I'll pay you Tuesday for a diploma today
Struggling Miami-Dade high school students have bypassed the state's graduation exam by enrolling in a strip-mall private school that promises diplomas in as little as 48 hours, a Herald investigation has found.
Many of the students who attended American Academy High School Corp. were guided there by Miami-Dade school system employees, including the head football coach at Booker T. Washington Senior High and a state senator who runs the district's 5000 Role Models mentoring program.Sen. Frederica Wilson, a former School Board member, said she has even paid the tuition for about 15 teenagers to get diplomas at American Academy. Wilson said the students, like many who have attended American, repeatedly had failed the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which they must pass to earn a state-issued diploma.
With their American Academy diplomas, students have been able to land jobs, win athletic scholarships and enroll in colleges, including Miami Dade College and Florida International University.
Without those diplomas, Wilson said, many of them would have few options and could end up in prison.
''We can either let them get a diploma and get a job at UPS or the Omni hotel or as a security guard . . . or we can let them walk around, rob you and me, and sell drugs to our children,'' Wilson said.
[...]
Private schools are almost entirely unregulated under Florida law. They do not use the FCAT. They are not required to hire certified teachers. They do not need to follow state standards for textbooks or curriculum.
The whole thing's really worth a read, if for nothing more than the sheer gawking value. Yet, while our initial reactions are likely to be umbrage if not outrage, the situation in Florida underscores an important point: Currently, the only two options available to teenagers are getting a high school diploma (at any cost) or being relegated to a life with few options outside of the seedy.
As it is, the high school diploma is starting to lose value compared to a bachelor's or postsecondary degree, and already those with just a high school diploma are twice as likely to be unemployed as those with higher degrees, not to mention likely to earn about half as much annually. Still, the high school diploma is the most fundamental unit of employment currency -- of potenital-reaching currency -- and its importance as a baseline should not be underestimated.
So then we come again to what I termed the "graduation conundrum," which I stated as this: "We have to choose between lowering graduation standards and letting everyone graduate even if they don't have a full set of basic skills, or raising graduation standards and ensuring that everyone who graduates is properly armed but shut out a multitude of students who have done nothing wrong."
While the ultimate solution is to fix K-12 education such that no student reaches 12th grade unable to pass a shockingly easy exit exam, I'm becoming more convinced that there needs to be a short-term stopgap measure as well. As an aside, I don't blame the exit exam itself; there is inconclusive evidence, but it seems that exit exams have at worst a minor impact on dropout rates.
For instance -- and this is just off the top of my head -- what about setting up public, school system-run "halfway houses" for the relatively small numbers of students who reach the end of high school unable to either meet their diploma requirements or pass their exit exam. These could be intensive programs focusing specifically on the skills in which students are deficient and which would in the latter case lead to an extra chance to retest. (Something like this may already exist that I'm just not aware of -- anyone?) As we've seen, the lure of a diploma is an extreme motivator. Alternatively, there's the 5th year of high school option that some Washington, D.C. schools have begun implementing. I'm sure there are any number of other ideas.
All I know is that the utter desparation that leads kids -- and even educators! -- to seek asylum in these private diploma mills that are the educational equivalent of slums is not born of laziness but rather fear. Fear of a life in which your resume might get you into a McDonalds interview but more likely is going to get you on the streets, and fear of dreams which dissapate on the wind. There are no good options here for the teenagers stuck in this vice, and while the constant goal must be to obliterate the entire contraption, until then we should be finding ways to alleviate the ungodly pressure.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 12, 2005 at 1:08 AM.
|
