By Dennis Quick

Scholastic surgery. Here are two quotes that pretty much sum up the state of U.S. public high schools.

“By obsolete, I mean that our high schools—even when they’re working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.”

“The number of students who must take ‘remedial’ courses in mathematics and reading when they enter college continues to grow, and is an increasingly hard-to-defend expense to state governments. And as the demand for a technically proficient workforce continues to increase, the number of native-born students who enroll in four-year engineering schools after graduation from high school or choose to major in technical studies continues to decline.”

The first quote is from Bill Gates’ keynote address at the 2005 National Education Summit on High Schools held in February in Washington, D.C. The National Association of Governors co-sponsored the event with Achieve Inc., an organization created by the nation’s governors and business leaders to help prepare high school students for college.

The second quote is from an open letter the National Association of Scholars, an independent group of educators, sent to the summit to help state governors with ideas for high school reform.

Both messages are painfully familiar. In the Lowcountry, manufacturers say it’s difficult finding qualified workers who have basic math and English skills. That’s understandable, considering that about 44% of Lowcountry kids entering ninth grade don’t finish high school.

What to do?

Some of the education summit’s solutions include aligning high school graduation requirements with college-readiness standards, increasing the number of high-quality teachers and principals, and strengthening accountability among high schools. Six foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the NGA to raise $42 million to implement these reform strategies. The funds will be dispersed through a grant competition open to all states. Grant awards will be announced in July at the NGA’s annual meeting in Des Moines, Iowa.

The National Association of Scholars says a good way to strengthen high schools is to strengthen the K-8 curriculum. After all, high schools must work with the product (if I may refer to kids as “product”) that’s given them. So the NAS’s first recommendation is to promote an “ethos of academic achievement” throughout all grades. Offering challenging courses, promoting good study habits and rewarding kids for performing well would help increase lower-grade student achievement in reading, writing and math that would carry over into high school, where this ethos would continue.

The NAS’s other recommendations pertain strictly to high schools. One of the recommendations involves splitting high school curricula along a liberal arts path and a technical-education path (for kids showing an aptitude for technology-based careers). Both paths would require heavy doses of English, history, math and science.

All of these recommendations from both the education summit and the NAS should be considered. It’s a shame these recommendations even have to be made. In a nutshell, all they’re saying is that students need to work harder at academics and schools need to offer more rigorous curricula. Once upon a time in America, kids and their schools did exactly that. Kids did their homework because Mom or Dad would whip their little behinds if they didn’t. Schools taught difficult courses such as Latin to give students a foundation for learning languages, including English.

Yet the most important recommendation is the NAS’s first one: education reform must begin in the early grades.

We’ve got to abandon our sentimental notions about “letting kids be kids” and start taking them (and treating them) more seriously. I’m not saying elementary school teachers should don a drill instructor’s field hat, wield a swagger stick and bark orders. I’m saying we have to respect kids’ intelligence and capabilities and believe they can rise to challenges. That belief fueled educator Marva Collins, who back in the 1970s took so-called “un-teachable” kids from Chicago slums, put them in her newly formed school (she had little regard for the public schools) and made scholars out of them. Her students became successful in life and to this day love her for what she did.

As a final touch, employers and business leaders should be involved in education from grade school through high school. Schoolchildren should see business people almost as frequently as they see teachers. As I mentioned in a previous column, kids should go regularly on field trips to workplaces and employers should make regular visits to classrooms. This would help lower our region’s dismal high school dropout rate because kids not bent on college nevertheless would see opportunities glowing in their future. 

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