prepping high school seniors for college

[Hegemony]

I just wish my students could write a halfway decent paper, with good use of detail, topic sentences, and proper mechanics. Something comprehensible with an argument in it.

[Hibush]

Not all high schoolers need be prepared for college. And not everyone needs to go to high school.

High schools should be short and substitutable.

I live in an area with a substantial anabaptist community. I'd say a third of the children living in the school district, since these group have a much higher reproductive rate than others. The children stop school after eigth grade because the philosophy is that they don't need to go to high school to be valuable on the farm or in the shop (and they get exposed to ideas that conflict with community teachings).

The consequence is clear. They are largely excluded from working in the broader economy's higher-income occupations. While there are mechanisms within the groups for young people to leave, the economic insecurity that would results really doesn't make leaving an option.

[marshwiggle]

What I would love to see all students emerge from High School with:

Academics:
Production of clear and concise written communication through an iterative revision process
Reading for meaning and understanding within a context
Quantitative literacy - using and solving simple algebraic equations to find an unknown, using probabilities, understanding and interpreting graphs, unit conversions.
Basic scientific literacy - using an evidence-based approach to understand the world
Basic civics - how your federal, state and local government works and how and why you should engage with it.
Computing skills - use of online platforms to communicate and share information, information literacy, basic cybersecurity, programming and familiarity with common programming languages

Life skills:
Treat others like you want to be treated
Your experience is not universally representative of everyone's experience
How to fail forward - learning from mistakes
Consequences exist and they usually result from your choices (time management, for example)

One area that my high school math education didn't spend much time on was statistics. I ended up taking a statistics course at a local community college. I think that basic statistics should be part of general education.

A few years ago my daughter (a trained high school teacher) told me about a talk given by Stephen Wolfram (of Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica  fame) making the case that statistics, rather than calculus, should be the main focus in late high school math. Even as someone in STEM, where calculus is crucial, I think he's onto something because everyone should have a basic grasp of probability and basic statistics to function in the world.
Given the number of people who buy lottery tickets, or make risky lifestyle choices, it's clearly lacking at present.

[Liquidambar]

A few years ago my daughter (a trained high school teacher) told me about a talk given by Stephen Wolfram (of Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica  fame) making the case that statistics, rather than calculus, should be the main focus in late high school math. Even as someone in STEM, where calculus is crucial, I think he's onto something because everyone should have a basic grasp of probability and basic statistics to function in the world.
Given the number of people who buy lottery tickets, or make risky lifestyle choices, it's clearly lacking at present.

As somebody in STEM, I can get behind this idea.  I don't think it would fix the problem of risky lifestyle choices (or lotteries), but statistics seems more directly relevant to most people's lives than calculus does.

[dismalist]

A few years ago my daughter (a trained high school teacher) told me about a talk given by Stephen Wolfram (of Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica  fame) making the case that statistics, rather than calculus, should be the main focus in late high school math. Even as someone in STEM, where calculus is crucial, I think he's onto something because everyone should have a basic grasp of probability and basic statistics to function in the world.
Given the number of people who buy lottery tickets, or make risky lifestyle choices, it's clearly lacking at present.

As somebody in STEM, I can get behind this idea.  I don't think it would fix the problem of risky lifestyle choices (or lotteries), but statistics seems more directly relevant to most people's lives than calculus does.

Nothing against Statistics, but why should it substitute for Calculus? As Marsh pointed out above, all this can make sense only for the top 20% or so of students. Those 20% could take Statistics in college, Statistics with Calculus. Hell, colleges would better drop the foreign language requirement for entry to make room for Statistics.

As for the other 80% of students, Statistics will be forgotten just like foreign language.

[And let's not forget the entertainment value of lotteries, and the fun part of life-style choices. :-)]

[Liquidambar]

Sure, I'm all for the top students taking both calculus and statistics.

If HS math education were centered around giving students a decent understanding of statistics, I would definitely change how stats is taught compared to the boring business statistics I took as a college freshman.  As dismalist says, a lot of the details would be forgotten years later.  However, I'd like people to remember certain concepts for the rest of their lives, like the idea that sample size matters, or that correlation is not causation.  I would start with my list of key concepts and choose which mathematical techniques to teach based on that.

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember enjoying this blog entry on possible different ways to structure HS math education.  Just throwing that out there in case others are interested.

[marshwiggle]

Sure, I'm all for the top students taking both calculus and statistics.

If HS math education were centered around giving students a decent understanding of statistics, I would definitely change how stats is taught compared to the boring business statistics I took as a college freshman.  As dismalist says, a lot of the details would be forgotten years later. However, I'd like people to remember certain concepts for the rest of their lives, like the idea that sample size matters, or that correlation is not causation.  I would start with my list of key concepts and choose which mathematical techniques to teach based on that.

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember enjoying this blog entry on possible different ways to structure HS math education.  Just throwing that out there in case others are interested.

This is an important point about statistics compared to calculus; there are lots of concepts in statistics which people should know about, long after they've forgotten the math. With calculus, things like limits, rate of change, and area under a curve are really only meaningful for dealing with functions. There isn't a similar list of concepts that affect daily life as there is in stats.

[dismalist]

Sure, I'm all for the top students taking both calculus and statistics.

If HS math education were centered around giving students a decent understanding of statistics, I would definitely change how stats is taught compared to the boring business statistics I took as a college freshman.  As dismalist says, a lot of the details would be forgotten years later.  However, I'd like people to remember certain concepts for the rest of their lives, like the idea that sample size matters, or that correlation is not causation.  I would start with my list of key concepts and choose which mathematical techniques to teach based on that.

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember enjoying this blog entry on possible different ways to structure HS math education.  Just throwing that out there in case others are interested.

That's a good and thoughtful blog entry, offering lots of high quality variety!

My opinion is best expressed by a commenter on the original post:

Pouncer
November 16, 2016 at 8:54 am   

Given a diversity of high schools for parents and students to choose among, there would be no problem in implementing any or all of these ideas — not all at any one school, of course.

Given a federal mandate for "common core" — or any similar requirement — and only one curricular sequence per school district (in cities, one district encompasses several high schools) only one idea will "win" — and all the parents and students who might prefer and benefit from an alternative will LOSE.

Even if any one of these ideas is better than status quo, and even if a district makes that "improvement", all those who would choose otherwise lose because they have no choice.

[kaysixteen]

1) We do have to draw some sort of line wrt a minimum educational level that all normal adults should regularly be expected to attain.   In the period since at least WWII this has been a hs diploma for most Americans, Old Order Anabaptists notwithstanding.   And with the increasing complexities of life/ work requirments, going now deep into the 21st c as we are, it is hard to see where this should be mitigated.   
2) That said, it is also true that 'what constitutes' a proper diploma-earning hs education is something we certainly can debate.  Hss today require many more courses/ subjects/ a/o workloads within these courses than they did when Gen Xers (let alone Boomers) were trolling around the halls.   This is true almost everwhere save sh*tty inner-city and rural hss.   I have seen curricula at private 'classical Christian schools' that quite frankly overload students, and I know this is normative for many rich suburban public hss.  We can of course discuss how 'deep' some of these courses are, but the workload remains.  I have seen some kids regularly get wholly insufficient amounts of sleep (insufficient for 40-something adults, let alone adolescents).   We do have to make choices-- which math classes would be more useful for a college-bound hs senior, calc or stats?   Somehow somewhere around 50 years ago calc migrated down to the college prep level of hss, whereas stats were almost never taught there til very recently.   I am not sure what the rationale for this is, as most adults would never use calculus (and by this I include most American college-educated adults doing jobs specifically requiring a college degree), whereas stats do seem much more relevant and useful, much more likely to be a part of overall 'quantitative literacy', and indeed, critical thinking/ analysis skills.  Computer programming languages are also just not necessary for most Americans, whereas a good knowledge of Spanish is probably something most 21st c Americans should nowadays be getting.
3) Parents and schools need to stand up and return sanity to adolescents' lives with regard to overexposure to and possession of technology, unfettered helicoptering that allows kids to live like junior high children even when they are in college, etc.   I am just using these two examples here to cover for a whole host of quite frankly bad parenting practices and attitudes that have also often been explicitly indulged by high schools.   We can certainly and probably quite quickly brainstorm as to what these are.

[marshwiggle]

1) We do have to draw some sort of line wrt a minimum educational level that all normal adults should regularly be expected to attain.   In the period since at least WWII this has been a hs diploma for most Americans, Old Order Anabaptists notwithstanding.   

I believe you'll find the dropout rate post-WWII was still far above what it is now, and was considered acceptable. The expectation that virtually everyone should "graduate" is the underlying idea that is the biggest constraint to improving education.

ETA: Here's a graph. Since 1966, the dropout rate has gone from about 17% to 6%. It was no doubt higher in the couple of decades prior.

[Hibush]

programming and familiarity with common programming languages

I like the life skills list, though. I'd add something like, 'How not to be a chump'. E.g., how marketing and advertising work, what scams look like, and so on, combined with financial literacy--not 'how to invest in the stock market' but 'how not to get fleeced by an intro APR'. Bunch of 18-year-olds on orientation day have to run the gauntlet of Visa and Mastercard student-account booths.

My high school had a course named "Family Life Education", but known as "Senior sex"'. It covered all of this stuff, including adult relationships.

[kaysixteen]

sure, there's no question that the dropout rate has vastly lowered from the immediate post-WWII period.   But those dropouts had a vastly greater amount of economic options which allowed many of them to have decent working class existences, some even more than that.   What is the likely outcome, otoh, for a dropout today, one who is not tied to the unique economic and cultural connections of a community like the OOA?  You aren't really suggesting that we should abandon efforts to get as many kids as possible through high school, are you?

[marshwiggle]

sure, there's no question that the dropout rate has vastly lowered from the immediate post-WWII period.   But those dropouts had a vastly greater amount of economic options which allowed many of them to have decent working class existences, some even more than that.   What is the likely outcome, otoh, for a dropout today, one who is not tied to the unique economic and cultural connections of a community like the OOA?  You aren't really suggesting that we should abandon efforts to get as many kids as possible through high school, are you?

My previous post gives two better options:

For the three points regarding education,

• If you stop requiring it to be basically universal, you can keep the standards high enough to make it worthwhile.
• If you stop requiring it to be accomplished in a fixed amount of time, students can take as long as they need to master the material and skills.
• If you make the generic part much shorter, (as dismalist implies), then you can stream students so they can focus on what each one will need for the path they choose.(This requires students to decide earl on, probably by 13 or 14 years old, about what path they want to follow post high school.)

My focus would be on points 2 and 3. If you look at data on all kinds of performance, the standard deviation is typically something like 1/5 to 1/4 of the mean. So on a test with an average of 75%, the s.d. is typically 10~15%. For some reason, we've decided that the standard deviation for high school completion time should be basically zero. (In decades past, that wasn't the case. "Repeating a year" was common at one time.) This decision has meant the pace of high school education bores the top 20% or so, and stresses out or overwhelms the bottom 20% or so. If we accepted that the s.d was even 1 year, then that would mean about 2/3 of students would graduate between *11 and 13 years, and 95% would graduate between *10 and 14 years.

Especially if you coupled this with the third option of more **streaming, it would allow students to focus on what they need at a pace that suits them.

(*Note this means that there need to be accelerated options so that bright students can meet the requirements in the shorter time.)

**As long as there are pathways for people to switch streams if their goals change, and the time to completion is flexible, then this doesn't lock anyone into an early choice which they later regret.

[kiana]

In addition to pathways for people to switch streams, I'd really like to have a more robust adult high school education option that is legitimately college prep. I feel that if we had more ramps to get back on, we wouldn't need to be so worried about trying to convince people not to exit.