Keep Kids’ Options Open

Bureaucrats and politicians can come up with all kinds of new hurdles for students to jump before they can be promoted or receive a diploma. Mandatory algebra. Exit exams. Bans on social promotion. But they surely can’t make them stick.

California legislators rejected one such unnecessary hurdle by reacting coldly to the state school superintendent’s proposal that all high school students, in order to graduate, pass a set of college-prep courses that would qualify them for the University of California.

Arbitrary, ill-planned attempts to “raise the bar” in public schools have led to embarrassing scale-backs rather than the hoped-for new heights in student achievement. California recently waived the pass-algebra requirement for about half its school systems. The state has always had a “ban” on social promotion, yet its failing students routinely move to the next grade. Chicago recently backed off on a tough program after studies found that holding students back did little for their academic achievement. Even U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige recently softened requirements in the problem-riddled No Child Left Behind Act because so many schools were unfairly labeled as failing to make “adequate yearly progress.”

Considering that close to half of California high school students repeatedly flunked the exit exam, prompting a two-year delay of that ill-designed reform in 2003, it made little sense for schools Supt. Jack O’Connell to propose that all students pass the so-called A-G sequence of college-prep classes to graduate. Yet Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) offered the bill to make it so. The exit exam required only ninth-grade skills in math, and 10th-grade in English. How many of these students would master four years of college-prep English and three of math?

Research shows that weaker students learn more from tougher course work -- if they stick with it. Big “if.” Not every student wants a college education or needs one. Society needs plumbers and salesclerks. More good would come of counseling programs to keep the motivated kids who enter college on track for a degree.

There is a long and ugly history of public schools steering selected students -- again, black and Latino -- away from college-oriented course work. Alarcon has softened his bill, which faced widespread opposition, so that it instead would require high schools to counsel incoming freshmen about the value of a college-prep curriculum and provide it to any student who asked. That was a positive turn for troubling legislation. Let’s not deprive kids of options, whether they lead to a college campus or carpentry.