I’ve just finished reading a little book — 896 pages — that contains an absolutely scathing if unintentional send-up of school reform. In it, the government decides that the headmaster of the state school is teaching subversion, and decides to make rules which will bring it in line with governmental expectations. One of these new rules allows the government to appoint suitable candidates to faculty vacancies, and which is how a government approved teacher came to be teaching a government approved age appropriate syllabus. Unfortunately, students were only allowed to read about the topic, rather than practice any of the techniques discussed. Imagine learning to play baseball by reading a book, because after all someone might get hurt; now you’ve got the idea. Oh, and the final exam was to be a lab practical. Before the year was half gone, many changes had occurred. Only clubs and teams that had government approval were allowed. A teacher had been fired. A newspaper published by one student’s father had been banned. Oh, and spring semester only got worse.
Of course, since all of this is the secondary plot, you won’t see it in the review over at Amazon.
And this brings me to the latest news that a coalition of 13 Governors have decided that it is important to bring our high schools up to the high standards that employers and colleges expect. These Governors have called the system broken. They are being urged on by the world’s richest man, former CEO of a Dow Component company that employs 57,000 people. Of course, Bill Gates and his family have for some years been deeply interested in improving the quality of education in the United States. To say that “For decades, our education system has performed exactly as expected: it has identified the top quarter of students and prepared them to serve as leaders in government and business, trained another quarter for jobs requiring skilled labor, and left half of all students relatively unskilled,” is absolutely jaw-droppingly scathing.
Don’t forget, Mr. Gates is concerned both as an American and a major employer who provides thousands of good paying, high-tech jobs.
So these Governors, a bipartisan group, have agreed that there are problems: not enough kids are graduating high school; there is a discrepancy between the performance of rich/poor and white/minority kids; the kids who do actually graduate high school often do not have necessary skills and knowledge. They have further agreed to tackle these problems: they want schools be accountable; they want the curriculum to be tougher (I am unsure how this is supposed to improve the graduation rate); they want “every child to graduate high school with a meaningful diploma in their hands”; they want that diploma to be harder to get (ditto); they want “to match their graduation standards with the expectations of employers and colleges”; they want to bring state standards and testing in line with employer expectations; they want to make all high school students take and pass college preparatory coursework (double ditto).
Allow me to start by saying that yes, we need high school standards, and they need to be good ones. Employers and colleges need to know that a person with a high school diploma knows and can do certain things. That does not mean that every child needs a college preparatory curriculum. I have never once been asked by an employer to recite the first 18 lines of Canterbury Tales, calculate the inverse of a matrix, diagram a Latin sentence, find the force applied to a major league fast ball, explain the logical fallacy of Avis’s “We Try Harder” campaign, or most of the other things I learned to do in college prep classes.
Not everybody wants to go to college. Not everybody needs college. There, I have spoken the heresy.
When Bill Gates implies that American schools fail by teaching half of the students neither sufficient academics for college nor sufficient skills for a trade, he is not saying everybody should go to college. Indeed, the man in a college drop-out himself. There are plenty of jobs in the United States that do not need college education, but rather good old fashioned rational thought, problem solving, math, and the ability to read. I am not talking about sacking groceries. Maybe we can outsource computer programming, but the wiring and plumbing of your house will have to be built and repaired where it is. There are good paying jobs in the building trades. Likewise, food service is a field which runs much deeper than “do you want fries with that.” Nor are these the only places where college degrees don’t matter.
If our aim is truly to prepare young people for life beyond high school, then we must consider vocational education to be part of the solution. If we need multiple grades of high school diploma to accommodate that, so be it.