Another vote for shortening high school

Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times[!]:

For many American high-school seniors, especially the soberest and most studious, senior year is a holding pattern, a redundancy, a way of running out the clock on a game that has already been won. When winter vacation rolls around, many of them, thanks to college early-admissions programs, know all they need to about their futures and have no more reason to hang around the schoolhouse than prehistoric fish had need for water once they grew limbs and could crawl out of the oceans. As for students who aren’t headed to four-year colleges but two-year community colleges or vocational schools, why not just get started early and read “Moby Dick” for pleasure, if they wish, rather than to earn a grade that they don’t need? Kids who plan to move right into the labor force are in the same position. They may as well spend the whole year in detention — which some of them, bored and restless, end up doing. Twelfth grade, for the sorts of students I’ve just described, amounts to a fidgety waiting period that practically begs for descents into debauchery and concludes in a big dumb party under a mirror ball that spins in place like the minds of those beneath it.

Comments

[Ted Craig]

I've been thinking about this since last week's "rant" and I find one flaw in your thinking. At my high school (which was an above average public high school, but average for the higher-end suburbs), you had a better chance of being taught by somebody with a doctorate your senior year than you did your freshman year at any public university. AP courses at most good schools are taught by people with more education and much more teaching experience than the equivalent intro course at the university. Cutting a year of high school could actually worsen a person's overall education.

[Liz]

Why wouldn't this just shift all that stuff to 11th grade? The problem seems to be that it's the last year of school, which would be true no matter when it ended. If students finished in 11th grade, they'd just apply to college in the fall of 11th grade instead of 12th.

[Jack]

I agree with Liz and Ted. Students usually are not motivated during their last year of high school, whether it is grade 11 or 12, unless it is AP that can be applied toward university credit. I do not think there would be much savings from cutting one year of HS, but on the other hand if more students take AP courses in grade 12 they could save time and money in college/university, whether 2-year or 4-year.

However, shortening HS may benefit potential dropouts, since many who would end up HS dropouts perhaps with GEDs would instead have HS diplomas, which could make them, and society, better off. (This is a guess; I don't know where the research literature is on this issue.)