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SCHOOLS
Rethinking High School, Part I: Standards, attitudes hampering education
Michael McComas, an assistant math professor, goes over some basic math skills at a Marshall Community & Technical College class designed to bring students up to a college level. MCTC officials say enrollment in such remedial classes has grown in recent years.
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HUNTINGTON -- Hari Satya Shankar Addagarla recalls how his academic classload one year while in India included math, chemistry, physics, biology, history, geography, civics and three language courses.
A tough high school curriculum? Not quite.
That was when Addagarla was a 12-year-old in what would be called a middle school in the United States. The academic classload for a typical middle schooler in Cabell County? Reading, language arts, science, social studies and math.
The disparity only widens as Indian students are mandated to continue classes such as chemistry, biology, physics and high-level math courses every year throughout high school, while most U.S. students are required to take one year of such classes, with additional years taken as electives.
Addagarla, who is now a 29-year-old Marshall University graduate student, said that although his course schedule was extreme, he and many others in India recognized the importance of getting ahead early.
"That, now I feel is too much for a 12-year-old, but things are so different in India," Addagarla said via e-mail. "(But) in a nation with a billion people, to stand out from the crowd, you need to toil."
That begs the question: Are students in Cabell County and elsewhere in the United States toiling enough to compete successfully in an economy where national borders matter less and less in the marketplace for jobs and the companies that provide them?
Many answer that question with a "no."
That's a large part of the reason why Cabell County is embarking on a journey to restructure its high schools to reflect the changes taking place on an international scale, brought on by rapidly changing technology that has made the world smaller.
Although West Virginia started work on new 21st century initiatives to increase rigor, relevance and relationships within the past few years, Cabell County wants to go a step further by examining how it might restructure high school education.
A committee has been commissioned to research and recommend what the landscape of Cabell Midland and Huntington high schools should look like and how to better prepare students to compete in a workforce pool that includes more people than ever before from all around the world.
The effort kicked off in June when the committee -- consisting of about 60 parents, community and business leaders, Marshall University faculty, administrators, teachers, students and central office personnel -- viewed "Two Million Minutes." The documentary, produced by venture capitalist and entrepreneur Robert Compton, looked at the lives of six high school seniors and how they spent the roughly two million minutes of their high school careers. Two students were from one of the top academic and athletic high schools in the United States and two each were from India and China.
The documentary revealed how more academically prepared the Indians and Chinese are in comparison to U.S. students.
Geraldine Sawrey, Cabell County's assistant superintendent of school improvement and leader of the restructuring committee, said the documentary exposed how important it is to teach students the new skills that will help them compete in a rapidly expanding and changing world.
"I believe (educators) realize today's students are different, and that we must prepare them for a future that we cannot predict," Sawrey said. "Therefore, (we) have to prepare them to be people who can think critically, analyze information (and) work effectively with other people."
Part of the challenge will undoubtedly involve curriculum choices, as illustrated by the example of Addagarla's experience in India. But other factors at work, experts say, are differences between the United States and other countries in people's motivation and attitudes about the importance of education.
How successful Cabell County and other schools in the nation are in closing the education gap not only has implications for students' futures, but also how well local regions -- such as the Tri-State -- and the nation compete economically.
Effects on the job market
West Virginia's education struggles have been well-documented for years. The latest example is the state's showing in the 2008 ACT test data, released Aug. 13, showing West Virginia's student scores tied for 36th among all states and tied for 15th among the 26 states in which 50 percent of its graduating seniors took the test.
And that's among the roughly 30 percent of junior and seniors who took the test. West Virginia also wrestles with large numbers of students who pursue little education beyond high school or do not finish at all. Moreover, lack of emphasis on education in the past has left the state with one of the least educated adult populations. Statistics from 2006 say 81.5 percent of West Virginians above the age of 25 had earned a high school diploma, a GED or higher, leaving the state ranked 45th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
While the state's students struggle to keep up with their peers in other states, the United States overall is struggling to keep up educationally with countries that raised the bar on achievement long ago.
According to 2006 data from the Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 25th in math among the 30 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In science, U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 21st out of 30. Although the data, collected every three years, is not directly comparable, it should be noted that the U.S. has fallen from 18th in math and 14th in science since 2000.
In Cabell County and West Virginia, some are concerned that students aren't ready to compete in the local job market, let alone a global one. While the county and state want to teach students new skills, too many have yet to master the basics.
Jerry McDonald, president of the Huntington Area Development Council, said companies already report concerns about the abilities of those in the local employee pool.
"We call on maybe 100 of our major companies on an annual basis, and they tell us the lack of basic skills is one of the top five concerns," McDonald said. "And that's reading, writing, computation and communication. If you don't have these basic skills, a person is going to be sentenced to lower-end jobs."
McDonald said a workforce without basic skills affects how competitive Huntington and Cabell County can be against cities like Charleston and Morgantown, as well as on a national and international scale.
"If we cannot produce a workforce, companies will not expand here or locate here or maybe continue to operate here," McDonald said. "I don't think that's going to happen, but those are the consequences."
At Marshall Community & Technical College, enrollment in such remedial classes as reading improvement, elementary algebra and fundamental mathematical concepts has grown and few seats are ever open, according to Billie Brooks, MCTC's dean of student services. The school also offers courses in basic physical science, basic chemistry and basic U.S. history (1865 to present).
As part of his course requirements, Marshall University graduate student Shail Sangoi has been teaching intermediate algebra at MCTC for the past two years. He said the lesson plans show a great disparity between America and India.
"The level of mathematics I teach is the same as my 11-year-old nephew is currently learning in fifth grade in India," Sangoi said. "Without a doubt, the U.S. provides the best education system in the world. But if an 11-year-old from India can perform better than an 18-year-old student, this is not in favor of future American generations."
Sangoi agrees with Brooks in thinking the problem stems from high schools pushing kids through toward graduation.
"The education standards are compromised to help them pass the course," the 28-year-old Bombay native said, referring to extra credit, take-home exams, cheat sheets and makeup tests. "Even worse, the students are merely promoted to the next grade in spite of failing the class. Such students suffer in the long run as they find transition to higher education very stiff and end up dropping out of high school or college."
Brooks said math isn't the only area in which MCTC students often need help. Reading, she said, has become a very serious deficiency in the Tri-State area.
"I think reading is the biggest now, and it impacts other subjects," she said. "Some of the high school requirements are getting stiffer, but that doesn't impact reading."
Cabell Midland sophomore Eric Newfeld said he's seen and worked with kids who lacked the basic skills, and they struggle, often bringing down those around them. He said it probably goes as far back as elementary school where these kids got lost and couldn't catch up or just didn't care about learning.
"If they don't care at a young age, they fall behind," Newfeld said. "And when they fall behind, they stop caring."
Tougher classes
Part of the achievement gap stems from what students are expected to learn. In higher achieving countries, observers say, it's not at all considered unusual for many students to take what America considers AP (advanced placement) or honors classes much earlier and throughout high school.
"I have not analyzed the AP/honors curricula in enough detail to give an opinion, but based on my observations and my early analysis of U.S. and India's high school curriculum, the average Indian is two to three years more advanced in their knowledge of math, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science," Compton said. "Suffice it to say, most Indian students take four years of chemistry, physics and biology by the 10th grade. Most American students take chemistry and biology for one year."
State Superintendent of Schools Steve Paine said when he visited Singapore earlier this summer, he saw firsthand how much farther ahead students in Asian countries are. But when he asked about their curriculum, he found teachers there are helping to develop very bright students in math and science using the same national curriculum used in the United States.
In Singapore, as well as India and China, they separate students who excel from those who don't.
"America is the only country that chooses to educate all of its students," Paine said. "Some of the leading nations in education sort out their kids."
Compton has observed the same thing, as did Thomas Friedman when researching his book, "The World is Flat." Both said that selective education is rampant in the Asian and Indian cultures. However, with much higher populations than the United States, those countries are still pushing out more highly-educated students.
"Given India's 1 billion-plus population, this competition produces a phenomenal knowledge meritocracy. It's like a factory, churning out and exporting some of the most gifted engineering, computer science and software talent on the globe," Friedman writes. "These societies that we are now melding with have a very high ethic of education. In India, putting a child through engineering or medical college is, for many middle-class families, a life's mission in a way that is almost unknown in the United States."
That "high ethic of education" speaks to another problem that besets American education, one that Friedman calls a mindset problem. Part of it is that too many people blame outsourcing for the loss of blue-collar jobs and an unstable job market, while hard data suggest the long-term effect isn't bleak for those who can adapt to the needs of the new workforce.
"There will be plenty of good jobs out there in a flat world for people with the right knowledge, skills, ideas and self-motivation to seize them," Friedman writes in the third edition of his book, released in 2007. "But ... every American today would be wise to think of himself or herself as competing against every young Chinese, Indian and Brazilian."
Friedman said Americans still want to believe there are good factory jobs that require nothing more than a high school diploma, a will to work and the "not-afraid-to-get-my-hands-dirty" attitude.
MCTC's Brooks said that mindset exists locally.
"Back in those days, you could get a job in a factory or a coal mine," Brooks said. "You could say, 'This is what my granddaddy did and what my daddy does and this is what I'm going to do.' But those jobs have changed. The whole job concept, what's needed out there today has changed."
A lot of those jobs are now done by automation and computers, but a human being is still needed to control the technology. And that requires an employee with a post-secondary education.
Compton questions the motivation of American students, and families for that matter, based on what he found in India and China.
"For (India and China), the motivation is getting out of poverty," Compton said. "For us, we're No. 1, and there's only one direction you can go, and that's down. So we have to stay as motivated and as educated as we can. We have to find a way to motivate (students).
"Catching up with Pennsylvania or Virginia doesn't help," Compton added. "We have to prepare our children to compete with children in other countries. Just jump to an international standard, which I think is in India and China."
Foreign concept
But thinking globally doesn't seem to come naturally in West Virginia, many say.
"There are 3,684 four-year colleges and universities, and we think there are only two -- Marshall and WVU," said Jamie Dickenson, a certified education planner in West Virginia who specializes in college admissions and financial aid assistance for high school students and their families.
Some families come to her because the high school counselor isn't doing enough, she said.
Nancy Newfeld has enlisted the services of Dickenson because she was unhappy with her son's high school counselor.
"They don't advise for the big picture," Nancy Newfeld said. "He was advised to take two years of a foreign language. That's what's required for Marshall and WVU. Shouldn't he have the guidance to suggest that he might need more? Not everyone wants to go to Harvard or Yale, but you should have that opportunity."
Some teachers, such as Cabell Midland High School world history teacher Rick Newman, are trying to reinforce the idea of a global economy. But he's not sure it is sinking in.
"These are the people who want your job," Rick Newman told his students last year when incorporating the idea of the global economy into a lesson on Japanese history. He told them that Japan, like India and China, requires more from its students than the American education system does.
"I think some do (grasp globalization), but a majority don't," Newman said. "But a lot of kids don't know what they want to do."
Andrew Brewer, who just graduated from Cabell Midland and is attending Purdue University on a football scholarship, also excelled in the classroom. He earned a 3.85 grade point average, good enough he thought, to get into Purdue's School of Pharmacy.
He said his first realization of how serious the national global competition is didn't come from his high school teachers or counselors. It came when he went to Purdue to register for the School of Pharmacy and couldn't get in.
"That's when I realized how much competition there really was," said Brewer, who was accepted into the School of Science and is majoring in biochemistry. "I thought I had the grades to get in."
In comparison, Compton and Friedman say China and India's young people aspire to be engineers or doctors from an early age. They take it so seriously that many students attend tutoring year round, spend their evenings studying and send in dozens of college applications, with the best colleges and universities always included. Compton said it's evident they aim higher than American students.
Dickenson notices the difference, too. She said she spends a month out of every year touring college campuses and has visited more than 400 schools. She talks regularly with admissions counselors and has come to find that foreign students are better prepared to see the big picture, while students in West Virginia aren't taught to plan that far ahead.
"They've got to equate their grades (in high school) to standard of living," Dickenson said. "You cannot take the easy way in high school and expect to do well in college."
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