Having a year (or more) of college credits upon high school graduation should be one of the education tracks available to every student.
It's a massive failure of imagination that this isn't already the case.
It's a massive failure of imagination that this isn't already the case.
I agree with what you are saying but I think it’s a product of a failure somewhere else in the education system. No child left behind and other programs hinder education by applying one size fits all policies.
It's directly a failure of the primary education system, but it is more a failure of leadership and resources than anything else.
As far as NCLB, the response to it is a bigger problem than the law. There's nothing in it stopping states from investing in both helping underachieving students and in helping other students get ahead. NCLB didn't tell Oklahoma to slash taxes and burn their schools.
Why is it more expensive to teach, say, calculus than algebra? Offering more advanced classes should not cost more.
Because educating someone to teach more advanced subjects takes more times and resources.
Besides, teaching college freshman calculus is not exactly magneto hydrodynamics.
The normally accepted education level for teaching a university-level class is a PhD.
I was taught freshman calc by grad students - with no "education" training whatsoever. Perhaps these "masters" of education are learning the wrong things.
Freshman calculus just isn't that hard, and isn't much beyond algebra. This "gee math is hard" crap is, well, crap. No PhD is necessary. Hell, I taught it to my kids on the kitchen table, and I have no advanced degree and never took a course in education.
Of course I do. I am just bemused by teachers having masters degrees yet be unable to teach any freshman college level class.
> Do you think someone who has never studied calculus should be able to teach it?
Freshman calculus is not rocket science, and I expect someone with a masters degree to be able to handle it.
Right, well here's the answer to the original question then. If you want teachers to be able to teach calculus, and you agree people should have an education in a subject to teach it, then you need the teachers to study calculus themselves, which they weren't necessarily doing, because they studied things other than maths, so you need to use more resources to have them also take calculus classes, so it costs more.
Sounds like things are all messed up in what districts pay for. They don't need more money, they need to redirect what they're already paying for.
You can't say 'you have a masters you should be able to pick it up yourself and teach it to these school children'. Can you not see how unreasonable that is?
Whereas a Community College may have an easier time finding instructors, since there aren't licensing rules or a need to employ the instructor full-time. Also they draw from a wider student population so may not have as much difficulty filling a class.
One wonders about such teachers who have advanced masters degrees in education. Why are they not qualified to teach freshman college material?
A masters in education is qualification to teach education classes, not other subjects.
Probably not; the state policies adopted under the pressure of NCLB and it's successors put strong pressure on districts to hire teachers with at least a bachelor's degree in the field taught for secondary schools, and even teachers that don't will often have additional coursework as part of college breadth requirements.
Simply making High School arbitrarily harder is kind of meaningless if most students would fail the material.
You can still have everybody lined up to finish ~17 or 18, just allow more variation in what they have finished. If someone doesn't plan to go on to college, maybe they don't need to take college prep math classes and can take classes that will serve them better.
Many affluent high schools have an abundance of AP/IB courses. Many high schools also have additional college-credit courses (where the high school acts as a sort of proxy for a local college, often a community college). At a "good" high school, students can combine all of these options to have not just a year, but even junior or senior standing by the time they start college.
There are three problems with this approach:
1. Not all high schools are affluent / have their crap together enough to offer these options.
2. students need to be prepared. Enough of them that you can fill a course. This can be a barrier in less affluent areas.
3. Students have to know about this option, usually starting in middle school so that they can begin working ahead early (e.g., finish algebra in middle school).
> ...and college
The pattern here seems to be picking the college vs. picking the more advanced courses at the college. So, you don't take "more advanced couses at regional State campus"; instead, you go to (your field's equivalent of) MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU. Or at least the state flagship. C.f., algorithms at an elite university vs. algorithms at the branch campus of a middling state system. The differences in both depth (rigor) and bredth are, in many cases, quite extraordinary.
> No child left behind and other programs hinder education by applying one size fits all policies.
Do you have any data to justify this assertion? AP offerings have increased since NCLB was enacted.
I don't disagree with you that NCLB is a net harm, but I don't think it's accurate to place the blame there for this particular problem. (Also, whenever NCLB comes up, it's worth pointing out that states bear a lot of responsibility -- they have quite a bit of leeway in how NCLB is implemented.)
I will be forever grateful that my high school encouraged this.
I also dropped out of IB, but in favor of a new program that let me take 2 online state college classes during the school day. So I got full college credit, great professors, and kept my schedule flexible. So agreed that dual enrollment is better if the option is available.
You can rack up quite a lot of credits with AP courses.
As an engineer, I wiped out all my English requirements (6 credits). I wiped out Chemistry (6 credits and a really annoying lab at 4 credits). And I wiped out my first Calc class (4 credits). I think I killed a foreign language requirement, too (probably 6 credits).
That's 30 credits--or, a full year.
The big problem was that I was feeding into engineering which really doesn't let you wipe a lot out--knocking off Chemistry was a big deal (I also had an AP History score which didn't do anything for me, for example). Generally, all your good science scores just let you switch to a "more researchy" track where you take "deeper theoretical" (read: a shitton more work) classes.