9486 in the collection
Support Grows for Stronger High School Graduation Requirements
Ohanian Comment: Pennsylvania education leaders have been drinking corporate Kool-Aid. While newspaper headlines scream that new college graduates, Ph.D.s and other highly educationed people are having a hard time finding jobs, not to mention the highly educated people losing existing jobs, these jokers announce a high school diploma that assures "a ticket to success."
Except it's no joke and it certainly isn't funny.
As Kathy Emery and I documented in Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? there are lots of important jobs that require "just" a high school diploma. And a lot of these jobs are in the health industry, the one industry (besides the war industry) which holds promise for increased employment in our troubled times.
We need to rebut the claims of our corporate politicos and their educationist lapdogs who claim that the current high school diploma is useless. By increasing the requirements for the high school diploma and making everybody "college ready," we jeopardize the future of many young people, people who could be employed in such worthy occupations as these:
automobile mechanic; baker; broadcast technician; cardiology technologist; communications dispatcher; electro- neurodiagnostic technologist; fingerprint classifier; forklift operator; graphics designer; heating, air-conditioning, and refrigeration mechanic; hotel desk clerk; land surveyor; legal secretary; medical transcriptionist; numerical control machinist; optometric technician; paramedic; plumber; robotics technician; sheet metal worker; shorthand reporter/court reporter; solar energy system installer; small applicance repairer; surgical technician; tool and die maker; translator/interpreter; veterinary technician; ward clerk (medical); webpage designer. And so on.
Insisting that everybody should go to college demeans human diversity and potential and fails to acknowledge and appreciate the very real needs of a community.
Press Release
Agreement Between School Boards Association, State Education Leaders Would Ensure Graduate Preparedness While Preserving Local School District Control
HARRISBURG, Pa., March 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Efforts to ensure that every high school diploma awarded in the commonwealth represents academic readiness took an important step forward today as the state Department of Education, the chairman of the State Board of Education, and the Pennsylvania School Boards Association announced agreement on several key principles.
"Whether our high school graduates go on to college or enter the highly competitive global workforce, they deserve the assurance that a diploma is a ticket to success, and the agreement we have reached on graduation requirements will provide that assurance," Education Secretary Gerald L. Zahorchak said.
As under the proposed regulations adopted unanimously by the State Board of Education last January, the state would develop a series of standard final exams that would be offered to school districts, along with a voluntary model curriculum and diagnostic tools to help identify and aid struggling students.
School districts could continue to use locally developed and administered tests, provided those tests have been independently validated to assure a high-quality level of academic rigor.
Schools also could continue to use other options for determining graduate preparedness, including student performance on the PSSA, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate exams.
Under the agreement reached today, school districts that use an independently validated local assessment to determine whether students have the skills to graduate would not have to use the state-provided standard final exams.
In addition, the agreement responds to concerns raised by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association and other education stakeholders that local school districts would have had to pay the full cost of validating local assessments under the state board's initial plan.
State Board of Education Chairman Joseph M. Torsella said the agreement will help strengthen graduation requirements while preserving school districts' options for awarding diplomas.
"In the end, all of us will achieve our common goal of ensuring Pennsylvania produces high school graduates who can compete with students from across the country and around the world," Torsella said. "That ultimately benefits the commonwealth's economy, its families and its communities."
While Pennsylvania has statewide academic standards that define what students should know at particular grade levels, each of the state's 500 school districts sets its own requirements for earning a diploma. A report from Penn State University researchers released last week showed that the vast majority of school districts were unable to provide evidence of having adequate graduation requirements for all students.
The State Board of Education has sought to address this problem through proposed statewide high school graduation requirements that would provide a menu of ways for students to show that they have the academic skills to graduate.
The board had proposed having the graduation requirements in place for the class of 2014. Under the proposal announced today, the new statewide high school graduation requirements would begin with the class of 2015.
State law passed last July established a one-year moratorium on any regulations regarding high school graduation requirements. The State Board of Education will continue its public hearing and input process over the next several months and will formally revisit the proposed regulations once the moratorium expires at the end of June 2009.
For more information on Pennsylvania's high school reforms, visit the Department of Education Web site.
CONTACT:
Michael Race
(717) 783-9802
Source: Pennsylvania Department of Education
— Press Release
Pennsylvania Department of Education
2009-03-04
http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/latest.jsp?resourceid=3934149&access=EH
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