The World Needs Pool Maintenance Assistants Along With Global Leaders Don't You Think?
MayorBob.
Posted to Etcetera on Wed Dec 20, 2006 at 09:49:05 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Schools in Florida seem to be stuck in neutral. One of the telltale signs of this is a graduation rate which ranks somewhere in the lower half of graduation rates among the states. What to do to improve the situation was the main question on the minds of Florida's educational elite. They think they have come up with a solution, at least they hope they have. That solution has nothing to do with improving the schools or coming up with ways of decreasing the student/teacher ratio. The solution the Florida Department of Education has just blessed is to offer a dizzying array of officially approved majors for the state's school kids.
The the list of 440 approved majors (13 pg pdf doc) was released by Florida's Education Commissioner John Winn. As Winn sees it, "student engagement is critical to success ... these major areas of interest will produce a major challenge for our students and better give them real world experience." The majors range from landscape technician to global leadership and do not conflict with the current requirement that a high school senior must earn 24 credits to graduate, 16 of those in core requirements. The idea is to give students a range of electives they can select from in a major category - four classes from one major category equates to a student's major.
The situation the new major program is intended to cure is a state graduation rate somewhere in the lower half of all states. Florida had a graduation rate of 66.7 percent in 2003, ranking 43rd in the nation in that category. Figures from the next year (see pg 30 of 71 pg pdf doc) indicate a very slight improvement in that percentage to 66.4 percent. State officials claim a 71.9 percent graduation rate in 2005 but that rate includes special diplomas and dropouts who returned for General Educational Development (GED) diplomas.
The majors program is part of Governor Jeb Bush's A++ education program which is supposed to "advance the performance of Florida middle and high schools. But the program is not quite as comprehensive as the education commissioner made it seem. Not all 440 choices will be offered to all schools and some students may need to select a back up choice for a major. In spite of some of the academic or career ring to some of the majors, they may not necessarily lead to what students think they will lead to. According to Winn, "Not all the majors are career-oriented, but they're designed to take elective courses in a series so that you leave high school with a competency or a readiness for additional training in a career area or college or you just develop a competency in an area that you love like dance or music." Courses such as landscape technician or pool maintenance assistant would be open only to Special Education students. However, kids who are not mentally challenged can opt for peer counseling or oral communications and, for the true world beater, there's always that major in global leadership.
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