links for 2008-03-22

Since I live a life with a half foot in academia a half foot in blue collar and a foot in engineering, I think I understand what is going on with the low high school graduation rates.

The basic problem is that high school has become steadily more difficult over the years but its applicability for real life blue collar jobs has become steadily less. You can get good work without a high school degree. We do not know if any of our non college educated employees have high school degrees; it is not a requirement for employment.

There's a strong tendency in this country to want all kids to be educated at the college level. Everyone wants their kids to become doctors lawyers and, if all else fails, engineers. So the schools teach students as if they were all going to go to college. But there are only so many jobs for those professions and most kids know that they are not going to be victorious in getting those jobs.

If you look through the want ads of the local newspaper, you will find that most of the jobs are for people who have, at most, high school degrees, but that is not required for them. Instead one needs one sort of qualification or another. When I looked around to see what kinds of jobs were available in Grant County, (central Washington) the other day, most of the jobs were for drivers. They required a CDL only.

Measure the Lamb shift for anti-hydrogen and get on with life.

Homeland Severity is one thin slice of salami on the way to slicing your throat at Federal whim - not as individual overt acts but by leaking information to favored felons in bulk. The 1940s' precedent had a unit process waste disposal challenge. Identity theft disappears your assets and credit. You pay for your own disposal.

Boy that NYT piece was depressing. It would be good if someone could quantify how many students actually were encouraged "to pursue other choices in life" so as to not bring down test scores.
But, based on the raw numbers, it could be like 10-20% (state depending) of the student population, which is insane.

Carl's point is interesting. I am not sure that high school is too hard (I think that depends on where you are), but it is seen as not relevant. I know folks who teach in a local farming community, the students have zero interest in school. Why read when you are going to pick crops all day for subsistence wages? I have no idea how to break that cycle, which is why I stayed out of education (well, that and my father told me to never ever be a teacher).

Over the years they've been making it easier here to kick out high school students once they are age 15 or 16. Perhaps this is the result of the post-Columbine policies of "zero tolerance" in many public school systems, where even minor infractions can result in expulsion.

Carl,

With respect to "blue collar" type subjects in high schools, I've noticed they've been gradually eliminating many courses of that sort like: machine shop, woodworking, welding, auto mechanics, drafting, etc ... as well as home economics and even music. Several of my friends who have taught high school in recent years, mentioned that many of the old machine shop classrooms were gutted and converted into computer labs. It's as if all the high schools in better parts of town, are essentially almost all college prep now.

That business about HS grad rates is old news, so there must have been a new news release to push it out there. Sherman Dorn (www.shermandorn.com) writes about it frequently (mostly in his state of Florida, but also about Texas) and publishes on the subject. A very clear version, with data, is in
http://www.shermandorn.com/mt/archives/000560.html

Uncle Al, they have to confine it "cold" to do the Lamb shift. At least they are getting there. I think it was more than twenty years ago (maybe even more) that I heard Gabrielse talk about trapping anti-H.

Re # 1 | Carl Brannen: "... high school has become steadily more difficult over the years..."

With all due respect, I disagree. In my teaching experience (college, university, high school, and corporate remedia), a bachelor's degree now means about what a high school diploma meant a century ago, namely the qualifications for a generic white collar job.

Once, a high school diploma meant that the student could show up often enough, stay in his or her seat long enough, do enough homework, and pass exams well enough to do an office job. Now, high school has been dumbed down so much that a high school diploma might mean nothing more than social promotion. No Child Left Behind did not solve that problem.

In my opinion, the roots of the trouble must lie elsewhere than any innate or systemic difficulty of the American high school curriculum.