An SAT score below 700 doesn’t mean someone has no skills associated with secondary education.
You’d have to give some useful definition for aptitude. The main part of the SATs are nothing but a test of acquired knowledge and skills. Just ask some IQ proponents.
Yes, something is wrong. The goal of anyone would be acceptance to college because that’s how you make more money. Being an educated adult, being happy, and making a useful contribution to society are secondary to the societal priority of making more money, which is the reason to go to college, which is the reason for taking the SATs.
Well you haven’t provided any argument to justify that, but you are entitled to your opinion.
I don’t know of any good measure. I don’t care either. Part of the problem is trying to measure and compare educational levels instead of skills, and mistaking skill measures for educational level measures. The result of this is an educational system that does a poor job of providing the skill levels people need, and turning all other aspects of education into a frivolity. Education itself is the skill people need, and schools don’t care much about it at all. I’m constantly surprised at the number of people, including on this board, who believe that you don’t learn to educate yourself until you reach college level. This to me is a clear indictment of the failure of schools. Above basic literacy, which basically means reading street signs and price tags to me, the primary goal of an educational system should be learning to learn. It is not something that can’t be achieved before adulthood. There are plenty of pre-adults who have learned how to learn how to play video games, without any coverage of that topic in school.
Apologies for the hyperbole. But what I said I largely stand by, though the “jailing” is probably only apparent these days to students who are not successful or do not value the goals of the system. Those who go to magnet schools and private schools, as well as taking AP and honors courses, are the students who do well within the system and to some extent enjoy it or at least value it.
For the students (and parents) who are not invested enough to seek out these special opportunities – i.e., the ones school is least likely to be successful for – school is still largely “one-size-fits-all.”
Quite a few, actually. Lots of people switched industries completely (for example, my husband went from working on Wall St to working in the admin end of things in higher education) and even more still signed on to temp agencies where this week they may be filing and typing for a company and next week they may be helping build and paint things for another and the week after they may be helping to review or process financial information for another. The fact that most people in today’s world can and often do switch careers when people in my grandfather’s generation had one career for 50 years is a testament to mandatory education. They may not specifically need to know about cellular biology to do that but the fact that they have that base knowledge means that if they decide, for example, that they want to be a nurse they can enroll in nursing school and be a functional student in that environment.
Having a wide base of knowledge is so important because it allows you the most potential options for your life. When my husband’s great grandmother came to the United States from Russia she had been apprenticed at a laundry and so she opened a laundry here and did very well…until the invention of the home washing machine and the laundromat, at which point she was super fucked and went from crappy job to failing business to crappy job until she died. If she had been given a good general education and had some other knowledge and skills to fall back on she would have been more prepared to do something else with her life when her primary source of income was no longer an option.
Ah, I see. But I would submit that the reduction in the number of higher SAT scores seems to indicate that the downward trend in the SAT mean was not just due to demographic changes, as is generally argued. There is not enough data to draw that conclusion, however.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the old SAT originally supposed to be an IQ test? Nevertheless, it does, as you point out, measure acquired skills. But, given all the bad aspects of the SAT and its incompleteness, if you can’t do the math section, you probably can’t do well in more advanced math or sciences involving math (which is most of them). If you don’t have a decent vocabulary and reading skills, you probably haven’t spent a lot of time reading or writing, which is necessary for success in most fields. I’m not saying you have to get a 700 on all sections, but studies have shown some correlation between SAT scores and college performance (for example).
Perhaps I should clarify – the NAAL and other literacy surveys seem to show that roughly a quarter of American adults lack really basic skills. Roughly 10-15% of adults who have graduated high school do not have basic literacy (quantitative and/or verbal). So, for some significant portion of the students who attend school, schools are not efficient at teaching those basic skills.
Sorry – I don’t mean to be dense, but your husband became an admin in higher education primarily due to information he remembered from high school?
Filing is not generally taught in school. Typing is not generally taught in school anymore. Building and painting are generally not taught except at schools which have enough funding to retain non-core curriculum subjects like wood shop and art. I taught high school math for a few years, and I would not want the vast majority of students I had reviewing or processing financial information for me, since I was often teaching them the last math course they would ever have (mostly algebra II), and when they came to my course (which was not required for graduation), less than 2% of them knew what compound interest was, let alone could do any computations with it. (I wish I were kidding – and I couldn’t spend time actually teaching them useful math like that, because the state curriculum required me to spend 6 weeks on crap like putting equations for conic sections in standard form, even if these students barely understood basic arithmetic.)
I am actually an incredibly strong proponent of a broad education. I don’t think our school system is actually good at providing that.
Life skills? I think we are sorely underestimating kids. We tossed out home ec and cooking classes for a reason. They are inefficient uses of time.
Not sure how long it’s been since you were a teenager, but most kids don’t have the mental capacity to propel themselves along out of their own volition.
As far as ‘changing their mind as adults’, you’re seriously short-changing them: a subtractive education that is not about academics and the fact that college isn’t free.
I’m wondering if you have these opinions because of the condition that metro schools are in? Because I have something against telling predominately Hispanic and black kids that they should be in tech schools instead of, oh, I don’t know, thinking about medical school.
Schools have work for credit/internship pograms, partnerships with community colleges, FAA, etc. The system you advocate reminds me of New York City’s public education system, and dare I point out their shitty graduation rates?
Nobody is going to want to teach kids how to read on the job. Nobody is going to want to teach kids how to add and subtract on the job. We are way past the point of “watch, then do” for any but the most simple, rote jobs. Kids need to know how to read, they need to know how to cipher :p, they need to know how to learn more, unless they want their lives to consist of the eternal question, “You want fries with that?”
I also suspect the same thing. I find it very easy to believe that there were a lot of people in times past in English speaking countries who basically couldn’t make heads nor tails of the written word, and if they saw “SHOES FITTED HERE” on a sign, they would have no idea it was a cobbler’s shop.
Nowadays, in the English speaking world, I’m thinking that there are a huge number of people who can’t reason logically, can’t make sense of the King James Version of the Bible and Shakespeare, but can find the intersection between “MAPLE AV” and “5TH ST”. I don’t think that there are a lot of people who don’t recognize any letters or can’t make out a cross street.
Filing is not taught in school but learning to alphabetize is, from kindergarten when you learn your ABC’s to your senior year when you have to put your sources in alphabetical order on your Works Cited page. Building and painting are not taught in a course necessarily, but I don’t know anyone who took a theater class without helping build and paint a set at some point or took an art class without being required to pick up a paintbrush. Typing was still taught in school 10 years ago when I graduated and I’m sure the required computer courses or papers that are required to be typed when they are turned in give students a basic knowledge of typing skills even if they aren’t glued to the internet 16 hours a day. None of this was presented as a 2+2=4 kind of fact during school but it was presented as daily skills you needed to have to functionally use and learn the information that was presented to you in your classes. You may not use your knowledge of the digestive system that they made you build a model of in 10th grade in your line of work but you might need to know how to identify and label items to take inventory or how to build a model of something as a city planner or architect, etc. Or you might have found that you loved learning about the digestive system so much that you went on to become a doctor and the basic education you received allowed you to go onto college so you could follow your dream.
And while he didn’t get hired for his new job based on his high school education my husband is only functional in the business world because of the basic education he received that allowed him to go onto college and get a degree in business management. If he had been told at 10 that since he could read and write now wouldn’t he rather go out and learn to be a mechanic only to injure himself 20 years later and have no basic education to fall back on he would not be able to earn a living at all now.
I’m in broad agreement with what you’re saying in this thread. By and large, Americans emerging from high school now are less intelligent than those forty or fifty years ago, and also less prepared to tackle the challenges of adult life. Some people will choose to remain in denial about it, but the facts are there for anyone who wants to see them. The statistics about the SAT are particularly telling, and so is the way that some folks are trained to respond with the claim that the population taking the SAT has changed. You’ve already tackled that objection in your OP, but some people just don’t want to confront the facts. I’d also recommend Mark Bauerline’s book The Dumbest Generation, in which the opening chapter presents a barrage of studies from the National Assessment of Education Progress, documenting the decline in knowledge among all subject areas: English, math, history, science, civics, and the arts. This knocks down the spurious objection that the SAT only covers a narrow skill set. Educational achievement is declining across all skill sets, across all demographics, by all measures.
That said, we should note that your attempt to separate “various aspects of public schooling” from the concept of mandatory public schooling itself is logically questionable. It’s entirely possible that mandatory public school can be successful and that the United States has simply gone wrong in the past couple generations. When you read about education in the papers, you’ll seem them discussing topics such as classroom size, teacher pay, the tenure process, and the difficulties of firing bad teachers. These are concerns, of course, but the bigger issues are being completely ignored. Should judges be allowed to impose a lot of irksome rules on schools and interfere with the day-to-day management of the classroom? Should we really be wasting all kinds of time and money on state-level testing? Should schools be running after every trendy idea that’s backed up by a single study, rather than sticking with techniques that have worked consistently for decades? The (obvious) answers to these questions give us suggestions for fixing the problems of public schools.
I was talking about 13-year-olds. If a 13-year-old can’t yet read, add, and subtract, after 7-8 years of school, something is seriously wrong in our educational system.
Really? Take a look at what most people in most jobs actually do on a daily basis and ask yourself whether high school, let alone college, actually helped.
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree. Then why should we subject them to a system that was designed from the ground up to prepare workers for mindless jobs? Take a look at the history of American education, particularly the push to expand secondary schooling. It was not done to expand students’ minds. It’s very effective at social control and producing good workers of low intelligence, which is what it was designed to do.
As a teacher, phrases like “babysitting” and “jail” burn me up. Five hours ago, I finished my school year. My kids did the standard curriculum, of course. I also taught them Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s Journey (with the caveat that it’s not universal) and helped them write stories in his vein; instituted a rich service-learning project around Heifer International that substantially incorporated science, social studies, math, reading (nonfiction research skills), and persuasive writing; used a modified version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a discovery-based unit to help them model some basic ethics; devised experiments to help them determine the best uses of various weather instruments; helped the better readers form a self-directed book club; and more. I work my butt off. At the end of the year I asked my students what their favorite activity was, and we made a list about fifteen items long of units they’d really enjoyed from throughout the year.
And there are tons of teachers like me across the country who are passionate about their teaching. We are not babysitters. We are not jailers.
Are there teachers who are phoning it in? Of course, just like there are attorneys or professors or accountants or actors who phone it in. Is everyone literate? No–just like modern policing strategies haven’t eliminated crime, modern teaching hasn’t eliminated illiteracy.
There are several huge factors that the OP hasn’t considered (I think). Here’s one: Humans crave story.
In 1900, if you wanted story, you had to read books or tell stories to one another. If you didn’t have a great storyteller around, reading was a primary source of entertainment, the major source of story. In 2011, if you want story, you can read a book, tell a story to one another, watch television, watch Youtube, watch a DVD, or play a video game. Reading is no longer the primary source of entertainment. Why on earth is it surprising that as alternate vectors for story have arisen, literacy rates have dropped?
For a long time in Siberia, if you wanted to get high, you ate amanita mushrooms. Folks craved that high so much that they’d drink their own urine to recycle the toxin. When affordable alcohol was introduced to the region, giving a much easier high, use of amanitas virtually disappeared.
I’m not saying that books are the same as fly agaric nor that television is beer. All I’m saying is that a similar dynamic may have occurred.
Should violations of students’ civil rights, leading to tremendous inequalities in public education, be ignored?
Should we lack all accountability for schools to show that they’re actually teaching students?
Should teachers ignore research into cognitive development, child psychology, linguistics, behavioral sciences, and other relevant fields, using outdated research or, worse, techniques backed by no evidence whatsoever instead of striving to improve their profession just as all other professions do?
The answers aren’t obvious at all. My rephrasings of your questions are seriously biased, of course–but so were your questions. These things are controversial for a reason.
I’m 31. So it hasn’t been all that long. Most of my friends or their spouses are teachers, and they feel the same way. It might make a difference though that I’m in Florida, and out system is abysmal. As to your second point, most adults lack motivation as well. They are the same kids who didn’t have it earlier. I’m advocating for a system to help them reach a modest, successful future rather than selling them a mostly unattainable pipe dream of college and big bucks. Better a tech field where you earn enough to support yourself and family modestly than working in a dead end service sector job with crushing student debt. Debt that was intended to be an investment against the future, but really means nothing because companies want experience rather than school knowledge.
Let’s not make this about race it will only cloud the issue. Problems in those populations are due to cultural institutions and baggage from poverty. Theoretically, a system like the one I propose should have just as much of a chance of increasing minority numbers rather than decreasing them in high end professions. Academically inclined youngsters would be separated out from the slackers in most of their classes, and the material could be taught at an advanced rate without having to teach down to the average kids.
Secondly, what’s wrong with tech schools? Tech fields can be extremely lucrative, and the earlier you start the faster you make professional pay. Not everyone has the chops to be a doctor, lawyer or CEO and we shouldn’t sell our kids a bag of crap.
Most of which are very limited, and don’t address the majority rather than the exceptional minority. That small group will achieve regardless.
You should know the alphabet after a few years of primary school, if that. I’m not sure the possibility that you might get a job putting things in alphabetical order justifies a decade more of secondary education.
A theater class?? The only schools I know which actually offer classes in drama are rich private schools and an occasional public magnet school. The average high school does not have the money for such luxuries – which are much more rare than wood shop or art.
And by the way, I was in our drama club at my high school for four years, but as an actor, I never had to paint anything or build anything (and nor did most of the students in drama club). There were other students who did though.
It seems that most students pick up some sort of typing on their own, then. What’s the schooling for?
The sort of information that can be used functionally in daily skills in secondary school is rather small. Primary school, yes. Secondary school, no.
Yes, and I could argue that if you got an apprenticeship as a mechanic you could end up doing similar tasks that made you curious and might cause you to follow the exact same paths.
I know nothing about your husband, so this is not directed at his experience… but…
Business is the most common college major these days. Schooling begets more schooling. What did everyone do a hundred years ago when most companies were not run by business majors?
Or, he could have spent his teenage years when he wasn’t apprenticing doing other things he enjoyed, picking up hobbies and other skills on the side – perhaps even switching jobs a few times and picking up experience that would actually be more likely to get him a job rather than a high school grad with no work experience. Perhaps at some point he’d get interested in formal education again and get a GED. Or perhaps when he lost a job after 20 years, he could get a job filing or painting or doing basic financial checking because he had actually been taught the alphabet and basic math in a few years of formal education.
I’m not at all saying that people shouldn’t go to high school or college. I am saying that beyond providing truly basic skills (and even that isn’t successful for many students), the lasting impact of formal schooling is small for those students who aren’t engaged with it or whose abilities and interests lie elsewhere.
For a greater extreme, take the show “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” That game show demonstrates how much trivia we have already crammed into the head of a 10-year-old along with basic reading, math, etc. But few adults recall any significant portion of such material. Why? It’s not useful to the vast majority of people – not in their jobs, and often not even as a stepping stone to more knowledge. (The contestants on that show seem to be chosen because they are a bit dumb, but nevertheless, the success of the show depends on the seemingly trivial information imparted to young minds.)
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t teach a lot of that trivia to kids; I’m just saying that once they learn basic skills, perhaps forcing them to be subjected to many more years of even more trivial information is not the most useful way to provide them with useful life skills, let alone cultivate a love of learning.
Actually, 1988 was a pretty bad year based on some Googling of SAT percentiles, so it does sound cherry picked. But what’s more, it sounds wrong. Can we get a cite? I mean, in 2006, 984 students got perfect scores on reading and mathematics. So either your numbers are suspect or public education has gotten a lot better in the past 20 years or so.
Also, it looks like ~62,000 students did 700 or better on both math and verbal. I know the SAT has been jiggered with so the results may not be directly comparable, but I’m not seeing an abject failure of the educational system in those numbers.
I am confused. Are you saying that secondary education should not be mandatory? You’ve been making comments about “locking kids up for 13 years”. Are you now saying that 6 or 8 years of “jail” is long enough - so they learn the basics, and can move into the working world?
Perhaps I failed to see it, but I did not see you qualify eliminating the ‘mandatory’ part to only after kids become teens. If education is not mandatory at all, then most kids will be even less prepared than they are now for the real world, IMO.
I admire you. I really and truly do, just as I admire many colleagues I have met over the years who are great teachers and make huge impacts in the lives of students.
At no point did I intend to disparage individual teachers, nor did I ever claim that no students (or even some significant percentage of students) get a lot out of school. Many schools and many teachers are very successful. That says little, however, about the effectiveness of the system as a whole.
If you look into the history of public education, there were significant currents in the 19th and early 20th centuries that clearly saw school as a method of social control. If the terms “babysitting” or “jailing” are upsetting, what would you call it if adults were forced under penalty of law to sit – mostly quietly – for a large portion of their day, under regimented conditions, in rows of desks where they had an assigned seat? And just in case they weren’t bored out of their mind at some point during the day and actually found some teacher or material engaging, after 40 minutes a bell or buzzer would go off, signaling them to march off to the next area?
I’m not saying your class or school is like this, nor were my classes. But these sort of constrained circumstances were built in the system primarily to control adolescents, to train them to be obedient, and to prepare them for a life of blue collar work. A teacher who tries to provide a more open or more engaging experience is often fighting against over a century of regimented educational dogma that in fact was designed to create a system of jailers and babysitters. (Do you know in the earliest days of mandatory schooling, men were driven from the profession, because the goal was in part for the state to become a sort of surrogate mother?)
You make some good points. But the fact still remains that we are graduating millions of functional illiterates from high school. I’m willing to believe that the social factors you bring up might justify the fact that lots of people today are not big readers. But that’s very different from not having basic literacy after 13 years of education.
That’s because ‘trivia’ type shows often rely on the social sciences for their material. That kind of material is best taught in a philosophical and conceptual manner so that the ‘trivia’ becomes facts, not things you desperately try to remember.
Most schools don’t teach history, government, and literature the way they ought to. This is why people ‘don’t learn anything until they get to college’.
It doesn’t mean that compulsory secondary education isn’t useful - it just means we need to change how we do it. The original intent of mandatory education was to create citizens of the world. People who were schooled in philosophy, arts, languages, and math would become ‘natural’ moral citizens and leaders.
Don’t abolish the liberal arts. Bring back the Academy.