Are High School Students Prepared to Succeed amid the Recession?

The Columbus Dispatch published a story today that highlights a failure on the part of educators to prepare our generation for life after high school.

Amy Brotherton and her daughter, Katie, spent the past two months touring Ohio colleges.

The message they received didn't waver: Colleges want well-rounded individuals whose high-school activities show that they would get involved in their college communities.

So where does that leave Katie and other students in the South-Western district, where the defeat of an operating levy Tuesday ensured the cancellation of extracurriculars?

"I don't want her limited by this, and I'm afraid she will be," said Amy Brotherton. Her daughter, an incoming senior at Grove City High School, played in the marching band and was a member of various clubs.

My first reaction to this was to think of the admissions essay that nearly every school requires as a part of its application process. Some of them have prompts that attempt to dictate what you write about and some of them don't. Either way, these experiences that Katie and her peers have gone through are exactly what admissions officials want to read about. These are the types of formative experiences that begin to shape a young person's identity, and if a student can make a good faith effort to articulate the thoughts/frustrations felt and the learning that goes on in these trying times, they'd probably find the college admissions process to be easy compared to their expectations.

There's a problem, though: many high school students are being shortchanged in their curriculum. The practice of writing in many high school classes (even English) has been set aside, and so what otherwise would have been a great way to capitalize on a unique experience is potentially its own liability for many students.

This focus on the quality of completed writing has infused recent policy debates, and both national and state-level efforts have introduced standards for writing and testing programs. Because writing varies considerably across tasks and contexts, developing valid standardized tests that reliably measure achievement and growth is an enterprise fraught with challenge. Although the most credible tests include actual writing samples, the cost of rating such exams has led some to advocate the use of machine-scored tests assessing students' knowledge of vocabulary and grammar; because students' scores on such tests often correlate well with scores on actual writing, argue some, they offer an affordable and efficient alternative. Because tests tend to drive curricula, teachers and literacy scholars worry that such assessments may encourage teaching practices predicated on an insufficient model of proficiency in writing–one that privileges discrete skills over an ability to negotiate the demands of writing for real purposes and audiences. As literacy educators argue the need to ground instruction in a broader conception of writing achievement, test-makers continue to work toward assessment strategies that better encompass the range and complexity of the kinds of writing people do in their lives beyond school. During the 1990s the National Council of Teachers of English convened the New Standards project, a group of literacy educators charged with formulating approaches to portfolio assessment that might serve both classroom-level and larger-scale purposes. The cost and complexity of such endeavors have relegated portfolios primarily to the levels of schools and classrooms, where they continue to provide evidence of students' processes, products, and growth over time.

Math, science, and standardized tests now drive curricula, reducing the influence of the development of general writing skills. While Amy would do well to reflect on her experiences and organize her thoughts into a cogent argument as to why she should be allowed to enter a college community, she very well might not know how to do that (though I concede that she may also know how to do this but merely hadn't thought of it yet).

As we push toward getting more math- and science-minded students to our colleges, are we prepared to lose the ability to express ourselves? Math and science aren't going to be the only disciplines that get us through recessions.