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High School Students Forced To Declare A Major
i_like_spam writes "As reported in the NYTimes, high school freshmen at many high schools across the nation are now being forced to pick a major. Starting this Fall, 9th graders in Florida will have to choose to major from among a set of state-approved subjects, while some students in Mississippi will have to follow one of nine designated career paths. High school administrators hope that having students declare majors will lead to greater student interest in school until graduation. College administrators think otherwise: 'youngsters should instead concentrate on developing a broad range of critical thinking and communication skills,' says Debra Humphreys from the Association of American Colleges and Universities."
This is not only useless, but potentially damaging to the children's careers.
As Paul Graham says,
[blockquote]If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were... there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school... In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.[/blockquote]
I agree that simply throwing money at a problem is rarely a solution. But just to back up that "Some places with relatively high spending per child have the crappiest schools" idea with some data...
a rchives/education/010125.html
_ level_Middle_CountyID_0.html (2003 data - Middle Schools only!) the overall rankings for the above top-10 spenders are, in order of spending: New York (#21), New Jersey (#16), DC (#51 - bottom of the barrel, folks!), Vermont (#5), Connecticut (#10), Massachusetts (#1), Delaware (#29), Arkansas (#43), Pennsylvania (#28), Rhode Island (#37)
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/
Or, a few clicks from that page is the actual report (2005 data, released April 2007):
http://ftp2.census.gov/govs/school/05f33pub.pdf
Page 12 ranks each state spending per pupil per year for primary and secondary education. Top 10 spenders are, in order: New York, New Jersey, DC, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Delaware, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island.
From this page: http://www.psk12.com/rating/USthreeRsphp/STATE_US
Clearly there is no strong correlation between money spent and education quality. Here is a list of the top 10 states by education rank (again, middle schools only!) with their spending rank in parenthesis: Massachusetts (#5), Minnesota (#23), New Hampshire (#15), North Dakota (#25), Vermont (#4), Montana (#28), South Dakota (#41), Iowa (#30), Colorado (#31), Connecticut (#5)
Interesting that South Dakota is apparently 7th in the nation for education quality and 41st in the nation for education spending... And DC is #3 in spending but dead last in results... By a huge margin, too! The difference between #50 and #15 (33 points) is more than two thirds the distance between #1 and #50 (45 points)! Smells like corruption to me.
=Smidge=
We have/had something similar here, except more broad. There were 3 tracks:
1) Advanced - Going to University
2) General - Going to community college
3) Basic - I like soup
That was in the mid/late 90s and they've since made the names a little more "PC". Each was geared to get the student what they needed for after highschool, without pigeonholing them into a specific field. Also, it was on a course by course basis so that people weak in certain areas but strong in others could tailor their classes along those lines.
It's a good system, except that because students who should have been in basic math wanted to be in general and general in advanced they would dumb down classes. All because teachers/councilors didn't have the balls to tell students, "You really should be in general/basic." So the students who should be there suffer from the progress being held back. This has rolled over into the community colleges where we have students entering Journalism who don't have a basic grasp of the English language and students entering Computer Programming who've never turned on a computer. Again they lower the bar so that people's feelings don't get hurt, and the people who really should be there suffer for it.
Sorry for the slight tangent. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
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