Education, Careers & Professional News
The right choice for Alabama students
Twelve years ago, the Alabama State Board of Education took a bold stand and achieved national recognition. On April 11, 1996, it voted to implement a 4-by-4 curriculum, which required all high school students to take (and pass) four years of English, social studies, science and mathematics, with the required highest level math being Algebra I and geometry.
The second step taken by the state board that day was to approve elevating the Alabama High School Graduation Exam from an eighth-grade level to a true high school level exit exam. The final achievement was to create an Advanced Academic Endorsement on the Alabama High School Diploma that students could volunteer to pursue. The voluntary Advanced Academic Endorsement included Algebra II with trigonometry and two years of the same foreign language.
These combined actions placed Alabama in the top five states for our rigorous standards. In the last decade, however, most other states have met or exceeded the challenge that we once helped establish.
The 2006 class of seniors saw only 39 percent graduate with the voluntary Advanced Academic Endorsement. We can do better. Alabama must have more and better prepared high school graduates to stay competitive with other states in supplying a skilled work force for the much sought-after economic development initiatives for which we are becoming famous. With slightly more than one-third of our high school graduates achieving the Advanced Academic Endorsement, we almost have a guarantee we will lose our competitive edge.
Intel spokesman Howard High said back in 2005, “We go where the smart people are. Now our business operations are two-thirds in the U.S. and one-third overseas. But that ratio will flip over the next 10 years (2015).” To add a little more urgency to the situation, we have to look no further than Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow,” Gates also said in 2005.
People who hire people in good-paying jobs want well-educated workers. If following more than a few decades of allowing students to volunteer into more rigorous coursework doesn’t yield the desired results, maybe it is time to turn the coin and place students in the Advanced Academic Endorsement pathway leading to a high school diploma and let them and their parents opt out, rather than in.
Five years ago, we could not have entertained this idea because our foundational components were too weak. We were struggling to fund the Alabama Reading Initiative in all schools, and the Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative was a beginning pilot program in Huntsville. There was no distance-learning initiative.
Today, the Reading Initiative is in all K-3 schools; the Math, Science and Technology Initiative will be in 40 percent of all K-12 schools by August; and the distance-learning initiative is in 43 percent of all high schools, with online courses available in 100 percent of our high schools. Today is the right time for First Choice.