TO WHOM THE (SCHOOL) BELL TOLLS
Half of high-school graduates enroll in four-year colleges, but barely half complete their degrees
BY KEN WARD

Ken Ward is opinion page editor of the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla. A Las Vegas resident from 1990-2002, he was a freelance columnist with the R-J and assistant managing editor at the Sun. E-mail him at kenricward@juno.com  Other stories by Ken Ward

Hilary Swank, in Freedom Writers, follows a long line of Hollywood teachers who work miracles in the classroom. You know the plot: Ambitious and idealistic young pedagogue overcomes seemingly insurmountable cultural odds to transform a group of troubled, non-achieving (typically minority) youngsters into academic all stars — and learns important life lessons from them in the process.

These are heart-warming tales, but real schools, and real people, deal in cold, hard reality. And the reality is that nearly four in 10 students drop out of high school.

The conceit of K-12 education — and American culture in general — is that everyone has an equal shot at scholastic success. Success is typically defined as a four-year college degree, leading to a well-paying, white-collar profession.

But even though almost half of high-school graduates enroll in four-year colleges, barely half complete their degrees. Those who fall by the wayside join their erstwhile peers as academic “incompletes.”

Are they failures? Maybe. Yet, in many cases, it’s the system that’s failing.

As America tries to “fix” its floundering high schools, debate is under way on how to make middle schools more efficient. That conversation often revolves around two alternate grade configurations: creating K-8 campuses or a 6-12 alignment. The New York Times recently published tens of thousands of words exploring them.

But this debate isn’t new (remember what used to be called “junior high schools”?) and reshuffling campus placements is tantamount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The crux of the matter is that America’s one-size-fits-all, largely college-prep curriculum has a high built-in failure rate — and middle schools are leading that collapse.

Eighth-grade test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress show the beginning of a sharp drop-off that accelerates in high school. It’s in these adolescent classrooms that students begin to tune out, either because they’re bored by the coursework or unable to keep up.

“There’s a false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder,’’ writes Charles Murray, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and author of the controversial 1994 best-seller, The Bell Curve.

Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars this country pours into public schools each year, despite increasingly Byzantine licensure and credentialing requirements for educators, scholastic gains remain slim or nonexistent.

Murray’s analysis, which he outlined in a Wall Street Journal series earlier this year, arrives at a politically explosive conclusion: “Even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.”

This declaration may strike some as unduly fatalistic, but is it merely coincidence that student performance on the NAEP closely follows the shape of a bell curve based on IQ distribution of the student population?

“It’s no use coming up with examples of a child who was getting D’s in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence,’’ Murray argues.

Educators and policymakers should keep their minds open to this because the struggling old school needs much more than a new coat of paint or another feel-good story from Hollywood.

Asking “What’s wrong with vocational school?’’ Murray makes a case for retaining students by moving them off the college track. After all, he reasons, there’s no shame in being a good tradesman whose skills command top dollar and whose work has intrinsic value.

And there’s no reason those choices can’t begin in middle schools.

“The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen,’’ Murray notes. “Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason — the list goes on and on — is difficult, and it is a seller’s market.’’

Ironically, such non-collegiate opportunities extend to the high-tech sector, where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have managed to get by without college degrees. Today’s ever-expanding “knowledge industry” doesn’t care about diplomas. It wants tech-savvy skills, which aren’t taught at the old school either.

Middle schools must begin making distinctions in aptitudes, and facilitate career choices accordingly, if high schools are to maximize their students’ potential. This is radical (some might say “discriminatory”) stuff for educators trained in the Ivory Tower, and whose livelihoods are seen to depend on the status quo — no matter how counterproductive it may be.

But, amid desultory dropout rates and academic gains that are barely measurable, there is no real alternative. While maintaining rigorous college-prep coursework, vocational education must be brought out of the scholastic ghetto and into middle schools where students can match their abilities to their studies. Public-private partnerships with local businesses and charter schools need to be promoted. Community colleges, with their emphasis on practical, market-based skills should be brought into the loop.

The social stigma of not getting a bachelor’s or master’s degree can be erased one success story at a time. Then middle schools will become more relevant to a productive life, and dropouts will become a vestige of the past.