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Chicago To Make Future Plans a Graduation Requirement (thehill.com)
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanual's recently approved plan will require high school students show their plans for the future before obtaining their diploma. "Students will soon have to show that they've secured a job or received a letter of acceptance to college, a trade apprenticeship, a gap year program or the military in order to graduate," reports The Hill. From the report: "We are going to help kids have a plan, because they're going to need it to succeed," Emanuel told the Post. "You cannot have kids think that 12th grade is done." But critics say the district may not be able to provide mentoring to help needy students when the rule takes effect in 2020. "It sounds good on paper, but the problem is that when you've cut the number of counselors in schools, when you've cut the kind of services that kids need, who is going to do this work?" Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, told the Post. "If you've done the work to earn a diploma, then you should get a diploma. Because if you don't, you are forcing kids into more poverty."
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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanual's recently approved plan will require high school students show their plans for the future before obtaining their diploma.
One of those "means well" but it's not going to work as well as he thinks. I remember even I straight out of high school wasn't absolutely sure what I was going to do.
This seems ass-backwards. Let's hold students back because we don't want to hold them back. Isn't the point to successfully get out of "school" (not drop out) as soon as possible? Won't this just lead to more dropouts?
Its funny how the detractors of this scheme have identified that there will be problems, the thing about having a process is that you can identify the problems and address them appropriately, which will be substantially better than the status quo.
This is really an excellent thing to do. If they have the resources in counselors to handle it, it's really a great idea, and it could be a real help to the US education system at large. So many of the country's political, social, environmental, and economic problems come from people not thinking ahead. I'd love to see this go into place. I think this would help knock some sense into a lot of people who've never stopped to think for a few minutes about the future. I think something this simple could really nudge a generation of kids into some basic thoughtfulness.
I don't respond to AC's.
It took me a couple years after high school to figure out what I wanted to do. Started out EE, then computer science, finally got a degree in Math.
If, at 18, I'd had to lay out my future plans they would have been somewhere along the lines of "smoke a lot of dope. Get laid. Find money to pay for weed and women".
Those 18 year olds are free men and women. Neither Chicago, nor the State of Illinois, nor the Federal government own them. This proposal, however, presumes too much. One must have a diploma at minimum to participate in much of society. But now this paternalistic body speaks to these young men and women as if to say, "Before you can receive this academic certification, you must prove your willingness to offer years of your life to a corporate master (i.e. find an employer who will deign to accept you), a military hierarchy (with the concomitant possibility of losing your life), or to a bank (in the form of bankruptcy-proof student loans). The wealthy, of course, will be excepted by means of gap-year programs but you, peasant, you must swear fealty."
I cannot deny the practical value of a proposal like this. It's certainly there. But I do deny the right of the state to gainsay an adults freedom to choose either to work or not work, to go to college or to spend a few years mooching off his willing parents, to take on debt or hang out in the basement writing or inventing or starting a business or playing video games.
and it's the kind of thing that makes me think there's something genuinely evil behind it. There's no benefit here. If a kid doesn't have problems in life they'll be college bound. But a kid who does just got a whole new set of problems to worry about. More friction at home. More fights.
As for 'counselors' my kid just graduated. Her counselors were worse than useless. Overworked. Under trained and under resourced. They knew most of the kids were boned and made no secret of it. And this was in one of the best schools in the city. What I'm saying is any kid that doesn't have amazing parents (or at least rich ones) is screwed. Oh, and speaking of rich parents if you're the kind of rich brat that gets to travel for a year you can easily get exempted from this.
My guess is this is the local businesses looking to get cheap labor from desperate kids who now must have a job to graduate. We'll probably see more 'internships' where you're working full time for little or no pay. I can't think of another reason to push something this awful and this obviously unpopular. If anyone else knows what evil thing is behind this let me know.
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How about just focusing on making sure they can read the newspaper, write at an equivalent level, perform basic math as needed to balance a checkbook, do basic geometry, learn about US history (at the very least - ideally world history as well), and have two years of science classes - biology, chemistry, physics? Oh - and can actually PASS the course without having "adjustments" made for life experiences. In essence - make sure they EARNED their degree, proving a minimal level of educational achievement. What they do with the degree after that is none of your concern, Rahm...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So every college student without a plan is going to go to their mailbox, pull out the latest "acceptance letter" from the nearest vampire college that takes anyone with a pulse, and submit it to get their diploma. Meanwhile, the idiots that wrote this law can do a press conference and talk about how he's thinking of the children.