[EDIT: This is one hell of a wall of text. I'm starting an education reform thread and moving it there.]
Tracking works. It works in Germany, it works in the UK, it works in Japan. Shoving everyone into one classroom regardless of ability keeps the smart kids back and keeps the kids who need extra help from getting it.
The problem is, kids from the top of the social ladder grow up in an environment that's conducive to the development of academic intelligence, and kids from the bottom of it don't. So instead, track by income group.
Suppose you were going to just take the top third of kids based on their test scores at age 10 or 11. You'd probably find that 60% or more of the top third were from the top third of the income tier, maybe 30% from the middle tier and 10% from the bottom. You'll have too many rich kids whose parents dogged them into prep courses, and too many poor kids who won't get in because of their home situations. Instead, divide kids into three groups based on their parents' income, and take the top third from each group: a third rich smart kids, a third middle-class smart kids and a third poor smart kids. Etc., etc.
One downside would be that competition among upper-class parents would be absolutely brutal. But it already is, and this is a much better system than the de facto one we have now, which tracks kids according to the price of their parents' house.
Then we come to the next big hurdle for poor kids trying to study their way up the social ladder: college degrees have unbelievably high price tags in the States, and because they're so important (because, as noted in my previous post, high school diplomas are watered down) it's become easier and easier to get college degrees, often with a not-very-high workload, from mediocre schools. Beyond those, there's also the crop of for-profit schools like DeVry and Phoenix that have popped up in the past decade that have huge price tags, very little rigor whatsoever and
negative earnings potential (in other words, their degrees cost so much and mean so little that you're better off without them).
We're seeing a process here in which
credentials are increasingly divorced from
education. American society is obsessed with credentials, but it's not, I don't think, very concerned about education. As a result, credentials are becoming increasingly more expensive (because there's a market for them) but less meaningful (because everyone has to have them even if they don't really have the skills to obtain the education that should back them). When a credential requires no money and next to no effort to get, like high school diplomas, it becomes devalued. When it requires lots of money and not much effort to get, which is increasingly the case with bachelors' degrees, it becomes devalued AND sets people back financially.
I think the secret here is exit exams. What do high schoolers need to know? We'd probably want them to be able to read, write, analyze what they read, do basic math and probably a bit of stats, have a good grasp of real-world science, know how their government works, know enough history and geography to comprehend current events, maybe have a decent reading grasp of a foreign language- we can continue a list of academic skills here, if we need to, and it might be wise to add real-world skills like balancing a checkbook and doing taxes.
This shouldn't be a terribly high bar. It's a higher bar than exists in many districts, and there are a
lot of high-school (and some college!) graduates who wouldn't be able to pass a test like this at this moment. This is actually OK, because
people respond to incentives. Even complete knuckleheads are going to start studying if a high school diploma actually requires it. It'll also restore some actual value to a high school diploma- middle-skilled jobs like book-keeping might no longer require degrees.
Some people still won't be able to pass a test like this. But the secret here is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This would create a better system than what currently exists.
We can apply the same trick to colleges, too. Decide what a college grad needs to know in terms of academic skills, which would be a more advanced version of the high school list, then ask actual PhDs in a given field what they think undergraduates need to know to have a BA's worth of knowledge and analysis. Then create college exit exams on the same basis. (Grad school is so specialized I don't think exit exams would be needed.)
Now, here's the trick.
a) A high score on an exit exam isn't just the last hoop you have to jump through on your way out the door of undergraduate. For all legal intents and purposes, it's the
only hoop. Instead of listing their institution and degree on their résumé, job seekers would just list their score on the standardized undergraduate exit exam. Anyone can take this exam. If you're dirt-poor but have a passion for history, you don't need to borrow thousands of dollars of student loans to have a BA in history. You can work during the day, study in the library at night, ace an exam with a $30 administration fee, and have a history score that is, in the eyes of the law and your employer, as good as any other.
b) Undergraduate is still one of the country's most valuable institutions, so you can't get rid of it. Instead, make sure schools are on the hook when they graduate students who don't know anything. You
could do college entrance exams with fully-funded universities, and lord knows I'd like to do it that way- but, and this really is not the case in any other country, the US has many top-notch private universities that shouldn't be nationalized. They can't live off their endowments in all cases, so they need student loan money. Instead of nationalizing them all, do something like this:
1. The institution makes an offer to an admitted student offering the student $X in scholarships and asking the student to provide $Y from outside sources. The remainder, $Z, is how much the student will need to borrow in loans.
2. The institution
borrows $Z from the US Treasury upfront, instead of receiving the money no-strings-attached as soon as the student presses the borrow button. In turn, the US Treasury sticks the student with $Z in student loans. Payments on both loans are deferred for four or five years.
3. If the student passes the undergraduate exam at the end of undergraduate, the US Treasury forgives the institution's debt. It doesn't need the institution to pay it back since the student will still have student loans to deal with, payable to the US Treasury. But an institution that admits students who don't have the talent to succeed in their program is going to very quickly find that it's up a creek without a paddle, because it has to pay the US Treasury back all the money it received from it.
4. Colleges learn very quickly not to admit students who shouldn't really be in a four-year academic program. Many of the weaker ones will have to close, but
that's already going to happen under the current system.c) Apply the "no listing your institution and degree" rule to
everyone, not just new grads- if you want to go job-searching, you'll have a test to take. (Don't enforce it for current workers who want to keep their job- that's asinine.) This is going to create a lot of upheaval in the labor market when it's first enforced, unfortunately. However, it would mean that an average American who got a degree in Exercise Studies twenty years ago would have to go to the library to maintain his degree status. People will adjust, and they'll adjust by
making sure they're well-educated and not falling behind. Is that really so bad?
In the end, the value of a high school diploma rises, the value of a college degree rises, and fewer people are stuck with unpayable student debt. Winners all around, except for unrigorous colleges. Someone has to be the fall guy- it may as well be them.
Author
Topic: Education Reform Thread (Read 9064 times)