Two weeks ago, I raised the issue of declining high school achievement (both locally and nationally) in my weekly journal. Since that time, the drumbeat calling for reform has resonated. In fact, while the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction wraps up information sessions across the state addressing high school exit standards, more and more national articles and reports are spotlighting the crisis in our public high schools.
A spate of recent data paints a discouraging portrait. Approximately 30 percent of high school 9th graders never earn a diploma, and up to 50 percent of high school students in some urban districts never graduate. Near the end of high school, African-American and Latino students have reading skills comparable to those of white 8th graders.
Among those students who do receive a high school diploma, many are unprepared for the rigors of collegiate academia. An Interactive Web tool, recently developed by Education Trust to examine graduation rates for four-year colleges and universities, highlights this problem. Even after allowing students six years to complete a four-year degree program, the percentage who finish is disheartening: less than 40 percent of college students graduate within four years, and barely 60 percent graduate in six years. Graduation rates for North Carolina universities are all over the map, but certainly no cause for rejoicing. While UNC-Chapel Hill does well, with 82.9 percent graduating, other state universities are struggling. Appalachian has a graduation rate of 61.2 percent, UNC-Wilmington follows with 59.2 percent, UNC-Charlotte has 49.1 percent, and UNC Pembroke has 38.1 percent graduating. The costs — both economic and cultural — of this “dumbing down” in education are astronomical.
Yesterday, Education Week published an article by Lynn Olson detailing the difficulties facing American high schools. As with so many other public education woes, analysts swiftly reach consensus that something is “seriously wrong with the system,” but often propose widely divergent solutions. Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation sums up the magnitude of both the problem and the search for its remedy in this way: “It’s like saying we have to fix global warming or obesity. From 30,000 feet, you can easily agree that there’s a problem, but the closer you get to it, the more you can see that different people’s views of the essence of the problem and the solution are very, very different.” This explains why little action actually takes place, even in the face of copious amounts of data and some serious hand-wringing.
So, what can we do? President Bush indicated recently that he will seek as much as $1.5 billion in his next budget to improve education in 9th through 12th grades. Will more law-based reforms and increased federal funding have a powerful effect? The jury is still out.
What we do know is that these statistics reflect an inadequate academic foundation laid very early on — in both elementary and middle schools. Clearly, any changes to our public system must start with the earliest grades. There is no question, though, that public education needs fundamental and radical reform — tinkering around the edges simply will not work. Now is the time to embrace the concepts of the marketplace, bringing choice and competition into our school systems. If we fail to act, we will be faced with a generation of “educated” high school and college students who lack even the most rudimentary skills they need to succeed.