You may have missed it but in a month of lowest-common-denominator political maneuvers, lawsuits stalling pretty much everything and the exposition of the Boston Celtics as one of basketball’s best ever, the New York State Board of Regents announced plans to overhaul its criteria to obtain a high school diploma.
Ah, high school. My own experience with the issue came when you could hear Jimi Hendrix and Cream on the radio, watch a talking horse and a war on television and lust after any car with fuel injection, whatever that was. My strongest memory is of running as fast as possible out of there, wearing a cap and gown, and clutching a diploma. Some of my teachers were pretty hot, by my adolescent standards, but that’s what I remember.
The Regents’ plan calls for alternative ways of getting students out the door — credit for things outside lying in a classroom. It defines standards for things other than knowing what the Magna Carta was for, like “critical thinking,” “innovative problem solving,” “cultural competence” and several other categories which admit there’s more than one way to learn something.
“Critical thinking.” If that catches on, every pop star and politician will be out of work.
A Regents’ statement goes on to say that disabled or English language learners will not be disadvantaged., and that hitting the right numbers on the Regents exam will not be the sole determinant for graduation. Sounds good to me; the Regents people essentially are giving up control over things after only 159 years.
I visited a high school guidance office about 15 years ago, for purposes of reporting and journalistic excellence. The place was staffed by about a dozen people and operating like a newsroom from the movies as a five-alarm fire was in progress in another part of town. My own guidance office was one man at one desk in a closet-sized office. He seemed to guide a lot of boys into the Marines and a lot of girls into cosmetology schools.
The new Regents guidelines also provide for disabled and English language learning students and basically acknowledge that there are ways to accommodate oneself and involve oneself, with society after high school. It’s what’s called “life experience,” and even if you’re 17 you have some of it. Colleges have been respecting it and rewarding it for years, and it’s good that the Regents’ 159-year-old hold on who graduates and who does not is seeing some changes.
Thus, assuming this works, the jock, the nerd, the artsy-fartsy, the emo kid, the closet poet, the ones who are amped about climate change, will get some due.
This is so different from the old days. High school war batch processing; a group goes in, gets worked over in a manner befitting the sons and daughters of the working class and then gets sent out. My high school yearbook featured headshots of the graduates and lists of their extracurricular activities, followed by plans for the future. You expect that in a yearbook, but for every face with a prospective college attached to it, another listed “military” or “work.”
No one in that graduating class likely said, “High school! What a magical time! What a great experience!” It was more like preparation for the grind life could become. Whether current high school students feel that way, I do not know but I suspect not; there are presumably schools with a single track – which is why the costliest private high schools do not offer courses in welding – but the Regents’ reformation of what it expects suggests that all the ways of “getting a good education” must be honored and appreciated.
No one taught me about jazz or classical music in high school. Or how to cook exotic meals, reconcile religion with non-belief, actually navigate in a foreign language, or tune a carburetor. There is little demand these days for carburetor expertise, but those other things came to me without the involvement of the New York State Board of Regents.
Grownups at the time often told me that you could not learn everything from books – but only when it suited their arguments or reinforced their prejudices – and they were right. While high school may never be a garden of learning where a hundred flowers bloom, it seems there have been some improvements since my time in the barrel.
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