Educate For A Change - PROBLEM STATEMENT

PROBLEM STATEMENT

For our students in public schools, the playing field is not level. It never has been level. It is less so now than ever before. Our current systems for placing students in instruction and for advancing students were designed for populations that were much less diverse than our student populations of today. What may have more or less worked one hundred years ago is now a failure for the overwhelming majority of our students.

There are some fundamental assumptions built into the way we educate in America’s public schools today. These assumptions are all false, and declaring them politically correct will not make them true.

1. All children are capable of equally high achievement in all disciplines.
2. All children of the same age should be able to learn, progress, and meet benchmark standards at substantially the same rate.
3. We can devise interventions that insure that none of our struggling students will fall behind.
4. All children should be able to perform tasks proficiently at their grade level.
5. All children should go to a college or university.

Here are some unquestionable results of the educational system which is based on the above assumptions in use in America’s public schools today.

1. Nearly 30% of students drop out before high school graduation.
2. Nearly all drop outs have either been socially promoted, retained, or both.
3. Over 60% of high school graduates enroll in some form college or post-secondary training program.
4. About 30% of high school students graduate with the qualifications to immediately enroll in a full program of college level instruction.
5. About 40% of entering college freshmen are required to take remedial classes, before they are granted enrollment in college level courses of instruction.

When students fail to meet the benchmark standards of a class in the expected time, and are passed along to the next grade level with a “D” grade, they are, with few exceptions, virtually condemned to a continual pattern of low achievement. Even though students may be promoted, they know very well that they have learned little or nothing, and that they are not on par with their peers.

When students require more support and more time to learn than the system can give, and are subsequently retained or socially promoted, the stigma of failure diminishes self-esteem and has a negative effect on motivation.

This leads to a series of choices by which students slowly extricate themselves first from the mainstream of the school and eventually from society. Such students have learned that at least for them, the educational system provides no real success and no reward, so they disconnect and eventually dropout.

Today students and teachers are caught in the crossfire between political demands and the everyday realities of the classroom. Leaders are calling upon schools to bring all students up to grade level as measured by standardized test scores. This is an impossible task. For all students to surpass the 50th percentile, and perform at grade level, the norms on which the test is based would be invalidated. By definition, half of the students must be below the 50th percentile.

The result of all of the political chest-thumping and bar-raising is that more and more students are going to be labeled as failures. And just as disturbingly, our schools and our teachers are now being labeled as failures.

Our educational system generates a de-facto caste system in our schools that carries over in our society. This cripples the vast majority of our young people and points them toward a life-course that falls far short of the intent of our so-carefully-worded mission statements.

In spite of decades of declarations, mandates, and remedial intervention programs, the trend is undeniably downward and the cost to society is enormous.

To the degree that our professional education community has accepted personal responsibility for what is really a systemic failure, we continue to confuse the real issues, and real change for substantial improvement remains elusive.