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I'm sure there were students who didn't graduate. We probably had at least 650 at the beginning of high school. In a district that large, that is spread out geographically, you don't know everyone. There was one girl who got pregnant as a junior and came back for most of her senior year. She went on to college and graduated.
By 1973, they were getting less stringent in regard to "allowing" students to graduate for "parental" issues.
Was Joe Willy the football player?
Ha! Good question, but he was the class of 1961. There were lots of rumors though.
Hey, cool! Thanks for posting. My faith in the CA school system has been partially restored. There's hope!
I don't know what method (if any) they had before "whole language", but older generations in my extended family always complained about the public schools not teaching phonics or grammar, going back to the 1950's at least.
Rather few of "degree required" jobs they may eventually get will have work tasks that requires a degree to do or to do well. A specific course or two on some technical matter, basic math, a decent vocabulary, and the ability to comprehend and follow instruction are all these jobs have ever needed.
It doesn't matter whether a job actually requires a college degree to complete the job tasks. What matters is that employers want candidates to have a degree.
It doesn't matter whether a job actually requires a college degree to complete the job tasks.
What matters (in terms of getting a job) is that employers want candidates to have a degree.
I submit that actually being able to do the job ...is what should matter.
And that THOSE skills, with rather few exceptions, shouldn't require more than a HS diploma.
Well, what a HS diploma once meant.
Do you really not understand the distinctions being made?
Earlier this month, the California board approved a new reading outline for the state's school districts that stresses phonics in early grades. Ohio, New York and Wisconsin are also considering measures to re-emphasize phonics.
Whole Language actually uses phonics, it just uses it in the context of good stories.
You all can bicker until your fingers fall off about phonics vs. whole language, but the point remains that whether or not the article cited in the OP supports the conclusion that in-coming freshman read at a seventh grade level is highly debatable. I could drive a truck through the holes in Stotsky's argument. Does the fact that the last book I read was breezy pop fiction mean that's the limit of my reading comprehension? Of course not!
High school reading lists are all over the place. Here's some of what my tenth grader has read so far this year, including ATOS levels:
Cannery Row...6.0 Frankenstein...12.4 The Crucible...4.9 MacBeth...10.9
Note that two of the selections don't even meet the seventh grade reading level Stotsky thinks is necessary, but I believe most high school English teachers would agree that the subject matter is appropriately challenging for a college-bound student. This is why I hate Rennaissance Learning's analytics. They're often completely meaningless.
Reading level and content and concepts are two different things. There is no doubt that reading say To Kill a Mocking Bird is important due to innocence, racism, etc., Of Mice & Men is important for mental issues, euthanisa, etc., Lord of the Flies is important for the change from humanity to savageness, Animal Farm for political overtones, etc. Then there is content issues as well. I doubt if Lord of the Flies can be read at a say sixth grade reading level, we wouldn't want a 12 year old reading about the vicious killing of Piggy. That and I doubt they would be able to process the meaning either. A young kid may read a comic like say Ms. Marvel or Ultimate Comics Spider-Man but not get all the character development of it. I didn't with X-Men as a kid, yet I loved the cartoons and got that they were feared but comicly it wasn't me until I got older.
When my dad grew up the Great Depression came along and lots of students dropped out to help their families. Only about half of all 14 to 16 year olds were attending school in those days.
Note that in 1900, the school year was only 99 days long. Kindergartens were about 30 years old, but only half of the who were 5 or 6 were in kindergarten classes. Between 1900 and 1919, half of the students did not ever get to 8th grade. Black students and other minorities often did not attend school at all even in the 1930s. By 1900, the literacy rate of black students was about 43%.
In 1940 - 25% of U.S. population and 8% of the African American population, age 25 and over, had at least a high school diploma, according to the U.S. Census.
I can tell you how this can happen. Dd#1 was on the road to being there. When she was in elementary school something about the way she read bothered me. She'd substitute words. I kept bringing this up with her teacher and was told she's on grade level and doing fine. I decided to get a second opinion so I took her to Sylvan and had her tested. It turned out she knew only 5 consonant/vowel sounds. She could not decode words. Her entire reading vocabulary, while on grade level, was memorized.
They told me that this is a common problem with bright children and that kids who do this do well until the end of elementary school when their ability to memorize words maxes out. They end up reading on about a 5th or 6th grade level. Parents and teachers mistake the ability to memorize words for "reading" when the child really isn't reading. After $4000 of tutoring (we did math and reading because of Everyday Mathematics) she was where she needed to be. I decided to spend $400 on Hooked on Phonics for her little sister who tested as reading on a 9th grade level in 3rd grade so I know both of my kids are above the average college student here and moved both girls to a charter school that used Singapore math.
If I found out my college bound child was only reading on a 7th grade level, I'd call up Sylvan. Why invest tens of thousands of dollars in a college education without the foundation? I found Sylvan to be expensive but worth it in that the problem was fixed. They taught dd to decode words rather than just memorize them.
Memorizing has become the newest way to teach reading in my neighborhood school. They send home lists of words for my kindergartener to memorize every week. But he never brings an actual book home - apparently, they just memorize word lists instead of actually reading books and using the words. This turns out to be because our brilliant government has decided to give standardized tests to Kindergarteners and hold the teachers accountable for test performance. And guess what's on the test? That's right...a list of words that they have to memorize. The same words they've been sending home. It's infuriating.
“'We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level, according to Renaissance Learning’s latest report on what American students in grades 9-12 read, whether assigned or chosen,' said education expert Dr. Sandra Stotsky. Stotsky, a Professor Emerita at the University of Arkansas, served on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10, during which she called the standards “inferior.” The study also found that most high school graduates don’t do much with mathematics past eighth-grade compared to students in other high-achieving countries. In addition, the lack of “difficulty and complexity” found in high school reading material is indicative of what colleges can assign to students once they enter higher education and professors aren’t requiring incoming students read at a college level."
Questions to parents: Do you even know at what level your child reads? Is that something you discuss at parent/teacher meetings? If your kid was in high school and planning for college and you found out he or she was only reading at the 7th grade level, what would you do about it?
It has to be pointed out though, that the test they used to determine "7th grade level" is not one used by any school district or college that I know of. So I'm not sure that's really an accurate statement to begin with.
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