A child is enrolled at a local public elementary school at the kindergarten level because his parents want to establish a strong foundation to learning, and they believe that the virtues of a public education are the vehicle to formative learning. This school in Northern California is chosen to best meet the needs of their son because they have performed a thorough examination of the offerings of the school district. They’ve visited the school’s website, toured the school numerous times, talked to the site administrator, who boasts a 99.8% attendance and a zero percent expulsion rate, talked to some parents who have enrolled their children at the school, witnessed the extracurricular activities, and looked at the Academic Performance Index (API). The school’s API score happens to be 860, and is recognized as a Distinguished School.

Six years later, the parents are sad to see their son graduate from this school. It is hard for them to leave such a warm and nurturing environment. Their pre-adolescent child will be enrolled at the local middle school. The parents have some misgivings about their son leaving from a small and controlled culture to a much bigger environment. Besides, the school’s API score is 688, and the expulsion rate hovers between 13-15% Knowing that no school can be perfect, the parents are seemingly undaunted about sending their one and only son there because they strongly believed the primary school had more than adequately prepared the child for middle school. With the increase of student diversity and the new learning approaches espoused by the teachers at the school, this serves as a rite of passage that their son must travel.

After a not so distinct time at the middle school, the student graduates and enters the one and only high school in the district. With an API score of 740, the parents are hopeful their child will do better than middle school. His efforts in his coursework yield A’s and B’s with a few C’s throughout his 4 years in high school. Feeling confident that he is adequately prepared to take his college entrance exam, his combined verbal and quantitative score is 980. With insufficient funds to pay for college, the parents convince their son to attend the local community college for two years and to fulfill the general education requirement in order to transfer to an university where he will pursue his interest in economics.

Before he can officially register for classes, he needs to take diagnostic exams to help determine which classes he should take. The results indicated he is not proficient in reading comprehension, and needs to take remedial math. If he was supposedly meeting standards throughout his K-12 education, and earned good to high marks in most of his subjects, how is it possible that this student lacks the basic skills needed to thrive in a college setting?

From the launching of Sputnik to outer space on October 4, 1957, and the clarion call by The Nation at Risk (1983), public education has seen many changes that includes what best methods are used to teach all students, what educational programming are available to best meet the students’ needs, how textbooks are rewritten to ensure standards and multicultural perspectives are not mutually exclusive constructs, how teachers are trained to teach in urban and rural areas, in particular, English Language Learners and Special Need Students, how assessments are interpreted to improve instructions, and how school governance has been streamlined to increase efficiency and accountability.

It can be argued that Sputnik has launched education reform in America. Subsequently, various large urban school districts are now using scripted curricula which are designed to assist teachers to disseminate information on a daily basis. This pacing guide focuses on the essentials the students are supposed to learn during the lesson. There has been a push to increase reading, math and science literacy because pundits have advocated standards to what all students should master at each grade level in order to maintain an edge in the global economy. However, the shift from an agrarian and industrial society has moved to a more technological orientation. The employment landscape has become more service oriented. The evolution and hybridization of math, sciences, and art have challenged the public’s epistemology and their will of being (Cunningham, 2005). Subsequently, the gap is beginning to diminish between learning in the classroom to working at a particular job because the approaches to learning and mastery mimic those in a college classroom, where skills predicated on critical thinking builds upon the very foundation and integration of basic skills. Furthermore, 70 percent of the 30 fastest growing jobs require a minimum of a college education (Somerville and Yi, 2002).

• “There are 1,200,000 students who drop out of high school every year.”
• “60% of the language minority students who graduate from high school are enrolled in one kind of remedial class at the community college.”
• “3 out of 10 high school graduates need to repeat a high school level course at the university level.”
  (http://www.edin08.com/, 2007).

At the lower grades, it is revealed by the National Center for Education Statistics that 29 percent of students in grades 4 and 8 were at or above the Proficient level in science, and 21 percent of students in grade 12 reached this level. At the national level, approximately 30 percent of students in grade 4 were below the Basic level, while nearly 40 percent of students in grades 8 and 12 failed to reach proficiency (Forgione, 2006).

This is an era where teachers in the profession are better educated and qualified to teach in the schools (Kober, 2000), these statistics are distressing and greatly reinforce Adelman’s thesis (1998) that not enough is done to help the students to achieve, and to prevent students from dropping out. The Crisis Report (2007) published by ACT indicates a dire situation with students graduating from high schools in 2004 entering college are underprepared to excel in college. Just in California, 24,000 high school students dropped out, an increase of 10,000 from four years ago (Williams, 2007).

It isn’t fair during this watershed that the community colleges take the brunt of the blame for the present state of student achievement when most of the students are underachieving by the time they get to the collegiate level. To some degree, the education reform movement appears to focus on accessibility and the epistemology of content (Marks, 2007). However, it is myopic to view reform only in terms of content. Other components to the symbolic network include level of instruction, funding, instructors, and students. Like any dynamic system, when one component is affected, it will impact others. Perhaps, time should be spent focusing on the ontological aspect to content mastery. Instead of focusing on breadth, and telling the students what they should know, mastering the subject matter in depth can be appealing because it can allow students to firmly build connections to prior learning. As the synapses strengthened, so will the students’ context and behavioral approach to learning. Students have to be given time to explore content with viable learning activities where not only basic skills are learned, but the strategies for learning are practiced and revised to further self actualization. The time spent on reading, analyzing, critiquing, and revising content takes practice and is not easily measured by a test.

Having additional funding to educate across all levels is only part of the solution. If the funding is used to purchase popular educational curricula or software only to be discarded the following year, or teachers attending in-services that do not increased their skills set is not money well spent. If the given standard curricula are not meeting the students’ needs, Ferguson’s conclusion (2005) of recommending a more rigorous scope and sequence that includes more advanced mathematics, sciences, and a course in public speaking makes some sense. No longer can educational entities work in isolation. In treading new ground, collaboration between the private and public schools should be welcomed to exchange ideas. There has to be a creative synergy between the K-12 level and the college level to focus on shaping the minds of students. For example, dual enrollment is one such endeavor. The success of the seniors at Balboa High School enrolling in classes at City College of San Francisco is a way of promoting beyond the basic skills at the high school and collegiate level.

If students are achieving similar results five years later as they are now, the polemical debate on basic skills will become part of the education consciousness that will further divide us. We must have the collective will to do what is necessary so that high school students holding their diplomas can confidently advance into college without having to take remedial courses.

References:

Adelman, C. (1998). National Crosstalk. San Jose, Ca. National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Cunningham, P.M. (2005). Innovation and the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications, and Case Studies. Ios Press.

Ferguson, R. L. (2005). Crisis at the Core: Preparing All Students for College and Work. ACT.

Forgione, P. D. (1998). Achievement in the United States: Progress since The Nation at Risk. National Center for Education Statistics.

Gardner, D. P. & et. al. (1983). The Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. United States Department of Education.

Kober, N & et.al. (2000). The Good News about American Education? Center on Education Policy and American Youth Policy Forum. Washington D.C.

Marks, J. (2007). Scope and Sequence on Curricula Development: A Presentation on the Utilization of http://www.curriki.org/. Alliant International University. November 13, 2007.

Sommerville, J. & Yi, Y. (2002). Aligning K-12 and Postsecondary Expectations: State Policy in Transition. Washington D.C. National Associations of System Heads.

Unknown Author. (2007). http://www.edin08.com/

Williams, J. (2007). Report: California Dropouts Increase in First Year of Exit Exam. Associated Press. November 7, 2007. Reprinted in http://www.sfgate.com/.

About the Author

Irving Leung, Ed.D.
Assistant Professor
Alliant International University, San Francisco, California

Irving Leung is the Director for the Mild to Moderate Special Education program at Alliant International University. He is responsible for establishing and managing the pedagogy for Special Education Interns throughout their training. Prior to his present appointment, he worked at Project Pipeline as a coordinator, San Francisco State University as an adjunct instructor, and San Francisco Unified School District as a classroom teacher.

He holds a doctorate from the University of San Francisco with an emphasis on International and Multicultural Education. His area of interests includes Special, General, and Bilingual Education, and Philosophy of Education.