Why SPAN? Why Now?
Recently much has been written about America’s high schools. Our graduation rates and our competitive edge on the world stage…But the two reasons a parent looks at the Todd Academy/SPAN program are all about providing your child with 1) a head start on college, and 2) enrichment, which they may not receive in a conventional setting.
So why with all of the changes everyone talks about going on at high school should you really think about letting your teenager become a full-time Todd Academy/SPAN student and taking such a non-traditional approach to education?
Well, let’s look at some recent articles on high school in America.
Education Reform
Is education reform needed in our high schools? The U.S.News and World Report of April 4, 2005 in an editorial on page 60 by David Gergen writes:
“On a list of 20 developing nations, America now ranks 16th in high school graduation rates and 14th in college graduation rates. But wait, it gets worse. That list of 20 doesn’t even include India and China because they’re officially considered ‘developing’ countries. Yet everyone in American technology knows that India and China are rapidly becoming our most serious competitors.
“Bill Gates is among a growing number of CEOs whose concern is rising. ‘When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad,’ Gate told the governors, ‘I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.” Gates pointed out that in 2001 India graduated a million more students from college than the United States did, while China has six times as many university students majoring in engineering. Many of those students are now staying home to work, saying no to U.S. jobs. As a result, U.S.-based companies are finding it increasingly attractive to build not only their manufacturing plants abroad but their R & D operations as well.”
“What’s needed now is public recognition that, as Gates says, ‘America’s high schools are obsolete.’”
In The Indianapolis Star of February 10, 2004 was an article titled, “Report: Diplomas dropping in value,” that stated:
“If you want a decent job at a decent wage, it’s a high-skill job,’ said Michael Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., one of the education policy groups driving the American Diploma Project.”
“’A high school diploma should mean something to an employer and university,’ said Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who is Achieves co-chairman.
“In Taft’s state, three in 10 students who go directly to college from high school end up taking remedial English or math classes, he said. ‘It’s evidence that the current high-school graduating standards are not preparing students.’”
On page 51 of the U.S.News and World Report of October 13, 2003, stated:
“If you read a lot of newspapers and magazines or happen to be acquainted with a particularly precocious child, you might assume that most American high schoolers spend their nights swilling coffee and propping open their eyelids to finish crushing amounts of homework. But Matt Hogan, a senior at Evanston Township High School in Illinois, does only 45 minutes of homework a night and still maintains a B average in honors-level classes. ‘Some of the classes really don’t give out homework,’ he says. ‘The teachers are too lenient.’
“Maybe, but it turns out that Hogan’s workload is just about average. According to a study released last week, most kids in this country spend less than an hour each day studying; almost 40 percent of high schoolers surveyed had done no homework the night before; and most college freshmen report that they spent just an hour a day – an all-time low – on homework during their last year of high school.”
Why would this be? In the U.S.News and World Report of April 4, 2005 on page 52 is an article titled, “Small classes, big headache.”
“Two and a half years after Florida voters adopted a constitutional amendment to reduce class sizes, Palm Beach County – and every other school district in the state – is tripping over a major stumbling block: There just aren’t enough good teachers to go around. With classes in kindergarten through third grade capped at 18 students, fourth through eighth held at 22, and high school limited to 25, the state will need to hire an estimated 29,604 new teachers by 2009 – a prospect that has many people worried. ‘I have every reason to expect that the quality of teachers will suffer,’ says John Winn, the state’s education commissioner.”
In the article, “Is it time to ditch senior year?” in the December 8, 2003 issue of U.S.News and World Report from page 74, we find:
“If it’s fifth period, it must be time for Hacky Sack for high school senior Jess Rojas. Second period the Boulder, Colo., student spends staring into space at the library, and the rest of his day isn’t much more challenging: The 17-year-old claims he can get A’s or B’s with little or no effort. Roja’s problem? He’s got senioritis, a condition that has afflicted him since he was accepted into the University of Colorado-Boulder last month. ‘I’m not taking any classes that I need to graduate,’ says Rojas, who finished his requirements by the end of junior year. ‘I’m ready for college now.’
“Rojas just may get his wish. Last month, in an effort to stem rising budget problems, members of the powerful joint budget committee of the Colorado legislature proposed eliminating the 12th grad and rolling the $271 million saved into a universal pre-kindergarten program. ‘In my opinion, not a lot of 12th graders are learning much,’ says Colorado State Sen. Dave Owen, a member of the budget committee. ‘Maybe we need to put more money at the lower end of the scale rather than the higher end.’
Senior year, and what to do with it, have become the subject of an ongoing national debate. In June, before Colorado’s proposed radical amputation, Florida passed legislation that permits students to graduate from high school with 18 credits instead of 24, effectively allowing students to graduate after their junior year. At the heart of both states’ attempted solutions is a fundamental question: What is senior year for? In many schools today, it’s a nebulous time when college-bound students with acceptance letters in hand often lose their motivation to learn, while other students, having fulfilled minimal high school graduation requirements, report to school for just a few classes. ‘Nobody claims the senior year,’ says Michael W. Kirst, a professor of education at Stanford who studies the subject. ‘The high schools don’t know what to do with it; the colleges won’t say that should be done with it, and the students are acting rationally by getting the signal that none of it matters.’ Indeed, Kirst believes that problems inherent in the misspent senior year won’t be solved until policymakers take a ‘K-16’ approach toward education – one that integrates all school levels seamlessly.”
“One look at college remediation rates might suggest that more, not less, intensive learning in high school is what’s needed. In fall 2000, 76 percent of postsecondary institutions offered high-school-level remedial reading, writing, or mathematics courses, and 28 percent of freshmen enrolled in at least one of them. Colorado says college remediation at its state colleges cost anywhere from $15 million to $21 million a year.”
One solution was discussed in the article, “Earning two diplomas in one” in the November 3, 2003 issue of U.S.News and World Report on page 56:
“The 16- and 17-year-olds in Steven Mazie’s writing seminar look like normal dressed –down, backpack-toting New York City public high school kids – and, in fact, they are. They’re also full-time college students. At graduation, their transcripts will be filled with courses like The Social Contract and Its Critics, Latin American literature, and multivariable calculus, taught by Mazie and the other 20 teachers on the faculty who hold a Ph.D. And their diplomas will come with an associate’s degree.
“When Bard High School Early College opened two years ago, it pioneered a kind of hybrid that is now rapidly being cloned: a school run jointly by a public school district and a local college (in this case, Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, N.Y.) where students can wrap up their high school coursework by junior year and tackle a curriculum of college courses that meet state requirements for graduation, too. Nineteen ‘early college high schools’ are opening nationwide this academic year, and 64 more are scheduled to start up next year.”
The article, “How much High School Is Enough? Some Students Benefit by Leaving After 10th Grade, Some Educators Contend,” by Valerie Strauss was in the Washington Post on page A15, May 9, 2000. It stated:
“To Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, 16-year-old Jeffreu Cua of Lutherville, Md, is the perfect high school student. It’s not because Cua gets great grades in tough courses, which he does, but because he is leaving high school after 10th grade, so bored that he wants to start college two years early.
“Cua, who attends the private Boys’ Latin School in Baltimore, is heading to Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Massachusetts, a Bard-operated school that is the nation’s only liberal arts and sciences college designed for students of high-school age. Most of the fewer than 350 students at Simon’s Rock enter after completing 10th or 11th grade and attend for four years.
“But Botstein said recruiting for Simon’s Rock is not his key aim; abolishing high school is. Conceived 100 years ago for a different population, today’s high schools are obsolete, he said. He proposes shrinking the K-12 curriculum into K-10 and then sending young people off to work, college or a new form of vocational education.
“ ‘By the age of 16, school is wildly out of step with the actual realities of America,’ said Botstein, who argues that high school as we know it was created for youths who were far less biologically mature and for more insulated from adult culture.
“Several educators, while viewing Botstein’s solution as extreme, agree that the structure of high school needs refurbishing.
“Never before have so many high school students worked so hard to impress elite colleges, loading up on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses and attaining grade-point averages far about 4.0. They are taking a college-level curriculum—but on a frenetic high school schedule that doesn’t permit them to explore their academic interests as deeply as they could on a college campus.
“There are also the college-bound high school students who start to coast once they’re within striking distance of the number of credits needed to graduate.
“As for the students who aren’t college-bound, they often find that their high school doesn’t offer a strong enough vocational program.
“High schools need to make changes to better serve all three groups of students, said George Washington University President Stephen J. Trachtenberg. Rules should be made more flexible so students who want to finish high school in two or three years can do so, he believes, and others should be encouraged to take at least some of their classes at nearby colleges—a trend that is growing but still covers only a small minority of the high school population. He also favors more vocational training options.
“High schools have been experimenting in recent years with various reforms aimed at creating more time for in-depth studies, including four-day school weeks, longer class periods and senior-year research projects.”
“Jessie Grogan, a freshman at Simon’s Rock, left Washington and Lee High School in Arlington last year at age 16 after completing the 11th grade. Like Cua, she was a top student, in the International Baccalaureate program, but said she had too much ‘busywork.’ ‘Education and learning are the most worthwhile pursuits there are,’ she said, but they are ‘eclipsed’ in high school by an emphasis on conformity and blind obedience.
“For Will Scott, Jr., a senior at Simon’s Rock from Winchester, Va, high school seemed to be about everything but learning. ‘What the school year became was more of a popularity contest, the football teams—adding facilities for athletic teams and very little for academic structure,’ said Scott, who attended Winchester’s James Wood High School.
“In their 1999 book ‘The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890-1995,’ professors David L. Angus and Jeffrey E. Mirel say that high schools gradually evolved into institutions whose primary mission was the custodial care of teenagers. The earliest high schools provided a challenging liberal arts education, but that focus began changing in the 1930s when a majority of 14- to 17-year-olds in America started attending and educators thought it necessary to water down courses, Angus and Mirel write.
“Educators woke up in the 1970s and began a drive toward high standards that remains unrealized and uneven, said Mirel, director of the Division of Educational Studies at Emory University.
The main problem with Botstein’s idea of ending high school after 10th grade is that most teenagers need more time to become socially mature, many educators say. Botstein counters that high school, with its cliques and peer pressures, is hardly a place that promotes social and emotional development. He also argues that high school has never adapted to the change in the average age for the onset of puberty: 16 ½ a century ago and now between 11 and 13.
“‘We create a hothouse environment which infantilizes young people, which does not encourage their growing up,’ said Botstein, who is also conductor and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra. Sainabou Nyang agrees. The 15-year-old 10th –grader at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring wishes she could cut a year out of high school. Too much time is being wasted, she said, and many seniors feel that they could be doing other things, ‘like getting on with their life.’
“‘High school is just too long,’ she complained. ‘Definitely!’”
So as you can see the SPAN Program fits right in to the high schools of the future, although it was cutting edge in 1984 at its inception. But the questions still follow: Yes, they still need a high school diploma before they can get financial aid in college and there are a variety of ways to make that happen:
(1)You can leave them in high school and they can take an additional college class at night. Most local high school will let them take one or sometimes two classes the last half of their junior and senior year but most won’t allow much beyond that, it affects their state funding something they will tell you they don’t have nearly enough of at this time.
(2)You can file them as home schooled and work through the process, we have provided in the article “A Parent’s Perspective” on the Todd Academy website at www.toddacademy.com with that in mind. But it is very time consuming and full of trial and error.
Reprinted from the Todd Academy Newsletter, Fall 2006.
