There May Be Hope Yet For US Education

Great article out of the New York Times today.

Education. Education. Education. It never ends and it's never too early.

Enjoy!

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Plan Would Let Students Start College After 10th Grade
By SAM DILLON
Published: February 17, 2010


Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.
Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.
The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.
The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.
“That’s a central problem we’re trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges,” said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. “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.”
The 100 or so high schools participating in the initiative are pioneers in a pilot project that organizers hope will eventually spread to all schools in those states, and inspire other states across the nation to follow suit.
High school students will first begin the new coursework in fall 2011 in schools in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said that high school graduation requirements there have long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate.
“This would reform that,” Mr. Holliday said. “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.”
The new system aims to provide students with a clear outline of what they need to study to succeed, said Phil Daro, a Berkeley-based consultant who is a member of an advisory committee for the effort.
School systems like Singapore’s promise students that if they study diligently the material in their course syllabuses, they will do well on their examinations, Mr. Daro said. “In the U.S., by contrast, all is murky. Students do not have a clear idea of where to apply their effort, and the system makes no coherent attempt to reward learning.”
Four years ago, a bipartisan panel of national education and other policy experts, assembled by the national center, recommended a far-reaching redesign of the American educational system, including the adoption of board examinations in high schools.
Other recommendations of the 2006 panel included giving states, rather than local districts, control over school financing, and starting school for most children at age 3. Mr. Tucker said that the board examination project was the broadest effort at putting the panel’s proposals into effect so far.
“One hope is that this board exam system can prepare students to move on to careers, to higher ed and technical colleges and the workplace, sooner rather than later,” said Howard T. Everson, a professor of educational psychology at the City University of New York, who is co-chairman of the advisory committee.
States that participate in the pilot project on board examinations will pick up to five programs of instruction, with their accompanying tests, for use by the participating high schools. Those programs already approved by the national center include the College Board’s Advanced Placement, the International Baccalaureate Diploma, ACT’s QualityCore and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education programs offered both by Cambridge International and by Pearson/Edexcel.