Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
High school graduation rates are up, but why? Tonight, PBS NewsHour looks at charges schools are increasing numbers artificially by “labeling dropouts as transfers, encouraging home schooling for their most troubled students, or creating alternative systems such as computer-based ‘credit recovery’ courses.”
The show also examines small theme-based schools in New York City and early college programs in Texas that seem to be getting more students to a valid high school diploma.
Fred Butler quit school in ninth grade, working full time to support his mother and five younger siblings. He married and raised five children, served in the Army in World War II and worked for the city water department in Beverly, Massachusetts. The 106-year-old man received an honorary high school diploma, but worries that he didn’t actually earn it, reports AP. He really is an old timer.
Alvin Roth, who just won the Nobel Prize for Economics, a high school dropout. Finding his Queens high school boring, he quit in his junior year but managed to get into Columbia, earn an engineering degree and go on to earn a doctorate in operations research at Stanford.
His work has been used to match students to their schools of choice and match medical school graduates to residencies.
Of course, dropping out of high school is one of those don’t-try-this-at-home ideas.
Is Algebra Necessary? asks political scientist Andrew Hacker in the New York Times.
A typical American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t.
My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus.
Inability to do math — specifically algebra — is the major academic reason so many students fail to complete high school, Hacker writes. He proposes “citizen statistics” as an alternative.
. . . it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.
It could, for example, teach students how the Consumer Price Index is computed, what is included and how each item in the index is weighted — and include discussion about which items should be included and what weights they should be given.
This need not involve dumbing down. Researching the reliability of numbers can be as demanding as geometry. More and more colleges are requiring courses in “quantitative reasoning.” In fact, we should be starting that in kindergarten.
I think it is dumbing down math — so far down that it will close the door on many careers. But it’s better to teach some math than stick unprepared, unmotivated students in dumbed-down classes labeled “algebra” and “geometry.”
Frustrated by huge failure rates in remedial math, some community colleges are teaching “quantitative reasoning” rather than algebra to students who don’t have STEM ambitions. That makes sense. But it’s an admission of failure.
Hacker also wants to see classes in the history and philosophy of math, which he thinks would draw more math majors.
Why not mathematics in art and music — even poetry — along with its role in assorted sciences? The aim would be to treat mathematics as a liberal art, making it as accessible and welcoming as sculpture or ballet.
Maybe more people would major in math if it didn’t require learning math, but what would be the point?
A commenter recommends The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure, which sounds like a cool book.
Here’s how Times readers responded to Hacker’s essay.
Yes, algebra is necessary, responds cognitive scientist Dan Willingham.
First, it’s not true that otherwise talented students are dropping out because of algebra. Motivation, self-regulation, social control and a feeling of connectedness and engagement at school are as important as grades, and a low grade in English is as accurate a predictor of failure as a low grade in math.
Second, “the difficulty students have in applying math to everyday problems they encounter is not particular to math. Transfer is hard.”
The problem is that if you try to meet this challenge by teaching the specific skills that people need, you had better be confident that you’re going to cover all those skills. Because if you teach students the significance of the Consumer Price Index they are not going to know how to teach themselves the significance of projected inflation rates on their investment in CDs. Their practical knowledge will be specific to what you teach them, and won’t transfer.
Well-educated people can learn on the job, Willingham writes. “Hacker overlooks the possibility that the mathematics learned in school, even if seldom applied directly, makes students better able to learn new quantitative skills.”
Kids who can’t understand math usually can’t read well either, writes RiShawn Biddle on Dropout Nation. “The very skills involved in reading (including understanding abstract concepts) are also involved in algebra and other complex mathematics.”
All Washington D.C. students would have to take the SAT or ACT and apply to college, proposes Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown. Even students who don’t plan to go to college would have to go through the motions, reports the Washington Post.
Brown said it’s imperative that D.C. public schools, with a drop-out rate of 43 percent, standardize how students view post-secondary education. . . . ”I’m not saying everyone should go to college, but my goodness, we have to get more young folks prepared to go to college if they want to go to college,” Brown said in an interview. “A lot of them don’t even know how to prepare and apply to college.”
Eleven states now require high school students to take the SAT or ACT, Brown said.
It’s a win for the college-industrial complex, writes Jonathan Robe.
Come to think of it, perhaps the way Brown could improve the idea is to force all colleges and universities to be open-enrollment and then mandate all persons apply to college and finally require all colleges to graduate any and all students who enroll. Voilà! Completion problem solved! It all reminds me of the joke that the best way to cure unemployment is to make it illegal to be unemployed.
D.C. hasn’t persuaded all students that it’s important to finish high school.
“Enroll full time. Get more aid.” That’s the message California community colleges are sending to students. Full-time students, who are more likely to complete a degree, can use extra aid for living expenses.
Also on Community College Spotlight: California won’t provide Cal Grants to students enrolling at colleges and universities with high loan default and dropout rates. The new rule will hit for-profit colleges the hardest but applies to all postsecondary institutions.
Two years after Green Dot Public Schools took over low-performing Locke High School, test scores rose modestly from 13.7% to 14.9% proficient or advanced in English, and from 4% to 6.7% proficient or better in math, reports the LA Times.
Enrollment and attendance rates surged, even as enrollment has declined elsewhere.
Locke began last year with about 250 more students than in its final year under L.A. Unified. And Green Dot asserts that 95% remain enrolled; independent state figures are unavailable.
More Locke students are taking exams in courses required for admission to state four-year colleges. Last year, 785 more students took math tests, 894 more took science tests and 603 more took history tests. Also, Locke’s passing rate is up for the mandatory high school exit exam.
In Lessons from Locke, the Times gives Green Dot credit for admitting all students in the attendance area.
It rightly made reducing the dropout rate its first priority, and some of its lack of progress on test scores might in fact be the result of its success in keeping more troubled students in school.
But Green Dot needs to bring more Locke students to proficiency in the next few years to be considered a success, The Times editorializes.
Green Dot Public Schools billed the standardized test results as a dramatic improvement compared to years under district control. Looking at the percentage increase makes the numbers more impressive.
In Don’t Try This at Home, Kids, David Boaz of Cato @ Liberty asks:
Q. What role did formal education play in the success of Chris Haney, the co-creator of the board game Trivial Pursuit, which he and Scott Abbott sold to Hasbro for $80 million?
A. Born Aug. 9, 1950, in Welland, Ontario, Mr. Haney often described himself as a beer-swilling high school dropout whose biggest mistake was quitting school at 17. “I should have done it when I was 12,” he said in interviews.
Once a Canadian journalist — his father helped him get his first job — Haney has died at 59 in Toronto of kidney and circulatory problems.
Family Man in the Washington Post tells the story of a young father who wants to do the right thing by his 18-month-old son and his girlfriend’s two daughters by two other fathers. But 20-year-old Bobby Krotendorfer, a high school drop-out fired from his last job for skipping work and mouthing off, lacks maturity. His 22-year-old girlfriend’s bipolar but they’d rather spend their money on eating out than paying for her meds. Instead of getting his rotten teeth fixed, Bobby wants to buy an expensive gym for his little boy.
Bobby Krotendorfer plods through the garage and into the kitchen of the small, blue-gray Colonial in Southern Maryland. He drops a Snoopy diaper bag onto the kitchen table next to the GED prep book and a box of Hostess Twinkies. A lanky 20-year-old wearing baggy sweat pants, Bobby has just taken his girlfriend’s 5-year-old daughter, Faith, to school, then listened to his girlfriend fuss at him over the cellphone on his way back home. Seems she’s always yelling at him about something since she took a part-time waitressing job at the Lone Star Steakhouse & Saloon, leaving him to watch the children.
“I’ve had it,” Bobby says. Exhaustion pulls at his pale, angular face, and his day has just started. There are baby clothes to fold, floors to mop and three kids to put down for naps: 18-month-old Robert, called “Junior,” his biological child with his girlfriend; 3-year-old Hope, whom his girlfriend had with another man; and Savannah, the toddler daughter of a couple whom he agreed to watch.
By the end of the story, Bobby’s got an $8-an-hour job at a car wash. He and his girlfriend plan to get married next year. They’ll continue to live with her father — until she gets bored and moves on to another guy or Bobby gets tired of her mood swings.
The economy makes it worse for unskilled young men trying to support a family. But Bobby’s bad decisions — goofing off in school, quitting at 16, trusting a girl with two kids to stay on the pill — have dug him in a deep hole. He’s not ready to be a family man.
At the age of 83, Frank Ganz has passed algebra — with an A — to earn his high school diploma. Ganz starting cutting school in eighth grade. It was the Depression and working was his priority. He dropped out in ninth grade and forged his birth certificate to enlist in the Navy at 16. When he got back from service, he got a job, married and fathered four children. From the San Jose Mercury News:
“I always told my grandchildren ‘Make sure you graduate high school,’ ” said Ganz, who ran an auto parts store in Los Gatos until his retirement. “But inside it always burned that I didn’t finish. I was always embarrassed. When my grandchildren started going off to college, I made up my mind. I said ‘I’m going to do it.’ “
Unwilling to settle for a GED, Ganz enrolled in an adult ed program that let him qualify for a diploma. It took him five years to earn the credits with help from a math tutor. Now Metropolitan Adult Ed — “It’s never too late” is the motto — wants Ganz to come back as an American history tutor. He knows it because he’s lived it.
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