After hammering on The Atlantic yesterday for shoddy reporting, I found an article they published that suggests that taking harder classes in high school does not necessarily translate to future success in college. The article is titled When the Value of High School Is Exaggerated, but whose title on the tab of my browser is Success in High School Doesn’t Mean Good Grades in College. I think both titles and the articles point describe our experience well:
Instead, the pair [who did the research on which the article was based] thinks that if high schools want to prepare students for college, they should focus less on specific content and more on critical thinking and reasoning. Most students will forget the specifics of, say, mitosis shortly after they take their AP biology exam, but they might retain the broader concepts of conducting an experiment and presenting evidence. “It’s really the underlying skills that stay with people,” Hershbein said. That may be one reason that calculus seems to be the one exception in the research, where students who have exposure in high school benefit “mildly” in terms of better college grades. That’s “probably because it is based on cumulative learning to a greater extent than other subjects,” the authors note.
Our premise all along has been that there are a lot of students who could easily transition to community college after the eighth grade. This allows the students to avoid the academic and cultural malaise that characterize the vast majority of traditional schools in America (government and private) and move into an environment much better suited for success in their future endeavors. The community college system in the US is profoundly better at preparing students for life after school either in a trade or further educational endeavor at a four year college. You can read about our experience pursuing that path in the series of posts on this blog titled Why Not Skip High School?