Posted on 02/28/2005 9:06:06 PM PST by baseball_fan
...America’s high schools are obsolete.
By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded…
By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.
…
Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship.
The other two-thirds…are tracked into courses that won’t ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job – no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach.
This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.
…
When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In math and science …
By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations.
… the U.S. college dropout rate is also one of the highest in the industrialized world. …
… In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many...in engineering.
…
… The key problem is political will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college – and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and – for their sake and ours – they have to.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at gatesfoundation.org ...
I agree there is always a danger of one going elitist and socialist in their prescriptions. Just because someone is great in one area doesn't always necessarily transfer to other areas, but neither should we automatically disqualify him either. At least Gates is defining the level of threat out there that we ignore at our peril.
His overall point seems to be that we cannot afford to leave any children behind as is occurring so dramatically now both for the students involved and the country. The numbers of graduates in science, math, engineering that China and India are posting may always exceed ours, but just as England is able to hold her own today percentage-wise, we need to be able to do the same for national security and economic prosperity reasons. We must muster the political will to rise to this challenge and design a system that will work.
He cites many schools in his speech as examples of where these designs are working. It would be interesting to know the details of what is different and working in those cases. Gates also acknowledges that the top percentage here are still as good or better than anywhere in the world.
I'm not sure how the vision coming out of this National Education Summit sponsored by the National Governors Association agrees with or differs from GWB's "No Child Left Behind," but Gates and GWB seem to agree on not leaving any children behind as it is currently designed into our school curriculums.
Good point. Thanks for making it.
Agree GWB is a titan.
I really don't think PE and shop are the problem. Kids should learn about exercise and sports, and working with their hands. We have all these girlie men as is it who can't change a tire or find the working end of a hammer. But you hit on the problem that self esteem and diversity have replaced logic, critical thinking and discipline.
Bull Shiite!
It's doing exactly what the Left had planned....creating generations of drones who will need the government programs and giveaways in order to survive and raise themselves and family.
Agree, we need a system that can reward courage as happens in the private sector.
However, I believe that Americans will prevail despite Bill Gates sending Microsoft jobs overseas.
Flurries started okay....at 10 AM, and by 3:30PM there was only 1.5 inches on the ground.
We're raising a generation of p*ssies and wimps.
When I was kid, I walked a mile to and from school....uphill.....bothways! ;^)
Multiculturism and diversity is valued over merit and hardwork. Doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that when liberals are in charge of our education system and push the former over the latter that you get kids who believe that they should feel guilty for achieving or others who are angry because they have been told that they cant achieve and need a hand out.
"Multiculturism and diversity is valued over merit and hardwork. Doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that when liberals are in charge of our education system and push the former over the latter that you get kids who believe that they should feel guilty for achieving or others who are angry because they have been told that they cant achieve and need a hand out."
It would be interesting to hear if Thomas Sowell felt school integration, as laudable as that breakthrough was, introduced the concept that everything had to be "equal" such that it became politically impossible to maintain standards, accountability and discipline because that would be seen as discriminatory and racist (granted, there were some with that ulterior motive then).
It would also most surely be wrong to lay all the blame there. For example, there was a much larger pool of women then to draw from as teachers since they were not represented in large numbers in other professions then and could often work for less because their husbands could support the family almost on one income. That situation will be highly unlikely again in the future (not sure what the Chinese and Indian schools are doing).
Also, I am just guessing that there were a lot of think-tanks introducing new ideas about education that represented a liberal cultural shift, but that would have to be researched. The preference of an education degree over having a major in one's subject area also seems like a lowering of standards.
The irony is that might have hurt some minorities as much or more who are capable of reaching these standards if held to them and encouraged and supported (such as Condeleezza's parents did for her). Malcolm X despite many of his shortcomings (including violence) seemed to recognize that self-reliance, self-discipline and hard work have to be there and cannot just be handed to one. Whatever the answer, that is all water under the bridge, and we have to come to grips with what it will take to not be educational and vocational roadkill in the next generation.
My son "attended" just such a school for a year to finish out his high school requirements. It's based on the "Great Books" (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kemp, etc.) and all work is done online using email and standard "netmeeting" software. I wish we had found the course sooner, as he enjoyed it more and was far more challenged than had been the case for many years. Students who complete the full five years of the Great Books curriculum read, discuss, and write about texts which are the equivalent of two years of a college Humanities course. IMHO, online tutorials like these are one of the truly excellent uses of technology in education.
Was it Great Books Academy or classicalfree.org by any chance?
Shouldn't be PE; it should be gym or recess. Outdoors where weather permits.
Or maybe he has and concluded shareholders are more important.
My high school required: wood shop, engineering drawing and electric shop in order to graduate.
I've used every bit of it.
Girls had to take these courses also and I suspect it helped keep their homes in running order a bit better than frilly silly home ec classes.
It was Escondido Tutorial Service (or ETS, for short), which has its home in Escondido, CA. He also did a year of Latin with Oxford Tutorials , which is based in Seattle, WA. Both excellent services run by professors who clearly love what they're doing and who certainly challenge their students.
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