Slashdot Mirror
New Plan Lets Top HS Students Graduate 2 Years Early
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that education commissioners in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont have pledged to sign up 10 to 20 schools each for a pilot project that would allow 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college. The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore. 'We've looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you'll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.' says Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Kentucky's commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, says high school graduation requirements have long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate. 'We've been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready,' says Holliday. However some school officials are concerned about the social and emotional implications of 16-year-olds going off to college. 'That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old. ... Most of them are just not mature enough to handle that,' says Mary Anderson, headmaster of Pinkerton Academy."
They'll only be far to young if they're the only ones. I have a feeling a lot of kids will be able to show the proper aptitude, and I have a feeling that college entrance exams will be re-tooled and remedial courses in college will go up a bit.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
The only way I mastered calculus was through a CC, I flunked it a couple times at two different engineering schools before taking it with someone who could actually teach at the local CC. Engineers and math people generally can't teach worth a damn, even less so in subjects they don't care about. I really don't see where having smaller class sizes and teachers who actually give a damn is a negative.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I used to work at a college. You would be scared to meet the parents of the kids enrolling there. you'd think little johnny was 12, not 19. Hell, most 18 year olds aren't mature enough, but you know what, eventually, they become that way, or they drop out. Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up (I say as I look at my demotivational poster)
I started college at 16 part time, found things like WRI121 incredibly easy, compared to AP English, which would have gotten me the same credits.. In fact, by the time I graduated high school, I had enough credits to get to other schools Transfer requirements, which are often much different than admissions requirements.
But damn. At 17, my grandpa and his buddies lied about their ages so they could fight in a war. And now, we can't have kids in classes with people a few years older then them? Boy do I feel alot older than I am.. I'm starting to sound like my Grandpa.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I like the idea of this program.
I hated HS and would have done anything to get out early.
In the end, as there was no early out, I simply dropped out of HS entirely. A bit thereafter I took the insanely easy GED exam, got my paper and started at my local community college in what would have been my senior year in HS.
I don't regret that decision. Never have. And once you have your BS/BA no one cares about your HS history.
Oh man, I wish they had this when I was a teenager. I was smart enough to have passed these tests and wasted most of my time in high school getting my ass kicked by bullies who didn't belong there any more than I did. College was like heaven to me. I was finally at a place where I could learn without having to put up with getting the crap kicked out of me in the hallways. My high school teachers made college out to be so hard, but I found it was a LOT easier. You can actually relax when you realize that half the kids in your class aren't knuckle-dragging, illiterate morons whose only function in school is to waste teachers' time with disciplinary problems and to torment the kids whose gas they will one day be pumping.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A "helicopter parent" hovers over her child at all times. Phoning the teach or professor to complain of every bad grade has recently escalated into accompanying adult children to job interviews for college internships, attempting to be present during the interview (really: many Silly Valley companies, including mine when I was stuck in charge of an inter program, had plans in place to deal with this).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
One problem with anecdotal evidence is that there is selection bias. For example, in a French high school I went to, there were two sisters, both very gifted, both had jumped two grades (which even in the French system is not always seen too kindly by school administrators).
One girl, the older one, was still completely immature, and could be very obnoxious at times. She was filled with false modesty. Every time she had an imperfect grade, even if it was still the best grade in the class, she had to complain loudly about it. She was complaining, but it was obvious to the rest of us, she was just gloating, and also she loved complaining (we could see she derived lots of satisfaction from that personality trait).
The younger sister, one year younger and so just one grade below on the other hand, was actually pretty cool by comparison. The younger sister didn't brag about her grades, had plenty of friends, didn't stay isolated away at the school library for every lunch/recess, and later I actually found out she was actually much more gifted academically than her older sister. And I think I only found out by fluke really, a teacher told me, and then I confirmed the story with others.
But if you were to have taken an informal poll about gifted kids at my school, I'm pretty sure almost everyone would mention/recall the older sister -- the obnoxious one. Very few people would have actually even known about the younger sister. And that's the thing, the success stories, and the more well-adjusted precocious students are virtually invisible compared to the precocious kids that are obnoxious and totally immature. That's why, we shouldn't go by anecdotal evidence alone, if we're really interested in improving the US educational system. The anecdotal evidence only tells us the story of the outliers, not the results of the core system itself.