article from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Schools' assembly line mentality is a recipe for disaster

By Scott Allen

For the Journal-Constitution

Monday, March 16, 2009

A final assembler at the end of an auto assembly line keeps noticing cracked frames, misaligned doors and missing steering wheels and brake lights on many vehicles. The inspection record shows passing marks ("A," "B," "C") for most of these cars, but the cars clearly aren't ready for final assembly. Management tells the worker that the cars cannot be sent back up the line.

It doesn't make sense, does it? Yet, this is how education works.

Today's high school teacher is often asked to fix years of underachievement. Nowhere is the public school system's flawed process more obvious than in Georgia's new, ambitious math curriculum. High standards with inconsistent accountability can lead to quite a mess.

Despite pleas to "teach the students what they are supposed to know, or keep them until you do," the state's middle schools unleashed a new class of unprepared students into ninth grade this year. Nothing, it seems, could hold them back from high school. Not failure rates approaching 40 percent on the state math exam. Not even a failure to attend so-called "mandatory" summer school.

High school has become a dumping ground for students, regardless of whether they know anything. Yes, we have many fine, successful, high-achieving high school students, but that doesn't excuse setting up their underskilled peers for failure. At one high school, 100 students who didn't pass eighth grade moved to high school anyway. All but one failed every class they took their first semester.

Is this a surprise? Despite the best efforts of many elementary and middle school teachers, the system ignored these students' shortcomings. Rather than having Georgia Performance Standards, promotion process seems to be based on Georgia Performance Suggestions.

And then high schools are expected to do miracles with students who are multiple grade levels behind.

Because of a lack of accountability in grades k-8, students hardly feel responsible for achieving in high school. Many students feel entitled to advance to a new grade by virtue of being a year older. Social promotion is nothing new. But our new math curriculum was designed around a surprisingly dangerous and unrealistic assumption -- that our students have learned most of the requisite prior concepts.

This approach seems reasonable enough until high school teachers realize that many students can't solve basic decimals and fraction problems -- a fifth- and sixth-grade standard -- or even understand the instructions.

At our high school's recent open house, a local middle school teacher confided that the only way she can get her students to pass math tests is to strip all fractions and decimals from the problems and do everything with small whole numbers. Maybe this is why Georgia students struggle on the SAT.

While all students have strengths and weaknesses, too many middle school students earn passing grades for substandard work. When students enter high school deficient in the standards, high schools understandably struggle with low morale, low passing rates and low achievement scores.

These schools are totally disrupted each March as state graduation testing approaches. Teachers hold cram sessions and scramble to finish repairing long-standing gaps rather than just assembling the final pieces to prepare these students for college and work.

Like the car assembler, only high schools seem to be held accountable for producing acceptable test results.

> Scott Allen of Smyrna has taught high school mathematics in Cobb County for seven years.