The article's author, James Rosenbaum, argues that too many students are entering college but not earning degrees because they are unprepared for the amount and level of college coursework. He proposes a 6 part solution, focused mostly on high school counselors and teachers.

Let's start by discussing two questions:

1. Do you agree with Rosenbaum's argument that failure to exert academic effort in high school is one of the primary causes of students dropping out of college?

2. What can educators at the K-8 level do to help assure that our students will go on to make good post-secondary choices and achieve their post-secondary goals? Jill Manning, the LA TNLI fellow who recommended this article, is an elementary school math coach and former kindergarten teacher, and she suggested that this work begins in the primary grades. What are educators you know doing to help prepare students for college?

I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts!

Lara Goldstone
Los Angeles
12/1/04

Instead, we have role models who work little and are extremely successful. As an elementary school teacher I find it quite frustrating to try to instill in my students the need and desire to work hard to accomplish a goal. The support that is needed from both home and society is lacking. While this needs to be taught and internalized it is becoming increasingly difficult to do either as a classroom teacher without the necessary support from the home and from society as a whole. Unfortunately, students in elementary school do not recognize college as something that is in their immediate realm of understanding. Being very literal and wanting immediate reinforcement, it is difficult for them to understand that the effort they put forth today directly correlates to the effort they will put forth in the future. This concept is very difficult to teach at such an early age, yet it needs to be taught and continues to be a focus in my school. We stress the importance of effort in everything that our students do. While we still struggle with students who put forth minimal effort we are continuing to reinforce students who do exert the needed effort and to provide as many positive role models as possible for those who do not put forth the necessary amount of effort. I hope this is helpful. I look forward to hearing additional thoughts on this subject.

Denise Snyder
Millsboro, DE
12/5/04

Mark Grashow
NYC
12/5/04

I agree that failure to exert academic effort in HS is one of the causes of drop out in college. I'm not sure it is one of the primary causes. I think motivation is by far the greatest factor.

I'm a little distressed at this whole discussion. Where is the desire to learn? Where is the love of learning for its own sake? This discussion seems focused on what we can do to make students effective at jumping the hoops of education, but nothing on how to help students love learning for its own sake.

I'm not sure I want to help students to 'achieve their post-secondary goals' because often, their 'goals' are merely what they think society deems best for them, and not a goal from their heart. I want to help my students to discover a passion. Something they love so much, they will work hard to create a product that reflects their passion - and not do it 'for the grade' or 'because it'll be good on their resume.'

I am more concerned that my students have success in life. I realize that achievement in college is one of the manifestations of that, but it isn't the only one.

Margaret Nye
San Francisco

<<Where is the desire to learn? Where is the love of learning for its own sake?>>

I would like to know how to instill that passion for learning in every student. Is it possible for us to do that as teachers or is it something that students need to develop for themselves? It would make sense that if students had the desire to learn, they would likely put more effort in whatever they do, including doing well in school.

As an early primary teacher (K-2), I am lucky to see that desire and excitement in the eyes of my students when they learn something new or discover they have accomplished something. Mark, what happens between when they enter school excited and believing they can do anything to feeling miserable and helpless? Having worked with high school students for so long, and knowing them well; what are some things we can do to not only ensure that they don't get lost in the system, but to keep that thirst for knowledge alive?

Jane Fung
Los Angeles
December 6, 2004

Perhaps our role as educators to counteract this would be to focus on effort - both in our curriculum and in our grading. This can be done in all grades. It always bothers me to see students' evaluations boiled down to a few tests, quizzes, etc. Too often do we have students who are trying their best but still failing for whatever reason? Perhaps it is time to take the focus off the end result (the grade) and put it on the learning and the effort put forth.

It is too simple to blame bad schools or a bad school system when we see little effort from our students. Even in the best of schools, with the safest classrooms and the most imaginative teachers, students need to put forth effort to succeed. I don't blame the students - they simply react to what they are given. The society, home, and school are at fault for creating a situation where students don't see the connection between effort and success.

Tim Fredrick
New York City
December 6, 2004

Lara Goldstone
Los Angeles
December 7, 2004

David Silberberg
New York City
December 7, 2004

What does that mean? One could say, for example, that the reason why we are experiencing global warming is because there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or that the ozone layer is depleted. True? Most scientists would agree. But is that explanation deep enough? Don't we need to know why there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or why the ozone layer is depleted?

The statement that students do not do well in college because of a lack of effort in high school may indeed have an element of truth in it, although even it strikes me as rather incomplete [Americans attend post-secondary education at a much higher rate than any other advanced industrial society, so clearly one factor is that our net is a lot wider than other nation's nets], but one then must ask why they are not working as hard as they might be in high school. If we don't ask that question, then we can simply infer what every causal explanation we would like to why students are not working hard in high school. They may not be working hard because American high school students are lazy. Or it may be that American schools just don't push their students to work hard [there is a new book by the American political scientist Michael Barone which suggests that American education is one of the few 'soft' institutions in American society, shielding students from the 'hard' realities of competition.]

Or, and here comes one of the possibilities I find more interesting, it may be that American high school students don't work hard when they don't see an efficacy in hard work, when they don't see a connection between hard work and effort and the outcomes of that effort. The late anthropologist John Ogbu offers an explanation of this type for the negative peer culture toward academic achievement among some African-American students -- the notion that high achieving African-American students are "acting white." If you believe that the deck is stacked against you, that racism will prevent you from having the life you want regardless of how well you achieve [and although such a belief is clearly less well-founded then in the past, it is not completely without merit], then why should you exert yourself to work harder? That is not a complete explanation for the "acting white" phenomenon, but it certainly is a major part of it.

So the key question may be not "do American students fail in college because they don't work hard enough in high school?" but "why is it that American high school students don't work as hard as they might?"

Leo Casey
New York City
December 7, 2004

Helen Gieske
State of Delaware
December 7, 2004

I was watching the news this past weekend, I forget the exact focus and channel, but I think it was actually about preparing students for college (it was not about NCLB) and a point was brought up that in other countries were they place a high cultural value on education, school is often seen as the student's job, their only job. It was said that here, in America, we put more of an emphasis on being "well-rounded". Did anyone else catch this? We all hear this message about being a well-rounded student. Do students in other countries take school much more seriously because of the cultural value placed on their role in their education, and, therefore, put more effort into their studies?

I also read Ogbu's research in grad school. Leo and Lamson bring up some very interesting points to ponder as we look more deeply at the complex reasons why, as Leo put fourth, American student's do not work harder than they might.

Nicole Nadeau
New York
December 7, 2004

Carol Gregor
Santa Barbara
December 10, 2004

Before I became a teacher, I was a documentary film producer, and in addition to my English Lit classes, I teach Documentary Video Production. My doc students have seen some of the films I’ve worked on, one recently in a real movie theater, while in the process of creating their own. I have explained to them that documentary film is a destitute industry, hard work, and will never, no matter how many trips to Sundance, yield the cash money that a rap, NBA, or engineering career will. But still, I watch these students work HARD for real results. They explore contemporary “art,” they are gathering relevant skills in researching, interviewing, camera operation, and editing. They learn to question sources; they learn to construct an argument, to back it up with hard evidence, to deconstruct the codes and messages around them. They watch and force the collision of five academic subjects in the same place at the same time. They also create a finished product: A real movie that they built, all by themselves, from the very beginning to the very end.
We have no reason to expect students to be fired up and passionate about learning at any level if we’re only teaching them math equations and five paragraph essays. We do have to teach these things—that is a fact. As teachers, we often have so much working against us when we try to do more creative things in the classroom and our students are confronted with a million reasons to leave school no matter what their background. Because of these things, I believe we have to keep fighting bad policy and publicly recognize real barriers (racial and otherwise), which is why I am part of TNLI. But in the meantime, as my video students write practice "Task II" ELA Regents essays to consolidate their research data, I also don’t believe, at least yet, that our hands are too tied to facilitate enjoyable, real connections between effort—the kind we all WANT to spend, and real success. To me, that’s the passion of learning.
Leslie Jirsa
New York City
December 11, 2004

I found these comments on the OpEd page of the Wilmington News Journal, and then located it online at the address below. I think it sheds some insight into the serious problem we have getting our young men interested in academics. As an aside, perhaps somewhat related, a couple of weeks ago there was a series on NPR centered around the reduced roles men are now playing in our society. With women taking over many top leadership roles formerly reserved for men, what are the men doing? Perhaps this explains a reason rather than an effect.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34784-2004Dec4.html

Helen Gieske
State of Delaware
December 26, 2004

Lara Goldstone
Los Angeles
December 28, 2004