by Dennis Green
The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that California spends about $135 million annually to teach college students what they should have learned in high school. Among the many other courses I taught at UC Santa Barbara and Westmont College — including Shakespeare and Bible Lit — I also taught remedial English composition classes for many years, so I saw the problem up close.
UC campuses enroll the top 12.5% of California high school graduates, and yet 65% of those incoming freshmen flunk the English Composition entrance exam. Many of them receive “A’s” and “B’s” in high school English, but are semi-literate at best.
The National Assessment Governing Board administers a test of core subjects, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, (NAEP), which found recently that in English and math, 4th and 8th graders in California rank near the bottom among all states. That is unacceptable.
Even more discouraging, a 2005 survey by Achieve, Inc. found employers estimated nearly 40 percent of recent California high school graduates were not prepared for entry-level jobs. Even in the workplace, they need remediation, further training in the basics.
In public schools, on average, only 65% of those entering high school ever graduate. In 2006, just one quarter of the 520,000 California students who had begun high school four years earlier completed the courses necessary to enroll in a four-year public university. Obviously, our schools are failing us.
While we are constantly reminded of the benefits of great schools, we are rarely or never told the social and criminal costs of those drop-outs. If public schools can take all the credit for those benefits, they should also take the blame for the costs of failure.
And no, I’m not going to blame the teachers, or their unions, for this malaise. In Sacramento, education funding has been hijacked by redevelopment agencies and budget-balancing tricks foisted off on we the people by our elected representatives. Their pet projects do not, in many instances, include the schools. Much of the effort by PTA’s and teachers’ groups now directed at raising new and much larger parcel taxes should instead be directed at Sacramento.
By the same token, if the students are failing too often, and in too many schools, let’s take the administrators by the throats and give them a good shaking. Never vote to re-elect a school board Trustee, for example, whose district is mediocre in its proficiency scores, or who has so poorly managed the district budget that it faces multi-million dollar deficits. They have been spending money they knew they didn’t have, and future monies they knew they wouldn’t have in years to come.
Shake up the School Superintendent and all his or her minions — by tying their salaries to the success and well-being, fiscally and otherwise, of the district and the individual schools they manage. Start with a ten percent cut. Their rate of failure in managing finances, physical plant and personnel would not be tolerated in the private sector. No Superintendent should be earning in a district as mediocre as Alameda, for example, nearly $200,000 per year, as Kirsten Vital does.
Finally, since Alameda teachers average $87,000 in salary and benefits per year, give them something more to do to earn their keep. Lengthen the school day past 3:00 p.m. Shorten that long summer vacation, and cut Xmas and Easter breaks in half. WITHOUT increasing that $87K.
We can’t fix our schools without major reform in the way teachers and their students interact. More use must be made of technology, and the way youngsters eagerly learn computer games. Finally, discipline must be maintained, and students must be kept busy working, learning new skills every day. Curriculum must be strengthened, even in job training programs leading to entry-level jobs upon graduation.
Until such reforms begin — from Sacramento to the teachers’ lounge — don’t give them another dime.
©2010 Dennis Green
No comments:
Post a Comment