I wanted to be a soldier, and that influenced some of my course choices in high school. Wanting to understand how to motivate troops, I took a course in sociology and a course in psychiatry. Knowing the chance of pulling a tour in Germany was high, I took three years of German. This was all stacked in a lot of history courses to understand why wars were fought, and to learn tactics and solutions to problems I might face by drawing on the lessons of the leaders from the past. I wanted to take a course in astronomy on the theory that I might learn to navigate by the stars even if I had no other gear to do so, but the course was not offered often and the time it was it conflicted with another course. Basically any course I could take that had the potential to help create a good soldier I took, including such courses as public speaking. But honestly, some classes were taken only because they were required, and to this day, for example, there has been no benefit derived from my having been required to take an art class.

By Thomas Mathews (Turtle) on Saturday, September 04, 2021 - 05:23 pm: Edit

I have to agree with SPP and Web Mom. I took a year of German when I came back from being stationed in Germany as a year of a foreign language was required. I might as well take something I know something about to make it easier. I had to take a year's worth of accounting. Not that I use it, but it helps me understand some business practices better than I had before talking them. Do I need a music or art class, no. Mostly because I know what I like in music and art, and really don't care about the finer points that much. I had to take some social science and other humanities classes. So I took ones that interested me like International Relations.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, September 05, 2021 - 12:36 am: Edit

I think most of the high school repeat classes could be replaced by a standardized test. Pass the test, skip the class, save the money. High schools then teach to the college test, improving their performance.

I had to take a serious science class as part of engineering school. I took predation, which had nothing to do with engineering but I thought might be useful in combat. Turned out to be utterly fascinating study of wolves, eagles, sharks, lions, tigers, polar bears, and a lot of other critters.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, September 05, 2021 - 09:09 pm: Edit

My tenth-grade biology teacher taught two twelfth-grade classes, micro-biology and physiology, back in the 1970s that advanced enough most of his students were able to CLEP a full year of college courses in those two subjects.


Garth L. Getgen

By MarkSHoyle (Bolo) on Sunday, September 05, 2021 - 09:31 pm: Edit

In some districts in N.C. they do what is called REACH (don't know the whole thing), but students graduate H.S. with 1 year/sometimes two of college credits.....

Covid and not being in school may have interfered with a lot of instruction on that front....

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, September 05, 2021 - 10:34 pm: Edit

Texas has the same thing. If you have the 16.75 credits needed to graduate high school but still have time left in high school, you can drive over to the community college part of the day and take college courses. Amarillo is blessed with a hardcore community college that rates higher than half of the state's universities and transfer credits is easy. I walked into junior year at Texas Tech with 93 college hours on the books and I didn't have the advantage of the "college during high school" program. I graduated high school with something like 23.75 of the 16.75 recquired credits. I actually graduated high school in 11 years but took the 12th year because the rules at the time wouldn't let me start college for another year.

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Monday, September 06, 2021 - 09:06 am: Edit

Wish I'd had that in HS. I literally took every Math and Science class my HS offered and was still bored. Should have taken typing.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, September 06, 2021 - 09:56 am: Edit

In my high school, typing was two semesters, and you had to take both. The first was how to type, the second was how to be a secretary and useless for 90% of the students forced to take it.

By Thomas Mathews (Turtle) on Monday, September 06, 2021 - 10:42 am: Edit

Most of the colleges that I applied to would waive the 1 year of a foreign language requirement if you took 2 or more years of a foreign language in high school.

Both of my nieces took enough AP classes that they had the equivalent of 1 1/2 years worth of college credit accumulated at the time they graduated high school. One of them graduated #2 in her class with the GPA determined on a 5.0 scale rather than the 4.0 scale I graduated on.

Speaking of which the 4.0 scale had always bothered me at the time of my graduation because of the 7 students who had 4.0 GPAs. One of those did not take any AP classes at all, while the other 6 had taken a minimum of 2 each and I would bet they took 3 or more.

Mike, my mother forced me to take typing in my sophomore year of high school. I hated that class almost as much as I hated the Oklahoma History and Health Science classes I was forced to take in my freshman year of high school. The funny thing is the typing class has helped me more in life than all of the other "elective" classes I took.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Monday, September 06, 2021 - 12:39 pm: Edit

My little sister's High School had a modified 4 point scale. AP classes gave you +1 point, remedials and some electives were -1 point.

Which sounds fine, but Beth managed to graduate with 26 credits out of a possible 24 (taking one class in summer school and taking two electives in the same period). So with every possible AP class and straight A's, she STILL didn't have the highest GPA in the school. (She tied with a guy who did the same thing, and they weren't in the top five.)

Someone in the administration managed to notice that GPA wasn't performing its intended function of identifying the best students, so they didn't have a valedictorian that year, just a group of students they called something else.

By Steven Zamboni (Szamboni) on Tuesday, September 07, 2021 - 12:38 pm: Edit

Part of what drove my GPA down was the school transferring my college classes over (plus I was a year ahead on all the other classes). I would have been so much better off had I just graduated early and moved on.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, September 07, 2021 - 01:36 pm: Edit

Yeah, I got screwed when my community college 3.9 GPA came into Texas Tech as 2.0 just before the hardest engineering courses where the professors only gave one A and two Bs per class.

By Nick Blank (Nickgb) on Tuesday, September 07, 2021 - 03:19 pm: Edit

We have a solid local community college, and in High School we had a program where Junior/Senior year you could take the basic level college course (history, math (pre-calc, calc), language, speech, etc.) instead of the equivalent high school course. The Community College profs even came out to the high school to teach the classes, so they were just part of my regular school day.

The courses counted toward high school graduation, and also transferred to my college, so I got to effectively skip those basic college courses my first year.

By Charles Gray (Cgray45) on Friday, September 10, 2021 - 12:39 am: Edit

So does my local district. I mean, letting juniors and sedniors concurrently take community college courses (in our district the students go to the CC) has two advantages beyond the higher level courses.

1. It exposes them to a wider range of students. I know several students who learned a great deal, not just from the teacher, but the fact that the guy they were sitting next to was already in the work force.

2. It provides more of a reward for greater effort. IE motivating the student to go above and beyond.

By John Williams (Johndw) on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - 09:21 am: Edit

I think standards for k-12 have probably been lowered, decreasing the value of a highschool education. If we raised standards again, adapted it to include apprenticeships and trade skills, life skills like money management, investment management, civic education in how you might actually run for office in your local area/state, and some other things, then we could probably decrease the number of people who seek out a university education because they have a bigger set of meaningful skills and education to seek out a living without feeling forced into university. Then with the lowered demand for university degrees it will remove part of the problem causing the prices to be so high.

By Kenneth Humpherys (Pmthecat) on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - 12:15 pm: Edit

I agree that standards have been lowered. I have looked at the tests that were given in various areas of the USA to 8th graders a hundred years ago that they had to pass to graduate. Most modern College students would fail those tests. Now some of the questions could be considered irrelevant or out of date due to changes in technology/language usage. For example, many grammar/language questions are outdated because we do not use the referred tense or word any more. But even the simpler parts of speech questions would stump most modern College students.

But all schools, including Universities, don't want to give up all that free government money they get for those extra heads in classes. So standards will be and are lowered to keep more students in school longer. As long as the government hands out money on a per student basis, schools will do their upmost to keep as many of them in for as long as possible.

My proposed solution is that standards need to be set for all levels of schooling from the outside. I suggest using minimum standards set by the workplace or industries that will hire the students that reach that level. For example, elementary schools needs to teach the basic skills all students need like basic math, science and reading. Middle schools should teach the skills needed for basic low level (apprentice or entry level) jobs and the minimums that every person should have. High schools should teach more specialized classes (journeyman level) and general certifications.

Once those standards are agreed upon, the government should pay the schools for graduates who meet those standards.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - 12:59 pm: Edit

You are never going to get the teacher's unions to go along with that.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - 01:41 pm: Edit

You'll also never get the local school boards to agree.

Elected bodies don't care all that much what's good for students, they care what voters want. And mommy does not want to hear that little Johnny isn't ready for 5th grade and needs to repeat 4th or to take a remedial class in the summer.

Nor does she want to hear that the school disciplined little Johnny because he misbehaved in class and his disruptive behavior makes it harder to teach anyone else.

This is IMAO, the BIG edge that private schools have. Their parents will back the school when it wants to discipline the kid.

By Douglas Saldana (Dsal) on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - 05:59 pm: Edit

100 years ago fewer than 1 in 6 American adults had completed high school. Schools had more rigorous requirements because they had a more select group of students.

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Thursday, September 16, 2021 - 08:03 am: Edit

Here in Oldham County KY, the schools are excellent. Not least because this is where the richest suburbs (metro Louisville) are. Plenty of money, small class sizes, fewer challenging students, more intact families, etc.

And they tolerate NO BS from kids and parents. Behavior you see on the internet results in swift expulsion.

For example my younger son is in regular 3rd grade. His class is 17 people. MS level teacher PLUS full time teachers aide. PLUS He gets 4 hours a week individual attention from an ESL teacher.

My older son is in one of the best public High Schools in the state. Amusingly, he is about half of the diversity in his high school class.
https://www.niche.com/k12/north-oldham-high-school-goshen-ky/

Every kid has a plan for how they get to school which includes "walkers" like my kid. He is not let out of school unless there is someone actually standing there, on the list, authorized to take him home. My older son rides the bus, We get robo text messages if the bus will be late. He has a 45 minute period every day in the ESL class with 5 other kids; 3 ESL teachers in there!

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Thursday, September 16, 2021 - 08:30 am: Edit

'Course that more or less exemplifies the problem, Mike. With public school funding based on property taxes, wealthy communities get fantastic schools. Meanwhile poor communities struggle on with buildings that should have been condemned years ago, ever-increasing class sizes, and little in the way of programs other than those strictly required by the state board of education (and often skimping in those).

By Ginger McMurray (Gingermcmurray) on Thursday, September 16, 2021 - 09:47 am: Edit

What Jessica said.

My schools growing up were horrible as were the ones my kids went to up until 6th and 7th grade. Sometimes they had to bring in extra chairs because there wasn't room in the class for more desks. The schools in my neighborhood are vastly better because I've done well in my career.

My neighbor's kids shouldn't have such a massive advantage over mine because their parents had the same advantage. It's yet another way for people to be stuck in generational poverty.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Thursday, September 16, 2021 - 01:18 pm: Edit

My state (California) spends more taxpayer funds per pupil than almost any other state in the union, if it's not at the absolute top of the list, but has close to, if not the absolute, lowest performance in math and English proficiency.

For most of them.

Private and charter schools do exist; about 2% of students attend them (mostly the sons and daughers of politicians, union leaders, other celebrities, and lawyers) and many of those schools have national academic competition teams.

By Steven Zamboni (Szamboni) on Thursday, September 16, 2021 - 01:43 pm: Edit

California is 18th on per-student spending. I used to run the numbers when I was arguing for new textbooks. (My high school should have been torn down decades before I went to it. I was almost jealous of the classes that got the fancy portables.)

By Andy Koch (Droid) on Thursday, September 16, 2021 - 02:36 pm: Edit

I believe New York is the highest per capita, with results similar to California..