NAS Blog

Sandra Stotsky, head of NAS’s Arkansas affiliate, participated in this week’s New York Times Room for Debate, which posed the question, “Given that a high school diploma, a bachelor’s degree and even graduate school are no longer a ticket to middle-class life, and all these years of education delay the start of a career, does our society devote too much time and money to education?”

Stotsky answered:

What a strange question: Does our society devote too much time and money to education? We spend much more on K-12 schools now than ever before but get so much less in return mainly because our high schools have long failed to address the real range of adolescents’ interests. We have oversold the worth of a college degree to compensate for a high school diploma with little academic or career meaning.

Finland offers all students leaving ninth grade the option of a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school.

Possibly half of the students now enrolled in our public universities and four-year colleges would be more motivated to study and develop better work habits in programs of their choice that could have been available to them in high school. As for many of the dropouts in ninth and 10th grades, their long-term costs to society could have been avoided if they had been offered programs in high school that appealed to young adolescents more interested in practical activities than the reading and writing required in authentic college-level courses.

If Race to the Top and Common Core’s high school standards had aimed at strengthening the high school curriculum so that a high school diploma meant more than it now does — and the percentages of remedial math and reading courses at public colleges were drastically reduced — that would have been a major step forward. Instead, the U.S. Department of Education seduced most states into adopting reading and mathematics standards that in effect mean most high school students declared “college ready” will be even less prepared for authentic college-level work than those now going into nonselective post-secondary institutions.

Other developed countries offer adolescents a choice of curricula. Finland, for example, offers all students leaving ninth grade — the end of compulsory schooling — the option of attending a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school, with about 50 percent of each age cohort enrolling in each type of high school. The “comprehensive” American high school has outlived its usefulness, but our policy makers have chosen to weaken its academic goals and ignore its career-forming capacity rather than serve the diversity of adolescent interests, talents and needs in grades 9 through 12 — at a much greater cost to the students, their families and society.

NAS board member and Endowed Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas Sandra Stotsky has a new blog post, Education’s Long Forgotten Vision, that chronicles the lowering of academic standards in high school, and in a domino effect, in college. She writes:

Efforts are already underway to make sure that all “college ready” students can be successful in their freshman college courses. Public colleges are being asked to “align” entrance requirements and the content of freshman courses to Common Core’s secondary standards, not the other way around. And, to ensure that “college ready” students can graduate from a college degree program in record time, all of their freshman courses must be credit-bearing, not tagged as remedial. (Otherwise, these students could not be called “college ready.”)

Check out Stotsky’s article and her attached critiques of the Common Core standards, released last summer, which have contributed to the decline.

Cross-posted from NAS.org

Congratulations to Jim Summerville, who was elected to the Tennessee state Senate on November 2, beating incumbent Doug Jackson in a surprise upset. He has been the president of the Tennessee  affiliate of the National Association of Scholars for a good many years. We wish him well as he embarks on this new chapter of his career, serving the people of the 25^th District.

This week, two NAS state affiliates wrote letters to the editor of local newspapers.

Potential Bias at UI College of Law
Daily Iowan
Don Racheter, Iowa Association of Scholars

Open Dialogue, Good Decisions
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Terrence F. Flower, Minnesota Association of Scholars

Friends in D.C., we hope to see you on Monday, Nov. 1, when FIRE president Greg Lukianoff will address the D.C. chapter of the National Association of Scholars. He will speak on “CLS v. Martinez and the Campus Freedom of Association Crisis.”

To RSVP and for more details, see this flier.

I’m pleased to introduce Jason Fertig as a new contributor at NAS.org. Dr. Fertig is an NAS member and assistant professor of management at the University of Southern Indiana. Dr. Fertig brings a depth of perception and lively anecdotes from his own experience in the classroom to speak to some of the  most real issues in higher education today.

He has written three articles for NAS so far:

More Millennials Need to Work at McDonalds advises recent college graduates: get a job, anywhere.

Real Sustainability: Saving Our Sense of Culture asks, “Are we failing to hand down our cultural legacy to the next generation?”

Dangers of Credentialing the College Degree: A Real-Life Example is a case study that illustrates the popular idea that students are entitled to get a passing grade – even if they don’t earn one.

I especially recommend the third article, which received attention from blogs such as Phi Beta Cons and Joanne Jacobs.

Also check out his essay at the Pope Center on the gap year, The Gift of Academic Maturity. Fertig spoke about the gap year this morning on Wisconsin Public Radio.

You can look forward to more NAS articles by Dr. Fertig in the weeks ahead.

Adam Scrupski, a former board member of the NAS, is quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal in the article “The Fog Over Katyn Forest” by Bret Stephens. Stephens quotes a blog post by Scrupski for the National Association of Scholars, where he wrote that the “OWI [U.S. Office of War Information] implicitly threatened to remove licensure from the Polish language radio stations in Detroit and Buffalo if they did not cease broadcasting the details of executions.”

“A lack of intellectual diversity hurts both left and right,” contended John Ellis in a statement last week to the Joint Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education of the California Legislature. John Ellis is president of the California Association of Scholars.

The Arizona Association of Scholars will be hosting a talk by Robert Maranto on “The Politically Correct University” (his most recent book) next week at the University of Arizona. I have been busy sending out emails to folks to let them know about this. I just hit the Student Life website. Just so you know, Sarah Casares is in charge of Student Behavioral Education, Hannah Lozon is in charge of Social Justice Education, and Jill Burchell is in charge of Sustainability Education. I wonder if these residence employees will attend?

Cross posted from www.NAS.org

NAS members, have you been getting your issues of Academic Questions on time? We have received some complaints from members who did not get issues or who have received issues bizarrely late.  In February, for example, our publisher, Springer, apparently sent copies of our Winter 2008-09 issue on Liberal Arts and the Family more than a year late to some members.  Other members report not receiving the Winter 2009-10 issue on Academic Revisionisms, mailed in November 2009.  If you have had either of these problems or other lapses with your subscription to Academic Questions, let us know by emailing nasonweb@nas.org.

We want to make sure you receive the issues, and we want to get to the bottom of the problem with Springer’s handling of our subscription fulfillment.