The LATimes is running a series this week about some truly terrifying (to me) high school drop-out statistics.
The Times determined that at least 53% of the students who began at Birmingham in ninth grade graduated four years later, many from other schools.
Half? Holy cow! And today’s article – the second in the series – indicates that the big obstacle is Algebra.
In the fall of 2004, 48,000 ninth-graders took beginning algebra; 44% flunked, nearly twice the failure rate as in English. Seventeen percent finished with Ds.
In all, the district that semester handed out Ds and Fs to 29,000 beginning algebra students — enough to fill eight high schools the size of Birmingham.
Is this an American educational phenomenon, do you suppose? Or could it be related to this article from the UK’s Times Online:
Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.
After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King’s College London confidently declares: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.” […]
“It is shocking,” says Adey. “The general cognitive foundation of 11 and 12-year-olds has taken a big dip. There has been a continuous decline in the last 30 years and it is carrying on now.”
But what exactly is being lost? Is it really general intelligence or simply a specific understanding of scientific concepts such as volume and density? Both, say the researchers. The tests reveal both general intelligence — “higher level brain functions” — and a knowledge that is “the bedrock of science and maths” says Ginsburg. In fact it’s nothing less than the ability of children to handle new, difficult ideas. Doing well at these tests has been linked with getting higher grades generally at GCSE.
I have absolutely nothing that connects these two findings to one another, other than the shared problems with the math. Does it actually seem likely that the human race is getting less intelligent?
Scary thought…
[…] Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the problems in Los Angeles high schools, where they’re facing drop-out rates of around 50%. The LA Times ran an enormous education special about the crisis, and while they noted that there are problems for urban school districts all across the country, no-one seemed over-worried about Texas’ schools. After all, this state reported an 84% graduation rate, and Polimom’s nearest urban district (Houston) was only losing roughly 1/4 of its high school students. […]
Maybe it could be as simple(as thought anything dealing with the brain were) as humans living longer means that they develop certain brain functions later. If over time that adds up to only a matter of months later, that can be the difference of a grade for many students.
Jack — I was confounded when I wrote this a year ago, and I’m no more enlightened now.
It does seem, though, that the intervening months have brought quite a number of educational articles and studies about the failing middle schools. The experts seem to be blaming the structure of middle school itself (as opposed to older models), and there are quite a few experiments going on with various grade configurations to see what might work better.
But having written this so long ago, it’s stuck in the back of my mind and bugged me. A theory I have floating in my mind relates a bit to your comment about cognitive development. What if the technological advances (as reflected in TV, and more recently computers) is spurring different regions of the brain, while others atrophy?
Given that my own educational experience is sociology and psychology, brain development is, of course, a realm in which I have to claim complete ignorance. Still — there appear to be a number of problems fueling the problems we’re seeing in the educational system(s).