According to a recent poll, 74% of Democrats said they believe graduating from college is “essential” or “very important” to being economically successful, compared with 40% of Republicans. Variations were only modest across incomes on that question, for both parties. I find this troubling and part of the reason why blue collar Americans are attracted to Trump and the Republicans. To put it another way, only 26% of Democrats believe that those without a college degree deserve to be economically successful versus 60% of Republicans who believe that even those with only a high school education deserve economic success. Trump and the Republicans do not look down on those without a college degree. People do not like to be looked down upon and told they are not good enough to succeed.
Only one third of Americans manage to graduate from college. Of the fifteen most popular jobs in the USA, only two (teachers and nurses) require a college degree.
Still, Democrats running for the White House in 2020 keep promising “free college” and/or big subsidizes for those who go to college.
To me, this comes across as elitist and at the very least, tone deaf to the realities of the working world. It speaks down to those without a college degree and it diminishes the value of the work done by those without a college degree.
Even if we all had a PhD in computer programming along with a M.D., a D.D.S. and so on, our world still requires that some of us drive the delivery vans, clean the hotel rooms, run the dishwashers at restaurants, stock the shelves, care for the elderly and the very young, and all the rest of the majority of jobs that do not require a college degree but are no less vital to the flow of our economy.
It’s not enough to press for a $15 minimum wage. It’s not enough to support labor unions. Free college is not the answer and might only widen the gap between the haves and have nots. Democrats must end their belief that graduating from college is “essential” or “very important” to being economically successful and instead, support working class citizens, regardless of level of formal education, as deserving economic prosperity.
I agree about the messaging coming off wrong at elitist, but the plans (at least Sanders’) are not just about 4-year colleges. His plan is for no tuition for public colleges, community colleges, tribal colleges, trade schools, and apprentice programs – any publicly funded educational program beyond public high school. It is a plan for opportunity, not elitism. The most ardent critiques of the plan don’t seem to be Republicans at this time. They seem to be people like Mayor Pete, who is clearly willing to attack any progressive goal if he can find some rhetorical open ground.
I will agree with you that including community colleges, tribal colleges, trade schools, and apprentice programs is a good thing, however, if one looks at the 15 most popular jobs in the USA again…..only two (possibly three with a CD-L) require anything more than a high school diploma.
From personal experience, I’ve been working for almost 50 years now and not one of my jobs required a college education or any sort of trade school, and yet I was able to support myself and my family. Yes, I do have a college degree.
The policy alone is not enough. It is why increases to minimum wage and Medicare for All are also critical. Plus other changes, like more employee representation on corporate boards.
This is true. But tell that to employers now. Employers want more to start, even if unnecessary, and just to check a credential box, but they also won’t invest in job training, nor will they increase wages. Employers want more and aren’t offering as much on their end – that is why student loans (of all kinds) are so pernicious these days.
I think the policy aims are noble, but the messaging should be more broad based than universal college and emphasize the free community colleges, workforce training, and apprenticeships available under these plans. We should also emphasize that it is public college. Ending present rent seeking subsidies to private higher education institutions to help fund increased aid or tuition breaks for public higher education institutions is another way to capitalize on the insider/outsider divide.
Harvard needs zero tax dollars to begin with, and a strong argument could be made that it should actually be paying taxes on its property and investment income. Currently Harvard University gets more federal tuition reimbursement than Bunker Hill Community College (which my mother was force to drop out of after Reagan cut her grants). This kind of inequity should end, and the federal government should begin privileging the poor and working class kids who want a leg up on the class ladder rather than defend the top 20% who make our increasingly birthright ‘meritocracy’.
I think this message is spot-on. I also think that income inequality is the elephant in the room in any discussion like this.
The problem that our country faces is that people are fixated on college degrees because they at least seem to provide very increased odds of “living the American dream” – which is “work hard and have a nice life”. Study after study shows this kind of aggregate numbers: The median weekly salary of a high school graduate is $718. The median weekly salary of someone with an associate degree is $799. The median weekly salary of someone with a college degree is $1,189, and the median weekly salary of someone with an advanced degree is $1,451.
To put it simply: college graduates now earn 65% more than high school graduates. That is really pretty astounding, and explains why so many people want them.
I have a lot of cousins. For a wide variety of reasons, most did not go to college. They are now in their 50s and 60s, and most have not had very good lives, economically speaking. They worked in various fields until those jobs played out – and in most cases they played out pretty quickly.
I had a cousin who was doing OK working for DEC, when DEC manufactured in this part of the state. She hasn’t worked a good job since that. I had another cousin who was doing work fixing up and reselling houses in the early 2000s. He hasn’t had a good job since the housing bubble popped in 2008.
We need to figure out a place for average people who don’t have college degrees. They deserve to live middle-class lives. They used to be able to attain this by working for manufacturing companies, but those jobs left so that we could all buy cheaper stuff.
I urge people to take a step outside of greater Boston to see how the rest of this state is living. People who are not one of the 1.5 million in Norfolk/Suffolk counties, or living within a 30-minute commute of those areas, deserve decent lives too.
I wish you would choose different language in diaries like this.
Somebody who says that graduating from college “is very important to being economically successful” is NOT saying that only college graduates “deserve” anything.
Language like this has polarized you and me for years here, when I suspect we agree on far more than disagree on.
Economic success is “security”. 76% of Democrats say that attaining this level of security is most possible when one has a college education. No, they are not saying that all college grads are secure, nor are they saying that non-college grads deserve to be insecure…..but the larger point it that any economic model is designed by humans, by us. When Democrats say that security is best achieved with a college degree, that is a subliminal message to non-achievers they it is they, and not the system, that is at fault for their lack of security.
It is time to start attacking the system and not blaming the workers. We keep hearing that low pay is because of low skill and those low skills are defined as skills not learned at a university or trade school. Why are skills learned on the job not as important? Why are skills that are vital to the operation of society low pay simply on the basis that they were not accredited by an official third party institution?
Again (and again and again) while I fully encourage all who want to attend college to do so for whatever reasons they desire, it is folly to say that college ought to me the measuring stick by which we decide who gets what from our collective economy.
Your choice of “deserve” is loaded and deceptive. I have never heard anyone except you assert that any person doesn’t “deserve” economic security.
I invite you to look at NINETY YEARS of American history with an eye towards answering the question: “Who has striven to provide economic security for every American”. The answer to that question is ALWAYS a Democrat. When you examine the same period and ask “Who has striven to plunder the poor, oppress minorities and immigrants, destroy organized labor, and fight increases in unemployment compensation, minimum wage, social security benefits, etc., etc., etc.”, the answer is ALWAYS a Republican.
The frigging universe sends a “subliminal message” to people on the bottom end of any scale you want to talk about. No political system, government, religion, culture or even family is ever going to change that. If there are more people than job openings for any given position, then some applicants are going to be disappointed. That’s a simple fact of life, whether or not it’s a “subliminal message”.
It is certainly true that in an arena of more applicants than jobs, other factors often come into play, such as gender, perceived attractiveness, skin color, etc. All too often family connections and either paid or promised bribery comes into play.
It is not possible to avoid disappointing some participants in a world with more applicants than jobs.
@Why are skills learned on the job …:
These are red herrings. Skills learned on the job ARE as important. In every field I know, they are vastly MORE important. Virtually EVERY job posting includes “experienced” in its description of what is desired.
@Why are skills that are vital …:
One more time — the job market is the canonical example of supply and demand. The compensation offered for a given job is driven by a balance of the demand for that job and the number of people offering to perform the job. Nobody has ever claimed that the resulting market is fair — that’s why unions exist, that’s why OSHA exists, that’s why minimum wage laws exist, and so on.
One more time — those are all things invented and introduced by DEMOCRATS. They are all things fought tooth-and-nail every inch of the way by REPUBLICANS.
Nobody — absolutely NOBODY — offers reduced pay “simply on the basis that they were not accredited by an official third party institution”. That is a deceptive fiction that you relentlessly repeat here. It just isn’t true.
@College ought to [be] the measuring stick by which we decide who gets what from our collective economy:
Another red herring. Nobody says that. What the “collective economy” says is that any job has minimum requirements. Paying the ante of a poker game does NOT have any influence on whether you win or lose. If you want to play the game, you pay the ante.
A professional musician must demonstrate proficiency on their instrument. An aspiring athlete must demonstrate skills in their chosen sport. A wanna-be mechanic must show basic mechanical skills.
Whether or not it’s fair, employers value workers with college diplomas more than workers without college diplomas. A woman who is a CPA is going to be offered a higher salary for an accounting position than a woman without a diploma or credentials — no matter how much experience that latter woman has.
You might as well stand and shake your fists at the unfairness of a sun that sets every night as complain about the unfairness of an economy that pays people with college diplomas more than people without.
I’ll just quote FDR
What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security – security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security – these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead.
Notice he did not say anything about ones education level.
This quote is irrelevant to your premise. His famous line “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” also makes no mention of education level. So what?
The Democrats I’ve known all my life view making college accessible to every person who wants it as a way of fulfilling these aspirations. FDR himself championed the GI Bill, which made college an option for millions of American families.
Maybe we can all agree on the need for universal post-secondary education? I have friends and family who do well who did not get a BA, but none of them have only a GED. They got something. Whether it was military training, trades training, apprenticeships, or technical training. SeaTac shows us that the sky won’t fall even if McJobs have to pay living wages. We can support that and support a pathway to post-secondary education. Pursuing just wages for workers and an education for all who want it are not mutually exclusive.
Along time ago in the galaxy, I got a BA from UMass.
That education is not just about pleasing a future employer.
One thing we struggled against there—a lot— was the notion that the proper role for a working-class university was to be a kind of glorified voke-tech factory to get us Good Jobs and meet the needs of business.
We wanted jobs but we also aspired to grow intellectually and personally, to contribute to human knowledge, to develop our minds and habits of lifelong learning that would sustain us for the rest of our lives. Which would not just be about sweat and feeding the machine. Not just bread but roses, and books, too.
To the Ivy leaguers who, at the time comprised the UMass Trustees, all this other stuff was OK for them, not so much for us.
John has made this argument before. It still sounds an awful lot like similar stuff from elitists who went to elite schools and say, After all, how many thinkers do we actually need?
I say, You first.
Hear him, hear him!
One of the most informed and smartest person I have met over the years never went to college. He was a postal clerk who read, read everything, took it all in.
On a sadder note, I now work alongside kids with huge college loans to pay off and they, like me, are working in retail. Many of them has degrees in “Communication” or “sports Management”. One has a Bachelor of Music in Sound Recording Technology….when I asked them why they picked their field of study, the reply is something along the lines of “I thought I needed a degree to get a job” or “I don;t know, but I had to major in something” I hear them. Almost 45 years ago I was working in a factory and felt the push from society to “get a degree”. So I went for degree in the easiest area I knew of and four years later had my BA in History. I told people I was using that as a first step to law school, but knew that would never happen. I never really liked school.
In any event, after graduating from college, I went from being a part-time waiter in a restaurant to a full time waiter and bartender . The money was really good, I thought, until one evening when I overheard two guys at the bar talking about the money they were making selling cars. The next day, I quit my restaurant job and applied for a sales job at the same dealership, and got the job.
I was making more money than my sister, a teacher with a masters, and my brother, an attorney. College had nothing to do with it.
In the years that followed, I sold different things: cars, trucks, wedding receptions, radio advertising, frozen pizza, boats, fork lifts, it really never mattered what it was. My job never meant that much to me. It was just what I did to make ends meet.
However, in the same time, I continued to educate myself, to read, read as much as my friend the postal clerk; not for money, but for self fulfillment. Now that I approach retirement, I still plan to work a little part time to pay for groceries and such but I never plan to stop learning, never plan to stop reading, and I do not expect a bigger paycheck because of it. That was never the reason for my desire to learn.
What I hear from your anecdote is kids who didn’t want and couldn’t afford their degrees getting them and people who would have enjoyed the intellectual challenge of a college education being unable to afford to do so. This is a tragedy on both fronts. The postal worker should have had the opportunity to broaden his horizons, if he choose to. The kids you work with should have been given alternatives to mediocre high debt private schools with dubious majors. Our system is failing graduates and non graduates alike, it’s time we optimize it for every kind of student.
@College had nothing to do with it:
You, as a college graduate, will never know how much you benefited from your own college degree because it is not possible to run the “control” — what your life would have been without college.
As you observe, many of the benefits of college — especially of a liberal arts program — are not immediately measured in dollars and cents. It is not possible to say whether your lifelong “desire to learn” is cause or effect. If your education was any good at all — and I suspect you learned at least a little bit — then you acquired skills and practice at learning yourself.
Your ability to sell a wide range of things to a correspondingly wide range of purchasers says to me that you bring a great many skills and talents to the table — skills and talents that most educators suggest are intentional and purposeful goals of a liberal arts education. You would have to have purposefully refused to absorb anything during your four years of college in order to not benefit from that education.
Young men and women — especially young men and women of color — need all the help society can provide in facing the challenges of today and tomorrow.
The effect of your commentary here is to deny them that help. As a college graduate who has lived a successful life in comparison to your peers who did not have the advantages of your liberal arts education, you are saying, essentially, “let them eat cake”.
The curse of knowledge.
They did some illuminating experiments on this sort of thing a long time ago:
Scientists brought a young child, maybe 5 or 6 years old, into a room and showed them a box labelled ‘candy.’ They asked the child what was in the box, before opening it. The child said, obviously, ‘Candy.’
They opened to box for the child and it contained… pencils.
They closed the box again and asked the child what was in the box. The child, of course, said ‘pencils.’ Then they told the child they were going to bring in another child and ask the same question. They asked, what did the first child think the second child would say was in the box before it was opened?
‘Pencils,’ was the answer. The first child was convinced that the second child would know that the box labelled ‘candy’ would contain pencils.
Once you know something. It’s hard not to know it.
What about the kid who graduates high school and can’t read? That kid deserves economic success every bit as much as your highly-literate postal clerk compadre.
But, I guess, your answer is… ‘good luck!’
What about the kid who graduates high school and can’t balance a checkbook? That kid is going to get screwed on his/her wages, whatever the job, either accidentally or deliberately. Even if they did manage to get paid fairly, how are they going to do when tax season comes around? They are going to be at the complete mercy of someone else. Better hope for that someone else to have scruples….
That kid is not going to achieve economic success.
First of all, why is anyone graduating from high school who can’t read?
Heh. That’s a completely different question, well worth it’s own diary.
In addition to illiteracy, “innumeracy” is serious problem throughout America among even college graduates — even after years of “STEM” emphasis and useless standardized testing.
The whole point of standardized testing is to make sure everyone meets, you know, a standard! I expect people in the US who are not ESL or learning disabled to be literate by the time they out of elementary school (though vocabulary will certainly continue to expand), let alone high school. The maxim I have heard is up through grade 2 you are learning to read; after that you are reading to learn. What in the world are we doing! Ditto for basic numeracy.
Really? You’re asking that with a straight face?
Why is anyone graduating from high school who can’t read?
…Because prop 2-1/2…
…Because intelligent design…
…Because social promotion…
…Because charter schools…
…Because vouchers…
…Because teachers unions…
…Because bussing and segregation…
…Because one thousand and one other completely irrelevant reasons that serve to give political operatives some form of purchase or leverage, however despicable, in the arena.
…Because public education is a political football between opposing forces who could not care any less about anybody learning to read better…
Why, indeed…
The real mystery is how anybody leaves public school at all literate
Well, you’re first reason is MA-specific, but we also have MCAS, which I thought was to make sure kids graduated actually knowing something.
Just about everyone who enters college has gotten at least 400 in their combined SAT scores.
All of the evidence tells me that standardized testing is a very blunt instrument.
– Because they’re REALLIY good at <your favorite sport >
Don’t even get me started!:(
I know you were citing a laundry list of reasons others use, but I just want to be clear that unions are fighting for parents and students every day. Our district is getting a $15 million funding boost from the new law and our first visioning meeting for the union had several priorities for this money to be spent on. Not a single one was related to our salaries or benefits, rather, we want more supports for our ELLs, better trained security, and more social workers for our kids with trauma. More bilingual and diverse staff and more teachers overall to reduce class sizes. Unions are a partner with the wider community in democratic accountability over Ed policy makers.
Most of the talking points on that list are lies. That’s why Republicans love them.
I second the need for strong liberal arts programs for the masses. I’ll also push back against John’s FDR quote. After all, FDR signed the GI Bill which was a huge driver of post war academic investment in blue collar people getting a world class education once only open to the elite. One of my grandfathers benefited from that liberal education. Ike, Nixon, and LBJ invested in these programs. As a precursor to welfare reform, CEDA encouraged women like my mother (a single mother then before she met my father) on AFDC to take reduced rate classes. The commission that recommended welfare reform pushed for education to be given equal if not more treatment than workforce development.
Not everybody wants to or should go to college. I have a lot of students bored at school and already eager to work in the trades, open their own small businesses, or work in family businesses. They deserve living wages too. The HVAC apprentice I taught two years ago is now an HVAC master teaching apprentices of his own and earning as much as I do with my masters degree. The military is still a great option (though we should definitely discourage its use).
I reject the snobbery of genuine liberal elitists, none of whom are on this blog, as well as the anti-intellectualism of the right that dismisses all higher education as a waste of time and month.
Hopefully we can all agree that the status quo is a tragedy. Too many kids who want to go and would thrive in college do not because they cannot afford to pay. Too many kids who don’t want to go, do, and are saddled with crushing debt they can never repay. We have to do much better. Debt forgiveness and universal post-secondary education may be pipe dreams today, but we will not see better outcomes unless we push for policies that open up our meritocracy to working class families.
To sum up we can and should both make sure that everyone who wishes to go to college has the opportunity and everyone who doesn’t can still be able to live in a first world country. I don’t understand why these are being made out as mutually exclusive.
Not all on the right are anti-intellectual. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest (Mill). The system we have works fine, aren’t we the richest society in history, but we are in a transition stage where knowledge itself is available to the masses in ways unimaginable 20 years ago.
Does society need another person with a BA in history, literature, etc who holds themselves in high esteem and expected to make a living disseminating that information in neat little semester long packets or do they need someone who knows how to plug in the alexa machine and can figure out why the circuit breaker keeps flipping.
All work has value but if you went to Julliard to study the fiddle or you learned to run a fryolator and you expect to own a house and car I hope someone wakes you up soon.
There’s at least one comment from the right that is anti-intellectual.
It strikes me that if we had rather more people who truly understood how to disseminate information in neat little packets, we might have many more people who know that climate change is real, that cutting taxes causes more harm than good, that assassinating foreign leaders starts wars, that the earth is more than six thousand years old, and so on.
The “heartland” is chock-full of people who desperately need more exposure to those “neat little semester long packets” that you so contemptuously dismiss.
All work has value. If you expect to own a house and car, I hope someone helps you get a college education.
Don’t worry about me Tom. Sitting in my new Fla home (one of 3), retired in my 50’s, did get a college degree in my 30’s (going to night school) and got it out of intellectual curiosity.
Learn what is valued and do everything yourself if you can. And in real estate location, location, location.
Actually, scott12mass’s comment upthread is profoundly anti-intellectual.
Society needs both Scott. The colleague I shared a classroom with last year is a Romanian who grew up under communism. She tested strong in math and was sent to the math college by that regime, she did not have any say in the matter. Either the government would that option or she could be a factory worker. There were no humanities colleges. So she became a math major and later an economics masters student. History is her first love though, and she would watch me teach my class with envy.
Math is certainly more useful in an economic sense, and totalitarian regimes will always need people who know how to keep the lights on and the machines humming. The Nazi’s had no shortage of capable scientists. What they lacked was humanists willing to learn from the past and empathize with the other. That is what teaching the humanities should do.
My Intro humanities section at U Chicago was called “Human Being and Citizen”, and I always feel like this is what I am teaching my students. How to be good human beings and active citizens. It’s why we study genocides. It’s why we study totalitarian regimes, and why we read first hand accounts when we do. So people can see themselves in the lives of others.
Not to quibble, but the Nazi’s in fact had a good many humanists who enthusiastically embraced that ideology, as well as a good many scientists who resisted it. One of the more shameful aspects of US history during that period is the number of home-grown American humanists who supported the Nazi ideology.
The institutional Christian church, and in particular the Roman Catholic church, was shameful in its silence about the ongoing Nazi genocide against the Jews while it was happening.
One of the reasons why the US won the race to a workable atom bomb was that Germany’s greatest physicists, mathematicians, and scientists fled the Nazis and landed in the US — the most notable being Albert Einstein, who was among the first to warn the US government of the implications of his famous equation for weaponry.
The Eugenics movement that gave birth to the worst aspects of Nazi genocide originated right here in America, and the name “Eugenics” was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin.
I agree that society needs both humanists and scientists. As a scientist, I resist the suggestion that scientists were any more culpable than theologians or humanists for Nazi Germany.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but evangelical Christians are among today’s most vocal and most influential US supporters of Donald Trump’s bigotry — bigotry that has its roots in the same evils as Nazism, and that might well end up with the same outcome.
I’m aware of that history, it was just an example that science alone still leaves us without a humanist touch. I have no doubt a great many prominent intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences (lookin at you Heidegger!) were on the wrong side of the fight. Needless to say, I would counter that anyone who sided with the Nazis has no claim to being a humanist.
Your comment reminds me of the best defense I have ever heard for public education, from no less an authority than the Constitution of Massachusetts…
Of course, it does single out a certain “university at Cambridge” which seems to raise certain people’s hackles:(
Everybody.
Next question….
If we all had Ph.Ds or M.Ds, interspersed with the random D.D.S we would all be literate and numerate. We would drive delivery vans and cause less accidents because we could read a map. We would clean hotel rooms and run the dishwashers at restaurants with more autonomy (why is it, do you think, that a person who doesn’t even speak English can get a job cleaning a hotel room or running a dishwasher? Because the job can be demonstrated and done by rote, not by instruction.) . We would care for the elderly and the very young be reading for them, and getting their medical dosages correct. We would save money by increasing the number of people who can make correct change. There is not job that should not absolutely require literacy and numeracy. There are very few public schools in this country that require literacy and numeracy to graduate.
People recognize college educations as important because they are the guarantee of literacy and numeracy that a grade school education simply does not supply.
There must be a level of literacy and numeracy. This is what is both essential and very important to economic success. No person, no matter the job, can expect to be successful without a base level of literacy and numeracy.
The other option is to say the heck with it and go back to child labor and forget universal public education altogether?
I, personally, would like to see literacy and numeracy be guaranteed at the grade school level and not at the university. But local school boards and property tax politics being what they are, it’s very near impossible: That’s mostly because people like you want to crap all over the Democrats more than they want to solve the problem.
I thought you were using an extreme example above to get our attention, but now it sounds like you really have encountered school systems that do not expect basic literacy and numeracy. Am I reading that right?
He is observing, as have I, that our culture is chock-full of both high-school and college graduates who cannot read, cannot write, and cannot do basic arithmetic.
What are school systems expect appears to be irrelevant — what those school systems produce is the issue. I have been convinced for at least 20 years that the single most important thing America can do to revolutionize our society and restore our place in the world is to double or triple the annual salary we pay public school teachers, and raise taxes as needed to fund that.
6 6s for the last sentence to be sure. There is no excuse for your first sentence being true.
There is a reason why colleges offer remedial literacy and math courses to incoming first-year students.
Large companies like IBM and Experian have been offering similar programs as part of new-employee on-boarding since at least the 1990s. Even at Digital Equipment Corporation, back in the early 1980s, there was increasing interest in such programs.
Employers were finding that recently-hired college graduates were unable to read and write well enough to understand, never mind create, manuals, memos, policy proposals, and so on.
This has been a HUGE problem for a long time.
SMH!
I have long said we need to get to the point where our public high schools are so universally good that colleges don’t even need core requirements let alone remedial. I’m actually surprised colleges admit students needing the latter. This would have the added benefit of allowing students to get a Bachelor’s degree in three years thus making undergraduate studies one year cheaper. Not everybody has to go to college upon graduation from high school, but if they don’t it should not be for lack of financial or academic opportunities.
Most of the students who need remedial courses take more than four years. Five and six year BS/BA programs are common today.
Yeah, I heard from a few people how bad students are these days, so clearly it must be a huge problem.
I have an idea! Why don’t we evaluate students somehow – maybe a test! – that we would use to prevent students from graduating if they can’t read and write well enough to create manuals, memos, etc.
Then we could know which schools were good and which were bad. We could close the bad schools! Get rid of them completely! We could also grade each school – A, B, C, F – so that people would be able to easily know which communities to avoid.
And while we’re at it, let’s test the teachers, and fire the bad ones! Because after all, with all these failing kids, it it clearly because of the bad teachers, who, of course, are protected by the UNIONS!
Maybe we should even think about turning the schools over to the private sector, because government can’t run anything right.
Yeah! I think we’re onto something here!
Why wasn’t this all done 30 years ago?
/s
Well – YES! After that though the trick is to fix things so that doesn’t happen so much.
… and the MCAS and other high-stakes tests have done virtually nothing positive except validate that wealth and test scores are highly correlated. Most school districts went on, business as usual, but the “other” school districts (poor, non-white) were heavily disrupted. Their schools were privatized with mediocre results. Their unions were weakened. And with a letter grade assigned to them, their property values dropped as families with school children avoided them. Their curricula were adapted to eliminate critical thinking and focus more on how to take tests.
This was all based on pre-internet “conventional wisdom” hype, not actual data. Voters wanted to punish the “urban youths” that they heard were being passed along and graduating without knowing anything.
That’s why I said the solutions need to be different, but frankly I do NOT want someone graduating who cannot meet certain basic standards. I took a sample MCAS once and I could tell you which high school class I learned the answer to each question in. It is not that complicated. I have no desire to punish anyone, but lift them up. I’d like nothing better than every kid to pass it with ease.
You think I’m making this up to get your attention? You’re a nice guy, Christopher, but I don’t feel the need to cross the street to get your attention.
The current President of the United States might be illiterate. And you think it’s about me?
@The current President of the United States might be illiterate:
Widely published accounts report that he is illiterate. At least now, if not always.
I had a good friend years ago who got an Master’s degree (in one of the social sciences) and was illiterate. His wife (and enabler) did all his homework for him, just as she had while they were in college together. He covered it well in day-to-day life. He and I were pretty sure that he was dyslexic, although he had never been diagnosed with it — he didn’t want it on his medical record.
We’ve always assumed he sends out all those tweets himself. Granted they aren’t the greatest writing, but I think they are enough to show he is literate. He can also read speeches though occasionally has physical difficulty when you don’t expect it, for which I do not know the cause.
Numerous sources report that he dictates his tweets.
I had not heard that and they don’t sound dictated, but if that is true I wonder who the poor sap is who gets to type them out.