I was looking at cnn.com and found an interesting clip on the "America's failing grades?". The group that is putting forward the message is Alliance for Excellent Education.
We all know that the white students aren't very good at SIUC, but man the high school graduation rates for minority students is terrible. According to the piece, they are between 50 and 60% for just high school graduation. They go on and talk about the costs to our society and how if you don't graduate high school you aren't getting a good job and 75% of people in prison aren't high school grads.
Just think if we stopped wasting time and money trying to do things that are impossible and just declared war on bad education? Maybe we should be assigning an education solder to each child who is behind at school?
When I think about SIUC, Southern Illinois and now education these days I think about what Ross Perot said, "You can't help people who don't want to be helped." But, maybe instead of having a huge uneducated minority population on the dole in the USA, we should spend the money on education while there are young. It has to be cheaper than suppressing the civil war and rebuilding Iraq.
Read the website, it is good stuff.
As always, your comments are welcome.
2 comments:
Freshmen in High School should be told they have 3 choices...
1. Study, graduate, go to College have fun, get a degree and stand a chance to have a decent job and life.
2. Don't study, and/or don't graduate, screw up and end up in prison.(especially true for males)
3. Don't study, and/or don't graduate and end up in Iraq or some other god forsaken place as potential canon fodder.
The days of just getting a HS diploma or dropping out and getting a job at the "plant" are long gone. Of course there is still the welfare option. (especially for females)
I read the study and I wanted to throw it against the wall. Initially, I was impressed that there were both businesspeople and education folks on board. However, to "sell" their agenda to the Ed Establishment (dubbed "The Blob" by Bill Bennett, his only contribution to education reform) they focus on "diversity." Sound familiar?
First, I've combed over these same numbers and you find equally large poor white kids -- esp. males -- performing dismally, well behind their nonpoor counterparts. But who cares about poor white kids in Randolph County? They aren't hip at cocktail parties held by the foundations behind this alliance.
Secondly, they ignore the male-female gap. This is across the board. The National Urban League, a premier black civil rights group, listed "lack of male college graduates" as one of the Top 50 problems in black America. Why? Because black women are graduating at TWICE the rate of black men. Given "assortative mating" (we marry those in our social class), that means a sharp drop in marriage rates among blacks. It's a cycle: black men who are unmarried are less likely to succeed, commit crime, etc. So it then becomes "the marriage gap." But the same is true of white males -- white females are outstripping them (no pun intended) in school. There is a "boy crisis" but then we would have to include those white boys, no way, Jose. Has anyone noted (SIUC is the exception) that 56% of college students are women and the gap is growing? They do better in high school, have much higher graduation rates, etc.
Third, the "Alliance" focuses only on "promoting" and "graduation rates." "But for..." reasoning echoing that of the Great Society of the 1960s (the programs that were supposed to solve all these programs and got the feds involved in education for the first time). "But for" lower graduation rates, the whole country would be richer. I won't extend the logical fallacies to their absurd conclusions -- obviously some groups are always going to have lower grad rates. I'm NOT saying this isn't a problem but that this group is selective in its "compassion" and misses the most important point:
Fourth, and last, high school graduation doesn't mean a thing if different groups STILL have different abilities at the end of 12th grade. It's like saying all high school and college students are fungible -- one is the same as another. Truth is (see Thernstrom, _America In Black and White_ and their _Closing the Gap_ books): black males in 12th grade are performing math and other skills at a 7th grade level. Even those who graduate (and most do) are still "really" four-five years behind. And we wonder why their grad rates are lower in college?
In sum, this group seems more concerned with the moral fashionplatery of diversity and less concerned with real learning.
OK, I wasted a half hour of productive time I should have spent copyediting my book. But this made me mad enough to write....
Two lessons: always be most skeptical of do-gooders (of all kinds), ask hard questions of them (you do this, Peter, I'm not talking to you). Second, remember Twain:
"lies, damn lies, and statistics..."
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