High School Graduates Not Prepared for College
The front page of yesterday’s edition of my local newspaper, The Argus, featured two stories emphasizing the reality that many California high school students who graduate with excellent grades eventually get to a university campus and find out they are not prepared for college-level work.
One of the stories opened up by following an 18-year-old high school student named Wesley Sims. In a science class, Sims’ teacher has the students spend the entire period drawing a crayfish, which was pulled from a tub, from different angles. The teacer says the exercise is meant to “sharpen their observational skills.” Other teachers might even tout it as a creative, hands-on lesson. Sims tells the truth to the reporter by emphasizing that such “easy work” does not really do anything to prepare him for college.
At an Oakland school board meeting last months, Sims spoke out by saying, “I woke up to take my SAT, and me being a 4.4-GPA student, I’m like, ‘All right, SATs, let’s go, I’m ready. I opened my book and knew, let’s say 25 percent of the things that were going on in the book.” Sims has been accepted to Cal State Northridge, which was his first-choice school. He will be taking his college placement test next month. That same test resulted in some of Sims’ friends, many of them honor roll students, being placed in remedial college courses.
The other article noted that many students who graduate at the top of their high school class find that they are not ready to succeed in college. “About 20 percent of the freshmen who enter Cal State East Bay with a 4.0 GPA need at least some remediation in math, English, or both.” And when you include all first-time freshmen in the California State University system, that number approaches 60 percent. “Most of the 25,000 Cal State students placed in remedial classes each year held at least a B average in high school and completed a long list of university-approved college preparatory courses, as the admissions system requires.”
Is anybody really surprised about any of this? I have long held the belief that the vast majority of public school education is nothing more that government-sanctioned babysitting. Many of our students are not being taught the facts and skills that they will need to succeed in life. Far too often, self-aggrandizing teachers will say how important it is to stroke the egos of students and not push them too hard. They feel that if they expect too much out of them, the students will simply quit trying and possibly drop out of school.
I witnessed all of this firsthand. I graduated as valedictorian of my high school in 1996. There were some wonderful teachers at my school who worked hard to teach us valuable lessons. And then there were some teachers who weren’t even good as babysitters. Some students, the ones who took their education seriously, found a way to learn and managed to graduate with a real education. Other students simply slid by until graduation. And when I got to U.C. Berkeley, I saw many students who were severely lacking in knowledge of basic concepts and who had absolutely no personal discipline or experience at working hard in order to learn. Quite frankly, many of these students should not only have never been anywhere near the campus of a prestigious university such as U.C. Berkeley, but they should not have been on any university campus anywhere in the United States.
The question then arises as to how we fix this situation where the education system is failing to adequately educate the students. There are some who seem to believe that the answer lies in providing more money to schools and education. Well, I hate to burst their bubble, but simply throwing more money at the problem is not going to fix it. This is especially true when many of those on the front lines of the education system, the teachers, are not doing their jobs properly. Instead of these touchy-feely notions of making kids feel proud of their sub-par performances, we need to demand that teachers actually instruct students with a vigorous courseload of essential skills. Instead of wasting valuable resources on peripheral skills that sound good in concept but yield questionable real-life results, we should get back to teaching the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history, and government. These are the skills that the youth of America are going to need if they want to grow up and become the next generation of leaders in the global marketplace.
Sure, there will be students who will not be able to pass the more rigorous classes that I am suggesting need to be implemented. That’s fine. Not everyone is suited to move on to higher education. There will always be room in society for those who are not willing to work hard in order to succeed. But that’s part of the beauty of America. Those who are willing to put in the extra effort will be able to distinguish themselves from their peers. They will be able to separate themselves from the pack and carve a path for success for themselves. But the important thing is to not dumb down the entire learning experience for everyone in order to spare some from failing. Those who are going to fail should simply get used to it. They need to learn, at an early age, that they must exert themselves if they want to succeed in life. That is how the real world works. In the real world, if you don’t perform up to par, you will fail. And those who work hard and succeed will be rewarded.
We also need to be able to replace teachers who are not doing their part to educate our children. Instead of unions refusing to allow less than adequate teachers from being fired, we need to adopt a policy where great teachers are rewarded for their work with higher pay and lousy teachers are dismissed. After all, if the real goal is to educate, then the emphasis should not be on protecting the teaching careers of bad teachers. The emphasis should be on providing the best possible education for the children. If certain teachers are failing to teach the kids, they need to be removed from the classroom and should find another line of work. Once again, successful teacher should be rewarded and failure on the part of teachers should result in them losing their jobs. Why is that such a difficult concept for some people to understand?
But not all of the blame can simply be placed on the shoulders of the teachers. The ultimate responsibility for the education of a child is placed on both the child and the child’s parents. A child who is not motivated to learn will not learn. Ideally, the drive to succeed will come from within the child. But if that child does not inherently have such a drive, then it is the duty of the parent to nurture the child to want to succeed.
Once both the parent and the child have a clear goal of wanting to learn, then the child can tell the parent exactly what is going on in the classroom. Not only am I personally not too far removed from school to remember it, but I have talked to many young people about what goes on from the opening bell until the bell rings to end the school day. If parents knew exactly what went on in class on a daily basis, it would blow their minds. Sure, a good teacher would take it upon him or herself to communicate with parents. But, in reality, that doesn’t happen. (Even more so when it’s a bad teacher who does not want parents to exactly what kind of poor education is being delivered to the students.) A child who cares about his or her education and who feels that they are not receiving the education that they desire can communicate this to their parents. The parents can then take their concerns to the teacher, principal, and/or school board. And, at the end of the day, if the school district does not deliver the kind of education that the child deserves, then the parent should be able to pull their child out of that failing school and move them to either another public school or to a private school of their choosing.
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www.Shahab2010.com