As a long time instructor, now retired, I can confidently share with you that it is not the case that Georgia students are less intelligent, creative or ambitious than other young people in other places...
During my thirty year tenure as a public high school teacher, many parents and business owners shared with me that when their sons or daughters graduated from our high school, they were not equipped with the language or computational skills necessary to function either in a college program or as an employee in a modern business enterprise.
Georgia high school valedictorians now rank 20th in the world when compared to the best graduates of other industrialized countries.
Thirty percent of Georgia public high school graduates who go on to college need intensive remedial work as college freshman to have any hope of doing college work.
Only forty-eight percent of Georgia high school seniors who go on to college eventually graduate.
The United States as a whole suffers from the highest per capita public high school expulsion rate on Earth.
As a long time instructor, now retired, I can confidently share with you that it is not the case that Georgia students are less intelligent, creative or ambitious than other young people in other places.
I can also confidently tell you that public school results should not be attributed to bad parenting, bad teaching, bad administration, or lack of leadership skills among our elected officials.
And, finally, I can without any doubt also share with you the solution to the problems of which our public schools suffer, a solution I suggested often when I was in the classroom, but one that wasn't well understood. Perhaps that was my fault.
The remedy to the dilemmas faced by our public schools have nothing to do with programs such as No Child Left Behind, or the 3R or Vision 15. These are programs that attempt to fix the public schools while working within the same school model that is no longer working for our young people because they have grown psychologically beyond it.
There really is only ONE culprit that accounts for Georgia's public school malaise, especially at the high school level, and that is the way we accredit our high schools.
Accreditation provides a template for every school. Depending upon the shape of that template, the programs and the methods used to deliver programs are defined. Said differently, accreditation provides a stage setting. Everything that goes on on that stage must be consistent with the setting. Teachers and students must perform on that stage in ways that facilitate the action and, therefore, enable the play to make some sense to the audience.
For the past hundred years, we have used the same accreditation method in Georgia, one designed by 19th century scholars John Dewey of Vermont and William Harris of Massachusetts. They in turn took as their model from a Prussian military training manual. (It is no accident that we use bells, whistles, klaxons, time segmentation, age grouping, marching in straight lines, neat rows and boxes we call classrooms to train America’s youth.)
In all other aspects of their lives, our young people are taught (rightly) that their individuality, their strengths, their interests, their learning styles, their skills, their creativity, etc. are important. In all environments, that is, except our schools and our prisons. (Even our faithful U.S. Marines are now training soldiers in ways that emphasize their creativity and individuality, given the new kind of enemies and unique situations modern military personnel must face every day.)
Until we as a society realize that no punishments, no incentives, and no add-on programs such as No Child Left Behind that don’t address accreditation are going to be effective in terms of turning our schools around, we are going to remain at the bottom of the First World in terms of public high school academic accomplishment.
Student-First Accreditation is THE solution to Georgia's educational difficulties, and it is hiding in plain sight.
Student-First Accreditation starts by knowing who the individuals to be taught are; what their interests, skill levels, aptitudes, learning styles and emotional preparedness are. Once those are known, students, parents, teachers, administrators, elected officials boards can work together to design school programs to allow every student to lead with his or her strengths.
We can do so much better for our public high school students, and EVERYONE will benefit. Parents, teachers and students will no longer be required to be heroes to do well. Administrators and school boards will no longer be required to erect barricades between themselves and an unhappy community. And, best of all, Georgia and by extension the United States, will once again be a world leader in terms of encouraging the true genius of its youth to emerge.
Sarah Thompson
Sarah Thompson is a retired public high school teacher who is now being treated for a terminal illness in Sacramento, CA.