New Plan Lets Top HS Students Graduate 2 Years Early 425
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."
Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
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,
Exactly. That's why we're only sending the top students. There will always be outliers who will be able to fit in at a collegeriate level when they're 16. That's the whole point of this program.
Our worry shouldn't be whether or not they can fit in at that level (I know plenty of 16 year olds who have a better head on their shoulders than many college freshmen). Rather, our concern should be whether or not we have an accurate way of determining if a particular student is ready to move on. What we have to ensure is that this program doesn't fall prey to overzealous parents - especially in the "everyone is a winner" mentality that we currently possess in America. I guarantee that if this gets passed there will be an outcry of "my child shouldn't be discriminated against. (S)he should be able to head to college too at this grade!" They're going to have to be ready for that.
Why go to community college? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are achieving that much at that time in your life, why on earth would you be going to community college? Either make sure that their high schools can challenge them, or get them to a college with an academic environment that will.
A community college does not have that environment.
maturity? (Score:5, Insightful)
'... Most of them are just not mature enough to handle that,' ...and they never will be as long as we continue to treat them like little children instead of young adults.
Re:Why go to community college? (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on the community college. There are some that are academically rigorous and serve as the first 2 years of a 4 year college curriculum at a much lower cost. And there are 4 year colleges that are diploma mills.
Don't get caught up in the label.
Thrown? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quoted in the write-up:
Nobody's talking about "throwing" anybody who isn't ready, just about making it an option for students who are. Options are good, no?
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
This will last until some parent decides that their kid is smarter than 'the system' and sues for 'discrimination' against '(social class)'. Where (social class) can be race, disorder, sex, location, criminal record, etc. It'll quickly be axed by the legal department of whatever schools are taking part in it. Even without this, there are still a LOT of parents who call up the teachers and demand better grades for their snowflakes.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Plus, this is only going to be a problem for the "pioneers" of the program. Colleges only have an abundance of 18 to 23 year olds because of the way the system is structured. If they were to change to this new system colleges are going to be full of 16 to 23 year olds in no time.
Re:Why go to community college? (Score:5, Insightful)
Community colleges are filled with people who choose to be there. This is an entirely different environment from American high schools, where attendance is compulsory, backed by the full force of truancy laws.
Trying to get everyone a good basic education has its merits, but in some other countries you choose at 16 whether you want to go to college or receive vocational training or leave school altogether. This seems to work out well for everyone.
And as someone who absolutely despised high school, I know I would have done much better mentally and academically, even at the worst community colleges. I doubt any university would have penalized me for attending college courses (even if poor by their standards) before I hit 18.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense.
The extra 2 years doesn't help anything.
HELL, an extra 6 years doesn't help anything quite often.
The people with talent are having their time wasted due to boredom and those without talent
are also having their talent wasted due to boredom. Artificially extending childhood just
feeds on itself.
Off to college at 16 is not entirely unprecedented.
The cultural failings that cause 16 year old to be children aren't fixed by subjecting them to 2 more years of high school.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
the problem is, the test is not likely to test emotional maturity. They might have the book learnin' but they won't have the lived experience. The teenaged brain is literally missing important parts that aren't fully developed until 19 or 20, mostly having to do with risk assessment and sociality. There's a reason why a 16 yr old is many times more likely to wreck a car than a 19 year old.
Nature or nurture? We really have no way of knowing. I suspect that we find 19 year olds becoming adults precisely because we expect that to be the case. Not too long ago, 14 was a marrying age, and I don't recall anyone of that time period thinking that this was odd or 'too much for them to handle'.
Re:So here's what happens (Score:4, Insightful)
> Basically, this means the public schools get out of having to pay for educating their top students two years early
That sounds about right because the public schools aren't teaching them anything at that point anyways.
The kids are just "doing time" until they can finally be released for college.
Re:maturity? (Score:3, Insightful)
I absolutely agree. It's probably going to sound curmudgeonly, but there's been a huge shift in the U.S. from guiding behavior to controlling environment. This is great...until the environment is no longer controlled. As soon as that happens, a child whose environment has been meticulously managed from birth suddenly finds her/himself completely unable to cope. Blech. My kid's only one, but my philosophy even now is to help him understand himself, characterize his environment, and act accordingly. It means letting him fail sometimes, because he chose wrongly, but it also means that he's much more in control when confronted with a new situation. I find it far less stressful for both of us.
Re:Why go to community college? (Score:4, Insightful)
A community college does not have that environment.
That's a pretty bold blanket statement you're making there.
It varies a lot by the CC. There are some CCs that are essentially two more years of high school, filled with losers who want to be able to say they "went to college" but who have no desire to learn any more than they have to in order to get the minimum passing grade. There are others that offer intellectual challenge and rigor equal to that found at the best four-year colleges and universities, and if you don't believe that, then you simply haven't learned enough about the issue to have an informed opinion.
Many, many high school graduates, to say nothing of the HS juniors and seniors who will be taking advantage of the program discussed in this story, would do much better at a good CC than they would at Enormous State University. Campuses are smaller and have more of neighborhood feeling. Classes are smaller and taught by professors who see teaching as their primary mission, rather than a distraction from research. Classmates are an interesting mix of people from various age groups, many having significant life experience, rather than a bunch of other 18-year-olds who haven't figured out that they can't coast in college the way they did in high school. Life after class isn't dominated by the toxic "Greek" life and athletic obsession that eats up so much resources at ESU.
It isn't for everyone. There are students who can graduate from high school and be ready for the challenges at ESU, or even Harvard or Stanford, from day one. Good for them. But like a lot of 18-year-olds, I screwed up my first try, and years later CC offered me a way back into the academic world. Given that I'm now within a year of my PhD, you can probably guess that I don't feel academically deprived by having an associate's degree to my name.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's exactly what happened in my school system. When I was a senior in high school (I couldn't graduate early because of the required 16 quarters of gym class per state law in NJ)"
I grew up in NJ and had a similar problem. I was lucky and discovered the Rutgers High School Scholars program, which was specifically designed to allow high schoolers to take a few classes per semester at Rutgers.
If I had not been in the Rutgers HSS program, I would have HATED my senior year in high school, since in addition to the three classes I was taking (Gym was required, Language and Literature aka English was required for any student attending school, and Wind Ensemble because I actually wanted to take it), I would have had to fill my high school schedule with classes I had no interest in taking. Instead, thanks to HSS, I was able to get an exemption to my high school's minimum courseload requirements.
In some ways I'm glad things worked out that way and I didn't graduate early, the "part high school part college" year of transition period helped a lot in terms of developing maturity without feeling like the system was holding me back. In addition this meant starting college at 18 (It sucked to be the one 17 year old on the bus when we went on a marching band roadtrip to Canada my freshman year), and getting to turn 21 in October of my junior year of college instead of senior year. :)
I think it would be a far better approach than what is proposed to continue targeting an age of aproximately 18 for high school graduation, but providing more opportunities for gifted high school students to enrich themselves. We do have this to some degree with programs such as the Rutgers program I attended and magnet schools, but they're rare and far too much of a pain in the ass to participate in thanks to the "everyone's a winner" mentality that No Child Left Behind put into law.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:4, Insightful)
My sister-in-law also went to college a year ahead of schedule. She stayed with it, but she still hasn't quite gotten her feet on the ground six years later.
Sure, some kids, like 2 entire kids out of 6 billion. would be mature enough to be great at 16 out and on their own. I don't think that's very many, though. At that age, they barely have experience enough to know how to navigate a four-way stop. I think that the parents would have to be very involved in teaching their child how to live on their own and be responsible for that to work. It takes good parenting more than a smart kid for this to work.
Re:It's a cost-cutting measure. (Score:5, Insightful)
> Schools can dump all the expensive advanced placement courses
Perhaps you intended to be ironic, but the whole point of AP courses is to teach college material to high school-aged students.
One can imagine a certain efficiency in having students take college courses at a college.
"Cutting education costs" is not necessarily an evil thing.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
I have news for you. Barely any of the college freshmen are ready either.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:4, Insightful)
I think those that can fit in academically are the least likely to fit in socially.
Because? Academically speaking, how would you support that statement?
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature or nurture? We really have no way of knowing.
You're on the right track, but I'd just like to mention that it's very easy to know this.
Spend time with a teenager and treat him like an equal if inexperienced adult and he will likely respond like an adult.
Spend time with a teenager and treat him like an inferior immature kid and he will likely respond like a kid.
It's worked that way with every teenager I know. If everybody treated teenagers like they were inexperienced adults and we let them have older peers to learn from, we would not have the stereotype of them being older kids nor a huge segment of society living down to those expectations. Cordoning teenagers off in schools and letting them only interact with people their age is one of the worst things we've done to them, next only to putting other adults in inappropriate positions of power over them, e.g. the PA story.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:4, Insightful)
correct. you were also likely to die by 35 during the time of Bill.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
Academically speaking, how would you support that statement?
Academically, I can't say... But anecdotally, there's Slashdot.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:3, Insightful)
1. This seems like a cost saving measure, and if so, is a bad idea. The only way this program would be beneficial is if you paid for those 2 years of CC. I wouldn't count on it.
2. My Half-college/half-highschool senior year was fantastic, and was pivotal in deciding what I wanted to do for a living and who I became as a balanced adult. It was a smooth transition between the two worlds, while allowing me to make new friends in college while still being able to keep in touch with my friends still in HS.
3. On the other hand, Why are we pushing for these kids to get through college faster anyway? From the sounds of the political discourse, we're talking about increasing retirement age and getting kids into the workforce sooner. Most kids aren't going to know what they want to even go to college for at 16, even the smart kids haven't decided what specifically they want to do. A part of me thinks we should pay these 16 year olds for graduating early, give them a grant to either go to extended college or travel internationally or something. Getting kids into college faster to get into the workforce faster shouldn't be the endgame.
4. It seems if we just paid High School teachers in Junior and Senior years more cash, so that their skill set isn't as huge of a gap, all students would be served better. Our HS technical teachers are usually paid 1/3 to 1/6th as much as their public sector counterparts, this is a huge problem.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:5, Insightful)
So sure, someone who goes to college early may enter the workplace earlier as well. They are more likely to enter the workplace at a lower point of entry though. Someone who enters college at the appropriate age will have greater social opportunities in college and thus greater potential for forge contacts and connections which will in turn land them a much better job when they graduate. Obviously this is provided they take advantage of those opportunities. Someone younger will simply not have those opportunities presented.
Networking is the real value of ivy league schools. Truthfully, the difference in what you learn at an ivy league school and what you learn at a "decent" university is marginal (based more on the student than the college). The true value of ivy league schools is that they are full of rich kids. Rich kids have rich parents who frequently hold positions of power. Befriend a rich kid and their parents and your likelihood of landing an extremely high paying position after college increases dramatically. I would go so far as to argue that most executive positions are only available to such people and that without those connections you will likely NEVER be able to land such a position.
Anyway, to sum it up, college's true value isn't just education; it also has social value. A younger individual may be ready for a college education, but such a person will be at an extreme disadvantage socially. In turn this puts them at a disadvantage for life rather than giving them a "head start." If giving someone a "head start" is the real concern, then you might as well drop out of high school at 16, get a GED, and get a job. You'll be working at 16 instead of "losing years" in high school and college. Landing a good job isn't just about your education, it's about your connections.
Re:Ill placed worries (Score:1, Insightful)
Not true. Life expectancy usually includes the overall life expectancy of the entire population.
So, all the statements about "people long ago only lived on average till 35" is utter crap, because... they include infant mortality statistics.
If you only looked at people who had reached at least the age of 5 (ie. remove the huge number of infants and young children who died early of disease, malnutrition etc.), you would find much different average life expectancies - believe me, it was not uncommon for people of Shakespeare's time to reach an old age past 60, and they probably reached it in fairly similar numbers to today.