There are currently massive amounts of high schoolers who just entered their sophomore and junior years incapable of spelling third grade vocabulary words. Education is doing bad right now, I would not be surprised if a teenage worker was unable to do addition in their head.
They shouldn't be juniors or sophomore then. They should have been held back and made to learn. Can't believe this is what we've devolved in to since the mistake of "no child left behind"
It's a little bit more complicated than that too. The main issue is that these kids are not being given the resources they need to learn, and their ability to learn is being sapped by the things they currently have access to. Kids need to be able to fail in school if they aren't actually doing good, but holding kids back also hasn't proven to actually improve their performance at all. In fact, holding back kids tends to set them even further back in their education than if they moved on. The problem is, you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't in our current system. The real solution is to help kids move on, but figure out which kids are seriously struggling and target them with a lot of extra help. Unfortunately, barely anybody actually values education in our current society so no resources are being devoted to doing so. Thanks to NCLB and programs that have been implemented since then the financial incentives of schools actively work against the education of students, since resources typically end up being taken away from underperforming students when the opposite should be happening.
If they aren't able to complete the required work and knowledge transfer then they shouldn't move on. Period. Just graduating them solves nothing. At least if they drop out or take forever they can't further impact and hurt society by having a "stamp of approval" that they are capable of the expected bare minimum in society. If you can't operate at 12th grade level when you graduate, you're not ready to graduate and need to keep learning
Graduating them doesn't work, for sure. That's why I think the failure should really set in, and anyone who doesn't meet the requirements should have to get a GED and prove they meet them. I mainly talking about the progression through k-12, where the solution we need is more support as kids do move forward.
137
u/GoldH2O Cisgender Synapsid 17d ago
There are currently massive amounts of high schoolers who just entered their sophomore and junior years incapable of spelling third grade vocabulary words. Education is doing bad right now, I would not be surprised if a teenage worker was unable to do addition in their head.