I know where you are coming from. Kentucky has the same problem: Kids that are lacking the basic skills needed to succeed at the next level. I taught high school pre-engineering and technology education for twenty-eight years, grades 9-12. The 12th grade students I had during my last year did not have the basic skills that the 9th grade students had during my first year.
The problem in KY is twofold: 1) The 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), and 2) NCLB falling short. KERA began as a lawsuit to equalize school funding across the state. The result of the lawsuit was a twenty-plus year failure that lowered the knowledge base of several generations of KY kids. At the time in 1990, KY ranked near the bottom nationally as far as high school graduates going on to college and near the bottom in adult literacy. KERA lowered the KY education standards to the point that high school graduates must complete a minimum of two years of post-secondary study to get what kids used to get in high school. Now KY adults are going on to college to get what they used to get in high school. Looks better on the national level!
The assessment instrument utilized with KERA utilized mostly all open response writing in all content areas. So if a student was a good writer, he or she could justify a wrong answer in writing and still get full credit. KY newspapers reported several instances in which elementary students received full credit for wrong answers in math because they justified their answer so well in writing. Sound familiar to common core education? It should because the federal common core curriculum is partially based upon the principals of the failed KY KERA curriculum.
NCLB was a good piece of education legislation. Anyone that has read the entire law understands the main principal is the fact that all children will possess a foundation of basic skills before leaving the third grade level. In other words, kids would master the basic core concepts of reading and math before tackling other subjects. Sounds logical; we all know reading is the key to learning.
However, NCLB fell short when it came to assessment. Legislators caved-in and allowed it to pass without any national standardized assessment. States were allowed to implement their own form of assessment. Several states simply attached NCLB to their present failed system of education. KY, for example, has wasted so many million dollars of taxpayer money on KERA that it simply attached NCLB onto KERA to “save-face” to avoid admitting KERA was a huge mistake. People in several states that were nagging about NCLB when in reality the problem was their present failed system of education just wrapped in a NCLB cloak!
In KY it seems the only purpose of elementary schools is to get kids to school each day to be counted for the daily attendance funding. Everything has to be made “fun” for the kids whether any learning takes place or not. All the “fun” stuff does not allow much time for actual teaching. Our middle schools are teaching the elementary curriculum and our high schools are teaching the middle school curriculum. For example, I had to master the states and capitals during fourth grade. Now KY students do not learn the states and capitals during twelfth grade. Our universities are teaching the remainder of the high school curriculum in the form of 0900 remedial core courses that do not count as college credit. Over seventy-five percent of the freshman class at our regional university has to complete remedial courses. Ah! More graduates attending college! Yeah right and we know why!
Every state has similar problems and will continue until there is some sort of standardized K-12 curriculum implemented in the United States with a standardized assessment instrument utilized in all states. This way if an eight-grader moves from Ohio to Montana it will be taught the same curriculum. By the same token, a standardized national assessment is the only fair way to determine how effective a school really is!