Are we preparing them for life?

In the venerable auditorium of Coughlin High School, with an embattled school board as backdrop, 24 Wilkes-Barre+Area+School+District%22>Wilkes-Barre Area School District seniors took turns accepting valedictorian awards. Are they ready for life after high school?

In a pre-kindergarten class at Dan Flood Elementary where learning is masked as fun, Jacob Wasman, 5, and Devan Steininger, 4, stopped playing with plastic lizards long enough to blurt out their future careers. “A fireman!” Jacob grinned. “A race car driver,” Devan said.

Jamie Gwynn admits he wasn’t ready. He slouched through GAR High School before buckling down as a senior, wrangled a “conditional acceptance” from Wilkes University, and was unprepared for the work professors demanded. Yet this year he was the first in his family to earn a college degree, graduating summa cum laude.

Are our public schools giving graduates the tools to succeed? Or are we pouring tax dollars into a money pit of mediocrity? The question flares up periodically with the release of disappointing test results.

It has been fueled recently by a state plan to tie diplomas directly to results from “graduation competency” tests.

An empirical answer seems tantalizingly close, thanks to more than a decade of state standardized tests in math and reading, and reams of reports created after the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind Law required national tracking of academic achievement. The deluge of data surely should tell us how well students are learning, district by district.

College preparedness

In January the Pennsylvania Department of Education released a study that looked at how many incoming freshman attending the 24 state-owned and community colleges required remedial reading and math courses. Data was given for graduates from individual school districts. Statewide, one-third of the students reviewed required remediation.

Locally, only Wyoming Area School District had a higher rate – 37 percent, while Wilkes-Barre Area mirrored the statewide rate of 33 percent. Rates in other local districts ranged from 19 to 30 percent. But even in the district with the lowest rate – Crestwood – one-fifth of the students involved in the study were unprepared for college work.

Results from the Pennsylvania System of Scholastic Assessment, or PSSA tests, offer even more concern. The state gives reading and math tests in grades three through eight, and 11. In every Luzerne County district, 11th grade students do more poorly in math than younger students.

In some cases the drop is precipitous. Data from 2007-08, the latest available, shows that in Lake-Lehman School District, nearly 87 percent of fifth-graders scored proficient or better in math, while only about 50 percent did in 11th grade. That’s a plunge of nearly 37 percentage points. At Dallas, better than 85 percent of fifth graders scored proficient or better, while only 56 percent of 11th graders did.

Reading scores are a little more promising. The gaps between fifth and 11th graders are smaller, and the older students actually did a little better in seven of the 11 county districts.

The drop in high school math scores is a statewide phenomenon, and historic data shows it’s been this way at least since 2002, when No Child Left Behind set minimum goals for test results and required those goals to increase steadily.

The current goal in math is 56 percent scoring proficient or better. In 2007-08, six of our 11 districts missed that goal in 11th grade results. Statewide, 330 of 678 schools hit the math goal in 11th grade. Among all 11th graders in the state, 55.9 percent scored proficient or better in math.

Despite such discouraging data, the vast majority of local high school graduates plan to attend college, or at least seek some sort of post-secondary education. According to state data from 2006-07, nearly 77 percent of Luzerne County public school graduates intended to seek more education, 73 percent planning to go on to either a two-year or four-year college.

Yet planning for, attending and completing college are three different things, and there is no uniform, district-level data that shows how many students ultimately fulfilled their degree-earning ambitions.

When the Institute for Public Policy & Economic Development released its annual “Indicators Report” in May, it included a few post-secondary tidbits. On the one hand, more people older than 25 had obtained an associate degree, 8.8 percent in 2007 versus 6.9 percent in 2000.

Yet the percentage of residents older than 25 with a bachelor’s degree had dropped, from 12.6 percent in 2006 to 10 percent in 2007. Statewide, 22.4 percent of those 25 or older have at least a bachelor’s degree. Nationally, it’s 24.4 percent.Those numbers don’t necessarily reflect on the success of local school districts. Students may leave the area before or after obtaining their degrees, and people without degrees may migrate in.

The data may not paint a clear picture, but there are other ways to gauge the preparedness of high school grads.

Employers’ complaints

Terry Ooms, the executive director of the institute that did the Indicators Report, said a lack of basic skills among high school graduates is a recurring complaint from employers she deals with.

The institute’s primary objective is to foster collaboration among employers, school districts and colleges to promote economic revitalization.

“Anecdotally, a lot of employers are frustrated that graduates lack basic workplace skills like how to communicate well, office etiquette, customer service skills,” Ohms said.

The hard data – the drop in 11th grade state test scores, SAT scores that tend to be lower than state or national averages and poor results in state science tests given for the first time last year – may not mean that high schools are failing to prepare students for their adult futures. But “when the numbers aren’t positive, we need to know why,” she said.

Tom Thomas, who runs the program that provides support service for students at Wilkes University, estimated the number of freshman needing remedial work ranges from 100 to 200 annually, a number echoed by King’s College Vice President of Academic Affairs Nicholas Holodick.

Neither school tracks what districts those students came from. It’s worth noting that neither college calls it remediation.

“Our attitude has always been that, in education, what you do is meet the students where they are and take them from there,” Holodick said.

That can mean providing courses to bring student reading or math skills up to par, offering tutoring or helping students develop broader study skills.

Joan Bush at Luzerne County Community College said about 44 percent of first-time students need some sort of assistance, most often with math, reading or English, but stressed that the school does not reject any applicants and that it caters to a very diverse student body. Students range from high school graduates to older people looking to learn something new or brush up old skills.

All three agreed on one common shortfall among high school graduates: “The students read less, and colleges – especially in the first two years – require a great deal of reading,” Thomas said. “Students come unprepared to tackle the work needed, to study independently.”

And it’s not just the opinion of the faculty or administration. Thomas said students voice surprise at the workload when filling out surveys for the college.

Reduced time spent reading is a national phenomenon. In his controversial book, “The Dumbest Generation,” Emory University English Professor Mark Bauerlein calls this crop of students “The New Bibliophobes” and rattles off statistics from multiple reports to justify the label.

One survey in 2002 designed by the National Endowment for the Arts (where Bauerlein has worked as director of research and analysis) found that the percentage of people age 18-24 who said they had read voluntarily during leisure time in the past 12 months dropped from 59.8 percent in 1982 to 42.8 percent in 2002.

Another survey sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that, in 2003 and 2005, 15 to 24 year olds said they read for leisure only about eight minutes a day, about one-third of the time spent reading by the general population.

“We’re talking about students being in one room at home or a residential hall with 120 television channels,” Thomas said. “They have Internet access to anywhere in the world, all types of entertainment – visual, musical, instant messaging, video games – all are diversions that really test students.”

Adolescence prolonged

In his book, Bauerlein argues that the high speed access to endless information and the relentless connectivity students enjoy simply prolong adolescence. Instead of using it to learn, he contends, students use it for entertainment and social networking, insulating themselves from the things they need to see and do to become productive adults. It’s a theory only partially embraced by the college officials interviewed for this story.

“Absolutely they use it for socializing,” Thomas said. The shortcoming of some high school graduates isn’t a lack of intelligence, but “they don’t have the strategies and ability to work independently.”

The solution isn’t simply to make them put down their gadgets and pick up books.

“I think everyone has compromised,” Thomas said. “High schools have tried to increase expectations, but colleges have also accepted the fact that freshmen are very different than students who have been on campus for two or three years, and there is a transition period.”

So colleges offer a broad range of support to incoming new students, including remedial classes, tutoring, and help in developing study skills.

“They are distracted,” Holodick said. “They have news 24/7, all the technology, Twitter, Facebook. What we need to do as teachers is embrace this technology and take advantage of it.”

“It’s very difficult to point to any one reason students come unprepared,” Bush said. “More students work than ever before. They have more family issues. There are so many variables that it’s difficult to say this one is the issue we have locally or nationally.”

Attaining motivation

There’s also the question of student motivation. Gwynn, the high school slacker turned college grad showcase, went from a 2.1 grade point average at the end of his junior year in high school to a 3.9 GPA for his entire college career.

He credited the conversion to several motivations: A realization that he was going nowhere fast, a few teachers and counselors who helped him see his potential, and paying for college himself.

“I’m a firm believer that it doesn’t’ matter what your grades are in high school if you have fundamental knowledge in writing, the ability to ask questions and learn. There is this negative stereotype that if you do poorly in high school you’ll do poorly in college, and that’s wrong.”

Others agreed, though with a reservation voiced succinctly by Ooms: “Personal gumption and passion account for something,” she said, “but to learn, you have to be taught.”

The institute she runs focuses “on trying to get people to understand that pre-kindergarten through post-secondary education is the economic future of our area, and we need to have collaboration on all levels,” including business, government, school districts and colleges.

The right mix doesn’t simply assure that those valedictorians and their fellow grads succeed next year, it will help Trinity Hull and Anthony Silva accomplish their ambitions sometime around 2025. They sat in that pre-kindergarten class (run by Head Start of Luzerne County), using a computer mouse to launch colorful balls bouncing around in a red rectangular tunnel on the screen. What are they planning to be?

“A doctor!” Trinity said confidently, her smile exposing a gap of missing baby teeth.

COMING TOMORROW

Not every high school graduate wants or needs to attend college. Read about other options in Monday’s Times Leader.