‘Say goodnight, Gracie’: School reform amnesia

High school reformers suffer from the same expert amnesia. Back in 2006, The Washington Post identified 12th grade as a “central issue in the debate about public education.” Senioritis, they warned, was “a condition afflicting hundreds of thousands of students,” characterized by “malaise and apathy — a sense of do-nothingness.”

How experts distinguish senioritis symptoms from the malaise, apathy and do-nothingness exhibited at other grade levels remains a mystery.

The Post reported that the declining “quality of America’s workforce,” and estimates that “30 percent” of entering college freshmen “need remediation,” had prompted experts and “more than half the country’s governors” to call for “remaking the grade.” Many policymakers ingeniously proposed “getting rid of 12th grade” altogether and replacing it with creative alternatives like “a year of public service” or “sending students straight to college.”

It seemed unlikely that the same 17-year olds who wouldn’t break a sweat to do their English homework would somehow summon the initiative to fill a year with genuinely meaningful public service, which like genuinely serious study also requires sweat and entails intervals of tedium. Besides, if too many American students were unprepared for the workforce and college after an unproductive senior year, it was unclear how they’d be more prepared before an unproductive senior year.

It’s still unclear. Two decades later seniors are once again being depicted as “bored, zoned out and only pretending to listen,” and reformers are again proposing to “eliminate altogether the senior year — and maybe the junior year, too,” at least for students who “meet college and career-readiness standards.”

Advocates add that early release from high school would reduce older adolescents’ participation in “risky extracurricular activities.”

The problem is those standards, aka proficiencies, despite “world-class” accolades, are simultaneously vague and narrow, subjectively assessed and more concerned with attitudes than academics. It’s also not been my experience that leaving high school, whether for college, a job or unemployment, makes older adolescents’ risky behavior less likely.

Reformers often claim that students who earn low test scores and drop out simply need to be challenged more. In other words, students who are scoring low on easier work and dropping out would be scoring high and going to college if the work were harder.

I don’t think so.

I know what I’d hear if I asked the average underperforming student if he wanted me to expect more work from him.

Other experts claim today’s seniors are “kids in transition, growing up faster” but “less emotionally mature.” These educators prescribe exposing seniors to topics and “skills they can use in college and the working world,” like “money management, college life, eating disorders, drugs and gambling.” According to one administrator, without these alternative activities, expecting students to take 12th grade seriously, to remain “invested,” is to unfairly “expect the impossible.”

There’s nothing new about letting down in the closing months of high school. I had a minor senior slump in the spring of 1968. Nobody called the governor.

Alarmingly, though, none of these senior year reforms involve academics. As for seniors growing up less emotionally mature, maybe that’s because nobody’s telling them along the way, do the work, whether you like it or not. Otherwise, the failure and the consequences are yours.

Instead we get empowerment-happy officials who see the hard work in improving schools as trying to get adults to open up and value the expertise of young people. They condemn the old paradigm of adults creating reform.

I value my students’ expertise. I just don’t overvalue it. That’s because they don’t have much yet. That’s why I subscribe to the old paradigm where adults are supposed to be in charge.

That’s not to say that adults have cornered the market on wisdom. One contingent of ardent reformers, displaying education experts’ fascination with change for the sake of change, justifies scrapping senior year on the grounds that we’ve been operating under the same education model for the last 100 years.

This dubious assertion ignores the reality that human brains are fairly traditional organs, the statistic that a century ago the high school graduation rate was under 20 percent, and the fact that my grandfather’s high school wasn’t staffed with special educators, psychologists, behavioral interventionists, social-emotional interventionists, individual student aides, home-school liaison specialists, breakfast cooks and dentists.

A likeminded dean of education concurs that many seniors simply “have no need to continue to be at a high school.” Apparently, his university must not be receiving any of the 21st-century college-bound seniors, now as many as 60 percent, who can’t do college work when they get there.

Taking matters one breathtaking step further, true enthusiasts have somehow determined that eliminating 12th grade would actually “better prepare students for college.” That’s probably because when 11th grade graduates get to college, they’ll be an even better fit for the watered down, remedial courses colleges already offer.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Peter Berger has taught English and history in Vermont for 30 years.