End Secondary School

I don't think there should be secondary school anymore.

Why would someone have secondary school?  Well, to teach the students everything they would need in life.  Really.  That sounds impossible.  Maybe we endeavor to teach citizens the things that make them fit the definition of educated.  However, schools largely don't do that.  Schools probably never did, or how many students can pass the same calculus exams that proved mastery one month later?  

And what does it take to teach the students these things?  It takes motivated students and only barely competent teachers.  It takes supportive parents who encourage and partner with students and teachers.  Over the decades the motivation of students has dropped, the buy in of the parents has flopped, and the competency of the teachers has gone up.  These statements are addressing averages.

Now there are teachers who don't do much.  They are at these failure factories in inner cities and they are working with too many students who don't care.  They lost the battle and their job is to shift the blame and cover the truth.  If America doesn't know, schools in inner cities are broken.  

But where the battle to educate is still being waged, public schools expected less and less and less.  In some academic game of high jump the children will keep adjusting to the lowered bar until they are refusing to jump centimeters.  They have and they do play limbo until they simply won't engage the bar.  School isn't teaching the minimum basic skills because there is no reason for the students to learn.  

So just end secondary school requirements.  Stop sending millions of kids who don't want to go to school to learn something they don't want to learn.  If kids want to go to middle school or high school or if their parents are highly motivated for them to go then they can go.  Then teachers wouldn't be spending out-sized time trying to make oppositional defiant teens pass arbitrary requirements.  Teachers can focus on the students who WANT to be there.  Students can get what they need.  The bills would be cut.  The arbitrary nature of grades can be amended up instead of down for the first time in decades.  

Just change schools to Primary (K-3rd) and Senior (4th-6th) and finally Remedial (7th).  In primary students will spend a lot of their time in the same way they do now.  However, maybe with more emphasis put on fewer grade levels there can be more teachers per student.  One teacher teaching 10-15...with a helper.  Sounds great! Student citizens need only to gain powers of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

It's all they need.  To read with good vocabulary and understanding for simple facts.  The idea that all 16 year olds can engage with Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Dickens is ludacris.  As surely as the idea that all 50 year olds can.  To do basic math well enough to mentally balance a checkbook.  To write opinions and feelings.  The list of requirements isn't large, and yet elementary schools are pushing some algebraic ideas into the lower levels so they'll be ready for them in secondary school.  That's crazy. Members of our society don't lament thirty year olds who can't find a hypotenuse, but America rightly cringes when we hear of high school grads who cannot read and write at a third grade level.  Forget the first problem and attack the second.  

Senior School (4th thru 6th) would be the time for high-stakes, standardized testing.  Students would need to prove their mastery of all ESSENTIAL (meaning a lot of them aren't essential) knowledge and skills.  Just as today this should be based on teachers grades, formative assessments, and standardized testing.  State testing would continue and increase in these early grades as children are proving mastery and schools are graded for their capability.  This makes politicians and test-writer lobbyists happy.

7th Grade would be for the ones who couldn't get through.  And as their peers move on they would be given more focus and attention.  Diagnosticians could give extra time.  Master teachers could be employed.  Summer school could be elongated.  The light at the end of the tunnel could be shown to them.  Once they get it they...

If a student doesn't choose to continue traditional, but re envisioned secondary school.  Send them to get a job.  They could be making their own money, helping their families, or a bit of both.  In my class I tell my kids that if they don't get through high school they'll probably only work menial jobs.  But some kids don't find this threatening.  Let's let them work at Domino's pizza, or Starbucks, or a grocery store, or where ever, for half of minimum wage.  Simply tie a juvenile minimum wage to the federal minimum wage.  Now a 12 or 13 year old kid can work for five years instead of secondary school. Kids can become apprentice construction workers, plumbers, daycare, animal groomers, or anything else  They can make more than minimum wage if their employers find them valuable.  

I can envision assistant managers taking over a fast food restaurant when they turn 18 because they've been working there 6 years.  General Manager may not happen until they go to business classes for a year or two, but that's way better than starting that trajectory at age 19.  

Plus, I'm tired of college graduates working at Starbucks.  Lets let them forgo Harvard and start butchering names right away.

Maybe you also don't let them vote until they pass their school.  I know sounds racially charged because it used to be, but I like the idea of the school graduation earning something.  How about you can't get a job until you graduate 6th grade and you can't vote until you can read the candidates positions.  Maybe people will care more about their vote if they all had to earn it.

Maybe they would care more about school if it earned them something.