I’m rethinking this one…
I’ve been supportive of national education reforms that track nearly all students into a college prep curriculum, regardless of their ambition. Marketplace realities — where sophisticated literacy skills are required to cope with training required for many blue collar jobs — should be the guide. But considering the dropout rates, especially among boys, proposals such as this from Louisiana have me rethinking this.
Tags: dropout
June 30th, 2009 at 7:51 am
I agree that the most important thing is to keep people from dropping out. It actually isn’t necessary for students to have full college capability upon graduation. My local community college gives a placement test to anyone who walks in the door, regardless of whether they graduated high school (you do not have to be a high school graduate to enter on a non-matriculated basis - when you pass 24 credits you automatically get a GED), to decide what levels of Math and English classes they need to be in. In many cases, even for high school graduates, those classes are non-credit remedial classes. One of the keys to the boy crisis is that boys mature later. But they do mature. Girls don’t keep maturing to the age of 90. They slow down and boys catch up. But if boys have been permanently scarred before they can catch up, the damage has been done.