State masking real education problems

That’s just the latest incarnation of how Georgia manipulates its education requirements. Consider the number of special evening schools that are designed to help older students who dropped out, or flunked out, get a high school diploma. Even with students still enrolled in high school, there are a number of special programs designed to help struggling students “stay in school” and get a diploma.

Giving high school kids second and third chances to retake tests they’ve flunked has become commonplace. A massive amount of money and effort is expended to raise the state’s dismal graduation rate by pushing marginal students out the schoolhouse door, diploma in hand.

Why all the emphasis on getting diplomas into the hands of Georgians?

It’s business, or rather an attempt to look good for business.

In the competitive industrial development environment, states vie with each other for major industrial and business projects.

One of the key components in that process is the education level a state can offer a potential business. Every state likes to tout that it has an educated and literate workforce. That’s especially critical with the much sought high-tech and biotech industries.

Except here in Georgia, we really don’t have the kind of highly-educated citizenry to be competitive with many other states.

So in an effort to mask that problem, state leaders have started inventing ways to make the workforce look better by manipulating the high school graduation numbers with programs such as the retroactive diploma approved this year.

While giving out 17,000 high school diplomas may make the state look better to prospective businesses, it does little to really fix the state’s low high school graduation rate, or to improve the quality of the state’s high school graduates.

This isn’t a new issue in the state. For over 65 years, the state has experimented with hundreds of “education reform” movements.

In the 1950s, it was a push for school consolidations and getting rid of smaller schools.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was a push for better math curriculums and integrating schools so that black students would have the same access to quality schools as white students.

In the 1980s, it was a push for more money and funding and the explosion of the middle school concept.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was more Pre-K programs, “new-new” math and increasing accountability with a massive amount of standardized testing.

Not all of that was a failure. Overall education in the state is better today than it was in 1950 and more students have more opportunities than ever before.

Still, Georgia is playing catch-up with many other states where education standards have been higher for decades.

In its bid to “fix” education, however, the state has embraced so many standards, movements and curriculum fads that it has created a great deal of dysfunction and dichotomy.

An example: Over the last 20 years, Georgia has pushed hard to “raise the bar” in its elementary grades under the theory that it would help students be better prepared for high school and consequently, lower the drop-out rate. So elementary school curriculum standards got harder.

But that effort has created a huge amount of turmoil in elementary grades by expecting students to understand concepts they aren’t yet mature enough to grasp. School leaders embraced the idea of teaching “higher order thinking” to students who hadn’t even mastered the basics. Most elementary students simply don’t have the cognitive maturity to deal with vague theories.

That has been exacerbated by the piling on of homework in the lower grades, a move initially designed to “close the gap,” but which cannot fix a flawed curriculum.

The result of that has been a huge disconnect between elementary expectations and results, increasing frustration for parents and teachers, and no evidence it’s had any impact on the high school graduation rate.

At the other end of the spectrum, Georgia has virtually abandoned tough standards in its high schools. That’s not true of every class, of course. But overall, many high school kids have less homework than their younger siblings and they aren’t being challenged with “higher order thinking,” even though they are an appropriate age to learn those concepts.

Some of this is due to the pressure of extracurricular activities, which indirectly has lowered the homework burden.

But much of that is due to the reality that if Georgia’s high schools really did raise the bar and demand more from high school students, a larger number would drop out — and that would look bad to the business community.

In addition, raising the bar in Georgia’s high schools would have a disproportion impact on students in many urban schools and poor rural schools.

Politically, state leaders don’t want to see that because they couldn’t deal with the backlash from those who would immediately claim the higher standards are racially biased.

So we’ve reached a point where Georgia’s education and political establishment look for ways to artificially inflate the high school graduation rate by lowering standards for low-achieving students (wink-wink), while at the same time giving lip service to “raising the bar.” That helps hide the real problem from prospective businesses that compare Georgia to other states.

So what is “the real problem?”

Culture, or rather the state’s defective anti-education culture found in many poor rural communities and in most poor urban areas.

There’s not much state officials can do about changing that anti-education society. No programs and no amount of money can educate those who don’t give a damn.

State leaders know that, so they play the game of pretending to raise the bar, while at the same time they cheapen the value of a high school diploma by handing them out to students who really didn’t meet higher standards.

That may mask the real problem to outside companies looking to locate in the state, but it does little to confront the underlying tide of dysfunction that is the real culprit.

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.