ping - you might be interested
Are schools trying to burn kids out on learning as quickly as possible?
Dwight Morris High School shares its campus with a magnet school that has kids concentrate in one of 5 areas:
Finance, Information Systems, Law and Public Safety, Pre-Engineering, and Biomedicine.
According to Wikipedia, Dwight Morris High School has problems. Maybe the admins thought that becoming more like the magnet school would help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_Morrow_High_School
I was thirty before I declared my major and finished up with my degree.
There's hardly a college students who doesn't change majors from the time they enter college.
Expecting them to know at 14. Utterly ridiculous.
Choosing a major won't solve the problem of high school dropouts who can't read, write, add, subtract, multiply, or divide. Public schools will remain a national embarrassment unless and until the fundamentals are taught in elementary classes.
This says it all.
This would end the shocking epidemic of illiteracy that now permits students to get into high school and even graduate without being able to read, write or calculate change at the grocery store.
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The same government-gestapo-educrates who are responsible for this mountain of failure are the same people who want total control over homeschooling.
My son had earned his AA by the time he was 17, but all courses had just been general requirements. When he had to declare his major in order to transfer to a University, it was very hard. He talked to advisors, got our input, talked to others, and finally decided. It was a good fit for him, but we know others that went a similar route (dual credit,) and they have since changed their major at the end of their Junior year. Changing your major is certainly doable, but it does waste your $$$, because classes you’ve taken toward one major aren’t usually interchangeable with classes in another major.
I can’t imagine as a Freshman in HS what it would be like to have to decide...and what happens if a kid changes their mind by the time they’re a Junior in HS...the article says they’re locked in and can’t change, how sad.
If the program at Dwight Morrow is starting this fall, where does Akelia and her "after two years ..." come from? I agree this is a goofy idea, and I agree that any real improvements in education have to start with teaching the 6- and 7-year-olds to read and do basic math.
However, this article is a sloppy redaction of the Times's. Mrs. Schlafly can do better.
HS counselors are not suited to plan anything in the first place, in my experience. My HS counselor was infatuated with over the road trucking. He mentioned it first as a vocation to anybody who visited the office.
This is not a bad thing if done right. The HS I went to always had majors. As an Engineering and Technical School Kids picked between Fields like Biological, Chemical, Computer, or Electrical technology. And you were not married to your field I entered as Computer but switched to chemical.
There was a core of classes everyone had to take (4 English, 3 Foreign Language, 3 Math, 4 History Social Science, 3 Basic Science (Everyone took Biology, Chemistry, and Physics) and 3 Phys ed. On top of this there were ap courses offered for those who had the time in Physics, Math, Foreign Language. Finally you had you core speciality classes, as a Chem Tech, for example, in addition to the regular chemistry you had to take Organic, Semi-Micro Qual, and Regents Chem.
Point is they filled your schedule, where most schools had eight periods including a lunch we had eight periods *and* a lunch and when you graduated you had everything other schools taught *plus* some core AP classes. If you failed the AP courses you got just a city diploma.
Now for those who say this type of thing pigon holes kids... Of my friends not *1* graduated from college with a diploma similar to what the subject studies in HS. For example I received a degree in EE, my friend who was also Chem Tech is a lawyer, my other friend who was Electrical is now a computer artist.
I had a wrong-headed idea of what I wanted to major in when I went to college, and unfortunately I stuck with it and got my degree.
High school students should be encouraged to explore, not specialize.
Mrs VS