This blog is almost three years old. I just came across it in my computer while looking for something else.
Reaction to “Tough Choices or Tough Times”
Stephen Dean Bohrer
February 12, 2007
A recent Denver Post editorial (Sunday, February 4, 2007, page 4e; “U.S. Education Needs Sweeping Reform”) restates the case made by a report released in December entitled “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” The report[1] calls for early-childhood education, paying for first order teachers (up to $110,000 per year), more resources for the toughest schools, a 10th grade exam that would kick low scoring students to trade schools, diminishing of local district control and a federal individual student account to assist with higher education.
Primarily written by business CEOs, the report maintains that an insufficient percentage of high school students are ready for the workforce upon graduation. For the past twenty years, similar business leaders lobbied that all workers should have the same skills as those attending college. This is the mantra of the Colorado Commission for Higher Education in its demand that all graduates entering state colleges (beginning with the class of 2010) must have completed a curriculum that includes four years of mathematics and two years of the same foreign language. Governor Bill Owens’ School Alignment Council endorsed that same conclusion, but also asserted that high school graduates who did not aspire to college were not ready for the workforce.
The fact of the matter is that the federal government and state boards of education have for any number of years undervalued students who wanted to work with their hands for a living. They have twisted federal Perkins funds while states have reduced funding for vocational schools and have forced the closing of programs that could have led to productive blue-collar jobs such as mechanics, heavy equipment operators, plumbers, and electricians. Vocational funding for traditional woodworking classes or home economics no longer exists. One cannot even use the term home ec., but are obliged to say family and consumer science to denote the unlikelihood that students should ever know how to cook, sew, can tomatoes, or crochet.
The Denver Post article goes on to repeat a statement from the Tough Choices report that says “Thirty years ago, the United States could lay claim to having 30 percent of the world’s population of college graduates” (Tough Choices, “Executive Summary” page 4) and “that number is now 14 percent.” The Post’s editorial and the Tough Choices report use these numbers to scare folk into thinking American schools are doing something incorrectly. The truth is that the developing nations of the “flat earth[2]” (namely China and India U.S. Colorado
Some in the media and legislature interpret Tough Choices as a reflection of how wrong-headed school districts are conducting themselves. The truth of the matter is that schools are conducting the business of the districts as prescribed by state and federal laws. The implication of the editorial and quotes from some current state legislators are more interested in placing blame than improving schools and their students’ readiness for college or the workforce.
The report deserves conversation by all stakeholders, but endorsing the Tough Choices report without adequate discussion is not fair to the educators who would have to implement any decisions and the students who would have to live with the results.
[2] A reference to a 2006 book by Thomas L. Friedman entitled The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, that talks about the interconnectivity of our world’s peoples and how we must compete with workers all over the world for jobs, not just workers in the U.S., the lowering of trade and political barriers, and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. (paraphrased from Amazon.com)
