Michael L. Hays
My thesis: Making high school optional can lead to improved public education at lower costs. Revisions to state law, with corresponding revisions in educational policy, can make a virtue of the reality of low graduation rates and ill-prepared graduates. Unless New Mexico is committed to repeating past policies and practices, and getting little in return for its expenditures, then reform and revitalization are imperative.
Mediocrity is the rule
In the past 10 years, the measure of mediocrity in New Mexico public education has been 50 percent. Some 50 percent of its students have failed to achieve proficiency in reading and math in 4th and 8th grades. Some 50 percent of its students have dropped out, mostly before or during 9th grade. In “Ready For College 2010,” the Office of Education Accountability, the Public Education Department, and the Higher Education Department report a drop from 50 to 47 percent of high school graduates enrolling in state public colleges but requiring remedial college courses in reading, math or both. They tout this drop as statistically significant, but it is not otherwise significant, for the percentages have varied between 46 and 51 percent for the past 10 years.
These measures of mediocrity in attendance and academic performance conceal large disparities among cultural or ethnic groups. Bad is the percentage of Asians and Whites, roughly 33 percent, taking remedial college courses; worse is the percentage of Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians, roughly 67 percent, taking remedial courses. Worst is that the percentage of students graduating from college decreases as the number of remedial courses which they take increases.
Three easy inferences: One, K-12 public schools are doing a poor job of educating most students but graduate them nonetheless. Two, public colleges are doing a poor job of remediating the students who most need remediation. Three, the state sanctions a scam whereby public colleges admit ill-prepared students, take their state scholarship tuition in proportion to their ill-preparedness, provide ineffective remediation courses, and discourage or fail those who work most and try hardest. Thus, the state rewards educational deficiencies with increased state expenditures, student enrollments, and administrative and faculty employment.
The status quo cannot work
Despite this continuing debacle, the state continues to squander much of the 50 percent of the state education budget – hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars – on ill-prepared or ineffective teachers, constituency-protected “tried-and true” programs (Ineffective dual-language and swollen special needs programs), or trendy “solutions” mismatched to persistent “problems” (anti-dropout and anti-truancy programs). Frequently, it tries gadgets and gimmicks hyped as panaceas, and hopes for the best – to no good results. It amends the state constitution, creates new offices and agencies, and indulges governors. The latest fiasco was Richardson’s publicity stunt, twice attempted, to tie driver licenses to attendance and performance.
Political correctness prevents reform
Although the continued mediocrity of public education perpetuates the state’s bad reputation and impairs its economic development, the state persists in doing nothing different to improve the system. Otherwise, it would develop a worthwhile curriculum. But it avoids doing so because student performance based on such a curriculum would vary because of inequalities in nature and nurture, the latter often along ethnic or racial lines.
Accordingly, politicians are less concerned with an excellent education than with an ersatz equality. They enact laws and allow regulations to avoid even the appearance of discrimination. They deplore low graduation rates, advocate enforcing attendance and truancy laws, insist that everyone get a diploma, and fund college for all needy graduates with lottery-supported scholarships.
Coercing attendance has two perverse consequences. It diminishes incentives to make education worthwhile and attractive to all students, especially potential dropouts or truants. And it leads to the use of placebos to placate reluctant students, without regard for their effects on other students as well. To ensure diplomas for all, schools allow little work, easy grades, and social promotion. The results are poor education, worthless diplomas, misdirected post-graduation efforts, and frustration, failure, and cynicism. Why anyone thinks that this approach in the name of equality helps students, especially poor performers disproportionately Black, Hispanic and American Indian, is a mystery.
The state needs a reality check
The reality check begins with the state admitting the facts of the “50 percent standard,” and its misdirected focus on effects, not causes, of a poor education. Dropouts peak after 8th grade, and truancy increases thereafter. Many 14- to 15-year-old students failing to achieve 4th- and 8th-grade proficiency in reading and math want to avoid four more years of boredom, difficulty, or failure in high-school academic courses. Without remediation, efforts to improve high school attendance and graduation rates can do little good.
However, the state provides no remediation, which is more expensive and less effective than a curriculum-driven education provided right from the start. And official demands for accountability lead not only to teaching to the test, but also to selectively coaching those students likely to pass them. Current efforts aimed at high schools are too late and achieve too little; they should direct them to elementary and middle schools.
Coercing attendance may decrease dropout and truancy rates, but is educationally counter-productive. Law enforcement cannot make the unable learn much or the unwilling behave well. Many students forced to attend school cause many of the discipline problems reported in many high schools; they disrupt classrooms and hallways, and distract teachers from teaching and other students from learning.
The time has come for an alternative approach
An alternative approach to high school education would make high school optional and require students to apply if they wish to attend. Parents would have the choice of allowing their children to end, at least temporarily, their formal education after the 8th grade or of encouraging them to study in K-8 grades to meet admission standards. High admission standards and a focus on curriculum and instruction would promote better education, raise graduation rates of those attending, and enhance success after graduation. An initial drop in enrollment would be temporary; discipline problems would decrease; and an improved educational environment for teachers to teach and students to learn would enable a better education for all enrolled students and enhance the meaning and value of an earned diploma for career or college.
An alternative approach to achieve these ends has four steps:
- Make grade promotion contingent on grade-level proficiency. Base promotion from 4th to 5th grade on proficiency demonstrated on state tests in both reading and math. Permit up to two more years in 4th grade to achieve proficiency. Provide and require after-school remediation.
- Change the state attendance law from ages 5-18 to ages 5-14.
- Make high school optional, and require an application and the attainment of academic and attendance standards: proficiency demonstrated on state tests in both reading and math at the 8th-grade level, a grade point average of 1.8 (C-) or better, and attendance of 95 percent or better, excluding health or medical excuses, in each of the previous two school years.
- Make graduation contingent on the same standards as those for acceptance.
This alternative approach would change the incentive structure of the educational establishment. It would base per-capita payments on the attendance only of those able and willing to continue their education and of the larger number swollen by those unable or unwilling. The threat of reduced per-capita funding would spur everyone – teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards – to take action to improve education. When they admit the correlation between poor proficiency in reading and math in elementary and middle schools, and dropout and truancy rates in high school, they would concentrate their attention on earlier grades, where academic preparation is critical to academic performance in later grades.
This approach reverses the state’s approach to public education, which muddles along in mediocrity, stifles personal aspiration, and supports a stagnant economy. It rejects the view of education as a means to provide social services and engineer socially desirable outcomes, a work-fare industry to employ large numbers of state-certified teachers, and a diploma mill producing fake passports to career or college success. It opposes generating jobs for teachers but generating failure by students, maximizing body counts for per-capita funding, and boosting test scores to serve realtors and assure parents or taxpayers.
This approach has important advantages. It does not waste resources on the often ill-prepared, unwilling, disruptive, and failing; and undermine the education of able and willing students. It sets attainable high standards, places mastery of academic subjects at the center of education, encourages student confidence and satisfaction from mastering them, and makes promotion and graduation honest rewards for earned achievement.
Michael L. Hays (Ph.D., English) is a retired consultant in defense, energy and environment; former high school and college teacher; and continuing civic activist. His bi-monthly Saturday column appears in the Las Cruces Sun-News; his bi-monthly blog, First Impressions & Second Thoughts, appears on the intervening Saturdays at firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com.