By Mark
I keep hearing about how education as a system is broken. Everyone has an opinion and a finger to point, and many have "solutions." I spotted an article recently which attracted my attention: a Utah senator is being accused of "dumping the 12th grade." (The article is here.)
I think he's on to something. Part of the criticism lobbed at modern education is that it isn't a modern system at all: it is an antiquated 18th century system. One change which could help us rethink the purpose and structure of schools is to rethink the finish line.
We should abolish the high school diploma as we know it.
We've already had some conversation about the value of the high school diploma here on SFS. The gist: every May or June, millions of high school seniors walk across stages throughout the country and grab nearly identical pieces of paper. Those identical pieces of paper carry identical weight whether the student passed with Ds or As. They carry identical weight whether the student stacked their schedule with challenging courses or as many study halls as their schedule allowed.
The fact that we tend to give a uniform high school diploma to all is, in my mind, the first thing that must change if we are going to ever shift away from the present conveyor belt model of education.
Now, I'm just brainstorming here, but what about this:
Tier One Diploma: Exit the system with 10th grade basic proficiency.
In many states, including Washington, the standardized state assessment takes place in the tenth grade. The reasoning is that if a student cannot meet that standard, they have their 11th or even 12 grade years for remediation. However, I've taught 10th grade for years. I have had many students as 10th graders who are chomping at the bit to get into a "real" job. They have interest in skilled trades which might offer on-the-job vocational development which a school cannot offer. Perhaps community colleges would be encouraged to accept a Tier One Diploma if it was followed by X number of years of vocational experience.
The Tier One diploma might be for the students who might not see the relevance of advanced math or canonical literature. I'm no fan of "closing doors of opportunity" for kids, as some opponents of this idea like to claim a 10th grade diploma would do. Really, now…letting a kid fester in the artificial school environment, perhaps struggling just to survive a math, literature, and science class just to get that traditional diploma, certainly isn't serving him or her better than letting them get out there in the "real world" where paychecks and other responsibilities make the day to day tasks far more relevant.
Tier Two Diploma: After 10th grade basic proficiency; Traditional college-prep two-year course of study.
This would not be all that different from present college-track 11th and 12th grade, but I think could take university-bound students that much further because students interested in skilled trades (which pay quite well and are vital to our country's infrastructure) might choose Tier Three below. Tier two would include AP offerings and Running Start, and would be the option for students who expect to make major career decisions in post-secondary levels of education. It would be in this tier of diploma that the "core 24" might actually make sense.
Tier Three Diploma: After 10th grade basic proficiency, a two year vocational, skills center style focused program.
I am lucky to live in a region served by a vocational skills magnet school for 11th and 12th graders (The Clark County Skills Center) where many of my former students have gained highly specialized skills in everything from health care to diesel repair to hospitality and business management to fire science and law enforcement…just to name a few of the program offerings. These are the young people I would want to hire if I were an electrician or mechanic and looking for quality entry-level talent. These are the young people who would be at the top of my list to enter a post-secondary nursing program or a specialized post-secondary trade school in culinary arts, law enforcement, or high-tech development. They emerge as well-trained, well-educated 18-year-olds ready to step into advanced programming or directly into the field of their choice. These are truly the occupations which make our country run, and it's time that we valued them more than the dime-a-dozen white collar or soft-skill B.A.s (the surplus of whom, some might argue, has helped get us in the dire economic situation we now find ourselves).
Perhaps part of our problem in reforming education is that we are not willing to change the finish line. Listen to any group of teachers talk about the problems with standardized testing and you'll hear over and over that a standardized test cannot consider the human factor: that students are individuals, not data. If we want to change the system, we need to realize that our "single output" model needs to change.
As a fellow lit teacher, Mark, I agree that it’s not necessary. The current model of education is based on a desire to create well-behaved intellectuals who could talk to eachother because they have read the same books, studied the same philosophers, know who Darwin was. We don’t do a very good job of teaching meaning math and science in most public schools. They are still humanities-heavy, something that is good enough if your family can give you the down payment for your home.
I agree. I wish we had a better option for our kids who want to learn vocational skills, or who want to learn a trade and start working at 16. Whether or not that 16-year old intern-electrician is well-educated or not is up to the teachers he had from kindergarten to tenth grade. It’s not as if all the important stuff happens in eleventh and twelfth grade.
another brainstorm:
Scrap grade levels all together. Instead think achievement levels. Promote students to the next level when they meet the benchmarks set at his or her current level. The benchmarks are already determined by the state standards or national standards. By this we are teaching students what they need when they need it and allowing learning to take place at a more natural pace. Motivation is created by the natural accountability within the system and students are still free to challenge themselves through AP or IB courses in preparation for college.
Sure we will need to account for the occasional age discrepancy and determine at what age differential students are forced to the next level. As well as the student who progress too quickly and his or her academic intelligence has outgrown their maturity. But student will be able move through the educational journey at their own learning pace toward graduation or trade school ensuring the meaning of the diploma matches the level of learning.
Continuing that lets us tell ourselves we changed the system, which we didn’t. Did the programming offered by schools changed to serve those who only wanted to pursue the CAA? I’m talking about discarding the diploma because it enables us to cling to the system-as-we-know-it, when ultimately the system is what needs to change. The first step in that is to change how we define the “outcome” of the system.
I don’t see the “straw man” argument you suggest. In fact, what you state seems to reinforce my point that the diploma itself is meaningless… I think your straw man claim is the “straw man.” 🙂 If the transcript is more important, why bother getting that last required art credit if my senior year GPA is a 3.5, if the GPA is the thing?
I think maybe we need to think less, then, about the diploma as ticket to the next stage. The diploma, as you point out, is essentially meaningless…so why not replace it with something which communicates more of a meaning? I strongly disagree that the GPA should be the replacement… then the purpose of school would be to earn a GPA. That isn’t the purpose, we need to remind ourselves that the purpose of school is to prepare students for what is next, whether that next is university, trade school, or immediate immersion in the work world. We’ve lulled ourself into the misguided belief that somehow the diploma is a satisfactory ticket for entry into any of the three.
We need to shift away from the diploma because, as you suggest, that paper on its own is meaningless, yet that is what we’re pushing them all toward. Even the CAA, which I’ve honestly never heard of until this post, is likely meaningless. An Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s all reflect different levels of specialization or generalization…and while not all AAs or BAs are created equal, at least there are more precise assumptions which can be made. Part of the flaw in the diploma-as-is (and the accompanying transcript) is that the two in concert are meaningful only to those who want access to certain “next steps.” It seems ridiculous to me that my sophomore whose dream is to own his own repair shop should have to take extra classes in lit instead of business courses or trade courses. Now, I’m a lit teacher, and I think literature is valuable, but we need to stop sitting in our ivory towers dreaming that making that future mechanic read Kate Chopin is really going to serve him better than helping him understand diesel mechanics. There are many folks who read the canon in spite of their education, not because of it, so don’t bother with attacking that and accusing me of saying mecahnics shouldn’t read literature…they should…that’s what electives are for…they would be better served with a greater focus on the trade of their choice.
It’s not about GPA, it’s not about a piece of paper, it’s about the preparation that is provided. As long as we’re still focused on the former we’ll never reform the latter.
High school diplomas may all carry the same weight, but they aren’t the only thing that a student gets upon graduation. The other thing is a transcript of classes taken, and the grades earned. The Marines would have taken (and did take) either my son, with his 2.9 GPA, or the valedictorian of his class, based only on their diploma. But the University of Washington had no interest in my son, while they snapped up the valedictorian. They looked at the transcripts instead of the diplomas. So it’s kind of a straw man argument to say that all diplomas are the same, while disregarding the transcript.
We actually have a two tier system already. A student who passes all the high stakes exams receives a diploma and a Certificate of Academic Achievement. If they pass everything but the math exam they get the diploma with no CAA. Why not just continue that?