Schools are also doing away with cursive reading and writing.
Posted on 08/04/2014 12:25:17 PM PDT by Lorianne
As U.S. high schools beef up math and science requirements for graduation, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that more rigorous academics drive some students to drop out.
The research team reported in the June/July issue of the journal Educational Researcher that policies increasing the number of required high school math and science courses are linked to higher dropout rates.
"There's been a movement to make education in the United States compare more favorably to education in the rest of the world, and part of that has involved increasing math and science graduation requirements," explained first author Andrew D. Plunk, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine.
"There was an expectation that this was going to be good for students, but the evidence from our analyses suggests that many students ended up dropping out when school was made harder for them," he added.
Studying census data going back to 1990, the researchers showed that the U.S. dropout rate rose to a high of 11.4 percent when students were required to take six math and science courses, compared with 8.6 percent for students who needed fewer math and science courses to graduate. Results also varied by gender, race and ethnicity with the dropout rate for some groups increasing by as much as 5 percentage points.
"As graduation requirements were strengthened, high school dropout rates increased across the whole population," Plunk said. "But African-Americans and Hispanics were especially affected. I think our findings highlight the need to anticipate there may be unintended consequences, especially when there are broad mandates that, in effect, make high school coursework harder."
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
I agree. Or have both but have students enter a “track” at a certain point. Academic track or trade track. This is done in Europe but is poo-poo’d here as ‘unfair’.
I don’t understand this. There would be no restriction from a student moving from one track or another as long as they had the aptitude for it. Heck, why can’t someone be in a trade AND an academic if they want? There is no logical reason why one could not do both.
“I have often thought public schools should concentrate more on life skills like managing finances, skilled trades, and such rather than trying to make every student engineering bound.”
Problem is, the skilled trades all require advanced math skills.
STEM is a form of ethnic cleansing.
They should make it harder before middle school. Get kids to realize that hard work pays off, not getting paid off to pass.
The next step along these lines is Common Core. The Common Core tests are, on average, about two years more advanced than the existing state-mandated tests. A lot more children are going to be “left behind”.
Absolutely, I have often pondered the same thought. Kids don't know basics of life unless there is a mentor who tutors them. Making change during exchanges of money. Ten-finger typing. How to grow food. Simple home maintenance such as plastering and painting. Types of tools and how they are utilized. Refurbishing furniture. Hanging items on a wall (sounds simple but many fail at this). Basics of electrical equipment (many don't know what goes on behind a light switch). The list is long, and the schools skip over what is necessary to understand in life. Many take years to learn this stuff, while many never learn, yet a few lessons early on in school can mean so much to so many.
As you say, public schools are overshooting by trying to make every student an engineer, when it's the little things they need as life skills.
Computer programming is not vocational. Yes you can be taught to write programs, but I have encountered many non-college programmers who have no idea how a computer really works and subjects like memory management are a foreign concept. We don’t need programmers that can write the next best social media piece of shiite, we need people who can design complex system like the guys did in the 60’s and 70’s when we were great and sent men to the moon.
The world needs ditch diggers too...
Simple fix. If the goal of the government schools is a higher graduation rate then just drop math.
Only ones that Habla Español will get those slots.
"your" is the possessive form of the word, as in, your house, your car. The word you need is the contraction of "You are", which is "you're".
Having everyone take Algebra 2 has hurt the truly qualified Math students, with their classes over-run by low talent, low interest students. Besides that, many miss out on having the best available teachers because of all of the time math teachers spend babysitting with students who could care less about upper-level math and getting them ready for tests that have no connection to real job and life math skills.
The world needs garbage men....
Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.
they started neglecting male education around 1994.
increasing the difficulty on math and science classes on 9th grade or above insures a sharp increase in failures... which leads to dropouts
this isn’t a shock or even unexpected.
just remember to thank hillary, the teachers union, and the american political left
We used to have two categories of high school: college prep and trade preparation. But that was determined to be racially discriminatory. My opinion: a student with IQ below 100 has no business in college track. I’m sure I will get some people disagreeing.
So everybody has to be dumbed down for the short bus kids?
This is because they come to high school only semi-literate and have never had any academic rigor imposed on them by the K-8 school systems. That level of education went away in the 80s.
By the time they enter a college they have few if any reading, writing, or critical analysis skills nor are they used to any level of hard work to achieve a goal.
Schools are also doing away with cursive reading and writing.
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