漏洞百出的教育

Many college freshmen arrive woefully unprepared to do college work, and as disadvantaged populations continue to grow, the share of the American work force that has made it through college is expected to plummet. Many experts blame that educational failure not just on high schools but also on colleges. School & College, a special report by The Chronicle, looks at efforts to fix the system. What reforms would better prepare students for college? What should schools and colleges be doing differently? How should state and federal officials help?

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Re: The leaky education pipeline

“ Reply #1 on: March 06, 2007, 05:48:48 AM”

Two quick things come to mind and involve the “trickle” down effect:

1. Academic disciplines need to encourage their students to become K-12 teachers. Yes, a secondary education degree partnered with an academic discipline is difficult to complete in 4 years BUT until we have a large percentage of academically qualified folks teaching math, science, English, history in h.s. (vs coaches who majored in communications teaching biology)students taking their classes will not have the content needed.

2. Become involved in running professional development seminars teaching the inservice teachers during the summer.

A third is to remember that college is not for everyone and perhaps we should concentrate on alternative career paths for students that are not academically ready for college.

Re: The leaky education pipeline

“Reply #4 on: March 06, 2007, 11:44:16 AM”

There should be a really comprehensive test for incoming freshmen, based on the college’s expectations. Those who do not measure up should be placed in non-credit remedial courses, or sent to community colleges for prep work. The SAT is so politically correct that it no longer measures a student’s ability to communicate or do simple math, just the likelihood that they could learn to do so. If the public schools don’t teach them how to do these things, all the potential in the world is cruelly wasted.

We have thousands of incoming freshmen who have great self-esteem but no useful framework for doing anything that even resembles college-level work. I had a prof tell me that a junior in his business stats class didn’t know that.1 and 1/10 represented the same ratio; a JUNIOR in college! For this kid to have passed even sixth-grade math is shameful, but I’ll bet his high-school math teachers made precious little effort to correct the problem―they certainly wouldn’t do so here in Texas, where pay raises are attached to sham measurements in improvements on standard tests, and classroom chaos is so prevalent that most spend their days trying to keep the decibel level down and prevent violence, forget meaningful instruction.

We’re turning out a whole generation of clueless graduates, who can’t write coherent paragraphs, who don’t know where Caracas is, and who can’t tell if they’ve been given correct change, much less take on responsible jobs. The college faculty are right, and the high-school teachers are delusional.

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