Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history
 

American kids, dumber than dirt



By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.
No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.
I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.
What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...otes102407.DTL **

**is that better??


if there are any teachers here...please comment.

Nice rant - it would be nice if he were to, y'know, support his views with actual facts instead of anecdotes . . . nah, that would be too intelligent and scientific and would completely lack irony.

This kind of article is written, in one form or another, every generation - OH NO ELVIS'S CROTCH WILL CAUSE ABORTIONS AND POPULATION WILL SHRINK.

It's mindless and lacks journalistic integrity. Prove your points, you ignorant douche columnist.

Exactly. This kind of stuff is basically only good for lining the birdcage. :rolleyes:

BTW, Daemon, the link doesn't work. But you might want to note the GC policy on quoting copyrighted material as found in the Welcome to the News and Politics Forum thread.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&sn=002&sc=577

thats the link, i had to search for it, but easy to find

I can give plenty of anecdotes that contradict the statements that this man makes based on my own observations of my middle school aged kids and their friends. I see quite the opposite. When I was in kindergarten, we played, we learned our colors, learned our alphabet and pretty much just learned how to share and be away from home. When my kids hit kindergarten, the teacher was teaching reading skills. They have started everything earlier than we did, from handwriting to multiplication tables. There are some basic things that they didn't have to do, like memorize state capitals, but then I thought to myself "It's so easy for them to look that up, why memorize it?" And, they definitely learned how to use a ruler, compass and protractor. The honors math classes are starting earlier also. It used to be that the highest math track started algebra in 8th grade, now they are starting in 7th grade. With technology, the amount of information to be learned has increased exponentially. Do you know how much more they know about DNA and Genetics than in 1981 when I had Biology II?

This generation has access to so much more information than we did. We would open an encyclopedia to get information for an essay paper. They surf the web and find more in depth information than any encyclopedia would give them.

I'm not worried at all. I observe some of these kids and find them to be engaging and ambitious with a good social conscience as well. I trust them with my future.

Yikes. Cliff Notes.

I agree. I'd bet my 10-year-old understands the Theory of Relativity better than this columnist. (He understands it better than I do -- he decided he wanted to know about it, did the research and left me behind.)

I agree that the column was lame, but this is an issue near my heart.

I think it's certainly possible that as teachers age, we lose the pop cultural connections that make us able to appreciate how nonintellectual kids are still smart.

When I was 25, say, I would have understood the intelligence that it took for a kid to connect and make a somewhat witty comment about a TV show or band that teenagers watched or listened too because I still knew the bands or shows; whereas today, maybe I'm more likely to just think he's just dumb because my interests have changed and I don't know his bands or shows. So some of the intergenerational condemnation stuff may just be a reflection of the distance in non-academic matters as teachers age. We teachers may be predisposed to think the kids we're teaching at the end of our careers are dumb.

But, even with that possibility, here's what I see and I believe it could be objectively measured: I think there's a bigger gap between the top kids and what they learn, reflected by AGDee and MysticCat's personal experience and what I see my gifted or AP students know*, and what all the other kids, who probably make up the vast majority of kids in public schools, know, which often seems to be dangerously close to absolutely nothing or nothing academic anyway.

I think even the lowest achievers know how to play complicated computer games and how to use every gadget on their cell phones, so they do know some stuff and have some skills. What they know just isn't usually stuff that I think it's important to know in terms of being an educated voter, citizen, or employee.

They don't know much and they can't think critically or logically about most issues. (I know we all have logical lapses, but they can't even be lead through ideas presented in a syllogistic or proof form and then apply what they've learned. God forbid that you show them more than one way to do something and expect them to recognize the best method for what they are doing on future occasions.)

And it seems to me that the kids I taught 10 year ago or really even five years ago were better off. They could do tasks that my present students cannot or require much more assistance in doing. And you can also see the same kind of dumbing it down if you look at the textbook published for the same course over a span of ten or fifteen years. The reading level is lower and the expectations for what they kids will master are lower.

*the top kids are three years ahead in math and seem to at least have been introduced to much more complex material in science, history and English. Sometimes, I'm a little disappointed in the accuracy of what they've been taught, but that's not a reflection on the kids.

AGDee and MysticCat--that's because you all are good parents... :)

But I understand what both parties mean.

This past summer I had a young teenage "girl" to me that I was mentoring, showing her how to determine blood pressure on mice and surgeries on rats. She took copious notes, followed ever direction I gave her, was able to make her own chemical solutions and present her work to the "public" intelligently. Her mother was just so happy her daughter could have this chance. But, what I think it was that this young lady had gone to private school and several members of her family sacrificed her going to that school.

Meanwhile, I have had students, that would take the stipend money and sleep with their new found little boy- or girlfriends in the dorm. There would not show up for work or show up late, they would talk back to me, fall asleep at work, put there iPODs on and tune out.

Then some of these same kids became 1st quarter freshmen, let's just say that the retention rate is extremely low for the 2nd quarter...

These kids had gone to a public school system school. I am not mocking the parents or schools. But we all must make a difference in every child's life. Maybe make a tax credit for tutoring young people for work and employers get extra bonuses if more of their employees spend time with school aged children? I don't know?

I do know about some my teaching skills, and I can motivate college-age kids and middle school kids into science interests.

Exactly.

The sky is falling, film at eleven...

I think there has always been a significant difference between the AP/College Prep level kids and the "remedial" kids though. I remember being completed astounded when I had to take 12th grade Civics. It was pretty much the only class through all of high school that all levels took together and I hated it. I couldn't believe how unmotivated and "stupid" some of the students in there were.

One thing that does concern me is that, as we move away from being an agricultural and manufacturing society, there are fewer jobs for those who are less intellectually inclined. Yes, we still need carpenters, plumbers, etc., but we have automated a lot of things.

In Michigan, they have replaced the 11th grade statewide test (MEAP) with the ACT and some other subtests that they've made up to supplement it. I think it's ludicrous to have every student in every high school take the ACT. It is standardized for college bound kids. Not all kids are or should be, college bound.

I struggle when talking with a co-worker of mine whose daughter is academically challenged. She has some severe learning disabilities and her mother spends an inordinate amount of time assisting her so that she can keep her head above water. She talks constantly about getting her daughter to do well enough to be able to go to college and is convinced that they will provide a level of support equal to what she now provides for her daughter. I would like to believe that, if it were my daughter, I would focus on her strengths and encourage her to get training in a career that would utilize her strengths, even if it didn't involve college, rather than try to fight the way her brain is wired. I worry that she is setting her daughter up to fail.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that there have always been "tiers" of academic achievement. Some people simply aren't at the same level as others. Some can get close through very hard work, but for some, they can learn with very little effort. I don't think that has changed much. What may be changing is how successful one can be if they struggle in an academic setting because there aren't as many well paying jobs available these days for thsoe who aren't well educated.

AGDee,

I think you're mostly correct -- except that I think there are a lot of opportunities left in our society for non-academically inclined people. Detroit/Michigan is probably not the best place to judge, given the sturggles of the auto industry, but there are many more service industry jobs -- ones that aren't being filled. The real problem, in my view, is the low pay for those positions.

As for your friend and her daughter, her mother is in for a rude shock, I fear, if she thinks all colleges and their professors will offer the support that she gets in public schools.

It does seem a cop out to make every student take what is a college entrance type test, however augmented. There are a lot of kids who have no interest and no business in college.

Our oldest and youngest graduated high school and college with high academic honors, but our middle had no interest in education at all and went to "hair school" and really loves being a colorist. She would certainly not have made it in college.

Parents need to realize that some kids just aren't meant for the university.

Yes, my concern is that people can't support themselves on the pay they receive for those service level jobs. And you're right, Detroit/Michigan are hurting badly these days because there was once the attitude "You don't need to go to college, just get a job on the line" and that used to work fine (and those people made more money than a lot of college grads too!).

And there are those parents who're proud of their kids even if the kids have flunked every single course they took the previous year. Mr. Tau works with a woman whose son AND daughter who failed every single course (with the exception of physical education) last year. This mom, however, is still convinced that both her kids will be star athletes, and will get a scholarship to a US school. The mom is doing nothing to get the kids' grades up. She isn't hiring tutors or sending them to academic camps in the summer. Nothing. According to Mr. Tau, she seems to be PROUD of her kids.

My parents instilled college in me from a young age, because they both went later in life. My mother and I were actually in undergrad at the same time. I was always in advanced classes because I ENJOYED school. I had great teachers.

My high school was the academic magnet for the county at the time, and it was assumed that most of us would be going to 4 year colleges or at least some trade school. For those of us who didnt, they were STILL given the basics and were encouraged to be strong in them.

I do think that No Child Left Behind has completely screwed up education--there is WAY too much emphasis on testing and scores and not enough on long term retention. My child is able to read above her grade level (4th, she's at 5th grade, second month), and knows that if she doesn't know something, she needs to LOOK IT UP, not expect her parents to give her the answers. She is always encouraged to give everything her best effort, ask questions if she needs to, and ask for help the second she needs it. Not everything can be found on the computer.

I am scared for this generation. How you leave high school without knowing how to write a term paper is beyond me, but I had to write a 20 page final in 11th grade. I took 3 AP classes my senior year. These kids don't know how to use an encyclopedia, how to look up books at the library, etc. It scares me. Yes, computers are EVERYWHERE, but you still need to know what to do when the computers go down.

I'm not that worried about kids not knowing how to look things up in books. After all, computers aren't usually down for more than a day or two. What kids really need to learn are:

1. How to properly cite their sources

2. How not to procrastinate (but that's all generations)

3. How to write a proper paper.

LOL. Thanks, but I don't think I get that much of the credit. We are in a very good school in a very good public school system. We have been fortunate that he has always had very good teachers who value him despite the challenges that he can present (and he can present challenges), who want him to do well and live up to his potential, and who constantly look for ways to keep him challenged.

My point really is that the article, as KSig and others noted, is based purely on anecdotal evidence from one teacher. Many of us can provide our own anecdotal evidence to the contrary. If the writer of the article really wants to support the claims he's making, he needs real data, not just anecdotes.

I do want to say, all this standardized testing and the emphasis placed on it is unreal to me. We had things like ASVAB and all that, but other than the SATs & ACTs, we NEVER knew when these kind of tests were coming up...we walked into school, the teachers said "OK, you're going to take a standardized test today" and we took it. To prep us for it would have defeated the entire purpose of what the test was supposed to show.

And even as far as the SAT is concerned, I love ex-Mr 33's story about how he forgot about it till the night before, went in the next morning half awake, and got one of the 3 highest scores in his class.

To make a Greek parallel, the emphasis on standardized testing as opposed to are the kids graduating, can they think critically, what are their grades like etc. is kind of like the sororities putting all the emphasis on achieving quota and total at rush and not looking any further than that to see how many of those women stay involved, terminate etc. The things that are easiest to measure are not the things that count the most.

not only that it lowers the bar for kids on said scores and in effect slides kids right on thru school without teachign them critical skills needed for them to survive....and they slide right on into colleges who will happily take thier money an dlet them flunk out because they couldn't pass muster.


Thank you Gee Dubya....

I agree that there's too much emphasis on standardized tests. These tests have biases and are generally unimportant considering that they don't measure what they claim to be measuring.

Not to mention there will always be children left behind if we don't address inequalities in education. We try to track kids into "smart" and "not smart" tracks early on without considering that there are a lot of social factors that go into being smart and intelligent. Family background is a key factor and the "separate and unequal" in our nation's school systems is another big factor. You also have kids with behavioral, mental, and physical disabilities who are tracked into "special care" tracks where people ASSUME they have no intellectual capacity and just need to be drugged up or monitored. However, some of them are very smart and intelligent so it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Plus, it's hard to get "special care" teachers who actually have the expertise to also challenge some of these kids academically.

If kids don't know how to look stuff up in books, or look up journal articles on JSTOR and sit down and read them extensively, that's the parents' and teachers' faults. I have noticed that when young adults get to college, they think that "research" means to print off random info from a Google search and pass it off as scholarly and referee journal research. Part of it is students being lazy and the other part is that this society isn't training the future for more than intellectually unstimulating and unrigorous tasks/jobs. It begins with the family and THEN becomes the teachers' responsibilities.

Should jursidictions be extending middle school until Grade 10, and then streaming kids into various types of senior high schools for Grades 11 and 12? For example, if you want to go into the trades, you will attend trades training for your last two years. If you're interested in academics, you go to a traditional academic high school. They used to do this in Toronto (though the kids would start in Grade 9 rather than Grade 11)...many of the most academic/traditional high schools are Such and Such Collegiate Institute while the non-historically academic schools are Such and Such Technical School or Such and Such School of Commerce. Would that improve anything, you think?

NO.

The last thing we need is to put 6th or 7th graders with 10th graders.

No.

There shouldn't be trade and academic tracks. Having honors courses and trade classes in high school are close enough to that. In my high school, there were kids bused to a trade school after lunch.

High schoolers can't predict their future. They may notice that they do well in trades versus honors courses, and they may even like that option. But how they perceive their future has a lot more to do with what they're presented with as options. Poor kids, kids with learning disabilities, kids who are bored in school, etc. will think this means that college and academic careers aren't options for them. Parents and teachers need to let kids know that their futures aren't set in stone at birth. And their futures may very well defy what they, and everyone around them, assumed to be their futures.

1. High school/secondary school in many parts of the world are for kids ages 11/12 to 15/16 and the kids who live there are no better or worse than kids here.
   
2. Even in this part of the world, plenty of private schools go from kindergarten to high school graduation. In these schools, middle and high school grades share at least some facilities. Again, the kids are no better or worse off.

I should add that high school in Quebec, Canada is Grades 7-11 (ages 12 to 16). The kids then go off to CEGEP especially if they want to go to university.

My high school was similar.

First 2 years you took basic academic courses that were required and last two years along with that, we had specialized courses along our career track and then certain days of the week, work study.

Oddly enough back 2 comments ago...about extending middle school to 10 grade... not just 20 to 25 years ago, we took 9th grade out of middle school and put it in high school....so who knows...maybe we should move it back

What does what other parts of the world do with their education system have to do with what America should do? I'm looking for something that could be the common denominator so that we can make these comparisons and then use other countries as examples for change.

8th and 9th were "junior high" in many districts. So people acknowledged that these grades were transitional in terms of maturity and learning processes.

I am thinking back to my older siblings' middle and high school years. I do believe that 9th gradere were high schoolers where I lived. Not sure.

Well, 33girl didn't think putting 11/12 year olds with 15/16 year olds was such a good idea. I was trying to say that it works in some parts of the world, including in North America. Like I said, many schools, especially private schools, house their middle and senior divisions in the same premises, even if the middle division has its own wing. Usually, they will share the caf, auditorium, gym and perhaps arts based classrooms as well.

High school in MD/VA: 9th to 12th
Middle school: 7th and 8th
Elementary: k thru 6 (I attended 1/2 year in 6th grade, then went to middle school in VA. Moved to MD at start of 9th)

I used to live in NY, and elementary was 1 -5
Middle was 6, 7 and 8
and High school was 9 thorugh 12.

So they don't share REAL classes together. That isn't really sharing to me because there's no learning process that is geared toward all the different age groups in one REAL class.

Superficially mingling with older and younger people is supposed to do what, exactly?

Some people feel that putting older teens with tweens can be harmful to the younger set. Some parents don't want their 10 year olds exposed to things that they don't think they need to know at that age (but usually, these kids already know about it!), such as sex, drugs, etc...

what she is saying is...I believe...what does it matter unless they are taking classes with upperclassmen and vice versa?

If they are all housed in the same facility... and still separate...it doesn't mean much.

Exactly.

When my parents were little, country schools had one or two rooms where all the children learned basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. I don't know how they separated the different ages from that point on but they didn't have many resources. Now that our society has changed and there are more resources (and all schools are "supposed to" have access to the resources), there's no research-based justification for overcrowding our schools like that.

Here's my take on what's going on.

When I was in HS (private, Catholic), I was on the honors track. The honors kids were required to take a language for 2 years, PLUS Latin for 2 years. We also took one semester of a class called "Study Skills".

Everything I ever needed to know about note taking, reading comprehension, daily studying for material, studying for test taking, and paper preparation/writing, I learned in this class. We also learned about time management, balancing activities (which were required of honors students), etc.

The amount and depth of academic work I did in HS prepared me for the level of personal time and effort of work expected of me in my college courses. What did not help me, however, was the complete lack of non-academic electives (with the exeption of "choose one" - Art (painting or drawing), Choir, or Typing).

An example of our electives (only in Junior or Senior year):
European Lit, Physics, Analysis, Advanced Calc, 3rd & 4th year language, AP classes.

The honors classes also provided opportunity/required thinking out of the box. We had different types of projects we worked on, as opposed to just papers or tests. We had also academic field trips, which included Shakespearean plays, trips to the Museum, etc., after which a project/test based on the content of the trip was usually required.

Lastly, the school REQUIRED parental participation, at 2 parent-teacher conferences, at least one fundraiser per year, signing off on any paper/test below a 70, or any detention.

Why were only the honors kids taking Study Skills class? Why didn't they have the opportunity to take advanced academic classes, work on creative projects, or see Literature come alive or stand face-to-face with a Degas or Monet?

In my book, my school did a great disservice to those other students, espcially because our school was a (college) prep school, where 97% of all graduating classes went straight to a 4-year college?

In most public schools, kids don't have any of those opportunites (and if so, they are rare).

I agree that there have always been levels and tiers, but I think that more kids are performing at the low tier level and the gap between tiers has grown. In the olden days when I went to school, I think the average graduate, even from the dumber tracks, was basically employable in a non-intellectual job upon graduation (at least in part because kids would quit school when they couldn't hack the work so the "worst" students never graduated).

Now, we've lowered the expectations for graduation to such a low level that a low tier students might not even understand that he or she needs to show up to work daily and complete the tasks assigned if they want to stay employed. (I'm not saying all low level kids are this way, but school certainly doesn't require many lower level kids to be responsible for much.)

But weirdly, in contrast to what some of you have said, I think I'd go the other direction and encourage students to track themselves more as a method of fixing it. What I see happening when we try to push everyone through the same material is that the standards get lowered to the lowest group. If we allowed student and parents to select classes for kids, but held the standards in those classes pretty rigid, I think we'd end up with better education overall because no one would be kidding themselves about what the present level of performance meant or what it would allow kids to do next.

At the school where I teach, kids are either in resource special education, college prep, or AP by the time they are juniors. College prep can't really be college prep if it's the lowest level class offered to any kids who doesn't qualify to be in a special education class, can it? (Do you imagine that our school is prepared to flunk anyone who can't really do the work? The answer from the administration is no. Teachers are expected to "differentiate instruction" for low and high level learners. )

And yet, there's no indication to the kid or the parents that they aren't really getting truly college prep level classes and that if they really want that, they need to be in AP.

So, if we made college prep really college prep, but offered general level or vocational level as an option for the kids who serious couldn't or wouldn't do college prep work, they we could have some true standards for performance.

And if the kids change their minds about the track later, let them stay longer taking the new classes or offer more junior college or vocation school training for kids after they finish one track.

But pretending to be all things to all people when we're really focused on getting the low end through does a disservice to everyone.

Yes.

You nicely described a possible solution for the problem(s) I presented in my email. Great analytical skills and ideas!

At my school, you either passed or were flunked/expelled, but there was no alternative for those who may not be suited for four+ years of academia, and who would excel and grow at a practical learning/training institution.

The only problem with offering vocational programs is that they can cost a lot of money. College prep and remedial programs (other than computer courses) generally require a regular classroom or lab setting only. Vocational programs may require studios, workshops, etc...and thanks to budget cuts, not all public schools can offer these things. Of course, there are always seperate schools or apprenticeship/co-op programs...

I know this may be off the subject, but I'm scared what our language is going to be in 50 years with text speak ruling the message baords. It's fine to do that on phones, but when someone text speak their post on message boards it's annoying and it gives me a headache. I'm scared that people will start writing text speak language on their papers.

Let's learn proper English, people!

Another thing, in the beginning of the 1980s, we were ranked 3rd in math and sciences (behing China and I believe Japan). Now we are almost out of the top 20 when it comes to that, and Mexico is right behind us. If we don't shape up, then Mexico will pass us.

OMG ur soOoOoOo rite! LWTFOMG whut would we do if Mxco wuz ahed of us? LMFAO wOw!