Graduation from High School After 10th Grade

 Some Useful Websites for Teachers
My Timeline will help you construct a timeline, adding events, descriptions, and images that help bring content alive.
How Stuff Works is a great site for a student to explore!
After School Activities brings hands-on activities and digital library resources into afterschool play!


Some Articles to Read 
(These articles may require you sign up to read them) 
Librarians' Roles Shifting to Address the Demand for Quality Online Content by Katie Ash 
'Algebra-for-All' Push Found to Yield Poor Results By Debra Viadero 
Educator Teamwork Seen as Key to School Gains By Lisa Fine

 

Thoughts from Yrisarri

This week I read a number of articles about plans for high school aged students to enter college and some about the importance of cooperation among teachers at schools to insure that all students get effective teaching.  I think these ideas have a lot of merit and could be utilized to make education more relevant and effective. 

Ky. in test that sends sophomores to college 
Information from: The Courier-Journal, http://www.courier-journal.com 

Louisville Ky. (AP) — Kentucky and seven other states will participate in a pilot education program that will send some students to college two years early. The National Center on Education and the Economy is providing the program under a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The Courier-Journal in Louisville reported that, under the program, students who complete the 10th grade with test results showing they can handle college-level studies will be allowed to enroll in colleges and universities.  The program is still being worked out, but is expected to begin in fall 2011 with 10 to 20 high schools taking part in each of the states.  Besides Kentucky, schools in Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont will participate.

Why not take this idea further?  Mandatory public education should end after the 10th grade for students who are prepared for the next level of education.  One of our educational problems is the 9th grade.  Young adolescents are beginning to view the world around them with a different frame of reference and become impatient with the schooling process.  I believe if they knew there was only one more year of mandatory schooling, there would be more motivation to finish.  My experience is that students in early adolescence have a hard time assessing their long term future and a shorter goal to graduation would help.  Not all students need to go to college at 16, but they do need to have a curriculum that is relevant to their lives and ambitions.  At end of mandatory public education is the beginning of what Australia calls Tertiary Education

from Australia's Government Website  http://www.dfat.gov.au/aib/education.html

There are two types of tertiary education programs: those offered by institutions, private training providers and industry in the vocational education and training (VET) sector; and those offered by universities and other higher education providers.

Why not allow students to make a decision about their education at this point?  Something that is often overlooked about our educational system is that anyone, at any age can change the direction of their careers by going to school.  Some students may choose to work and that should be encouraged and be a part of a planned tertiary education experience. The tertiary experience would provide for a diversity of curriculum, programs and experiences for young people prepared to take that step.  I believe that offering this program would cause many more students to be prepared.  Not everyone will be ready at this point but those who are not can be mentored and tutored in a more effective manner than flunking or passing to the next  level without the skills they need to suceed.

It should be understood by all Americans that  life-long learning is encouraged by our society and there is no real end point or time in life when it is too late to study and change.  Just as there should be no subjective value placed on the work individuals choose to do.  In a democracy such as ours there should be an egalitarian approach to vocational and professional choices individuals make.  All jobs should be understood to have paths for growth and advancement, and that security is possible with most choices made about work.

So how do we decide if a young person is prepared to take this step? It would require cooperation among school, community and business to create a meaningful diploma.  A committee chosen from representatives of the larger community could evaluate a student’s portfolio and decide if they had met the predetermined standards and benchmarks the community believes are necessary to begin the tertiary stage of education and guide them in the execution of their next step.

from When Should Students Graduate ... And Who Should Decide ?
By S.G. Grant  Education Week On-Line

What would happen, we wondered, if state policymakers took themselves largely out of the picture and allowed local, district-based committees to define the assessments that would demonstrate students’ readiness to graduate? Students would still need to sit for and pass the standardized state exams, but those results alone would not determine whether a student was competent and ready to graduate. Instead, state exams and their scores would be part of a larger slate of assessments that gauged students’ knowledge and understanding in more realistic and authentic ways.

A system like this would require that we care about each individual and work together as learning communities.  The burden of success would be local rather than centererd in some distant bureaucracy.  Each student would be required to have an educational plan evaluated at predetermined benchmarks.  Teachers would have to cooperate  to insure that student plans are successful in the long term.  This would cause schools to take advantage of the full talents of their teachers and administrators.

from Teacher Learning: Sine Qua Non of School Innovation
By Stephanie Hirsh 

You wouldn’t know it from current discussions about teacher effectiveness, but the talent and expertise needed to raise student achievement already exist in many, if not most, schools. Unfortunately, too few of them have a culture that encourages teachers and administrators to work together on a regular basis, to consult each other more often on matters of teaching and learning, to share responsibilities for instructional improvement, and to implement professional-learning opportunities that address both their needs and their students’.

Having the right conditions for professional learning promotes trust and respect among educators, the essential ingredients for an honest dialogue about what is working and what needs to change. Absent these conditions, the most effective teachers and successful schools will continue to operate as “islands of excellence,” rather than as places all educators can turn to as a way of learning how to improve their own results.

This plan would require us to focus on the individual students, give them a voice in their educataion, allow for the growth of diverse curriculums in the teritary system, give students authentic instruction, and provide for community and school cooperation at many levels. It would also depend upon rethinking what schooling, education and learning mean and how our society views the value of different types of work in our culture.