Are we dumbing down the next generation by lowering expectations and accepting mediocrity?
The African-American community should be concerned that the average African-American student in all schools in our parish is not being prepared for higher-order thinking. We are being prepared for the labor market, and then only for the projected jobs that will be available in our part of the state.
The problem is that an increasing number of African-American students are finding that upon graduation that they have not been prepared for higher-order thinking, but they will be ready for the labor pool.
In Louisiana, college admission is based on two general factors: Overall GPA and ACT scores. A student with a 3.5 GPA and 21 on the ACT exam has an 80 percent chance of being selected at most of Louisiana’s public universities other than LSU.
The idea is that college is rigorous and demanding and only those who have reasonably acceptable GPA and ACT scores have a better chance at succeeding.
How well are predominately African-American schools preparing students for higher-order thinking as reflected in ACT scores?
For the last three years, the schools in our parish with African-American supermajority student populations have been scoring an average of 15 on the ACT. That’s extremely low and generally means low scoring students will have a very hard time being accepted into a four-year public college and no private colleges.
A 15 on the ACT exam is a deal-breaker.
It’s a trend that is reflected in both parish and city schools, where the supermajority of the graduating class is African-American. Richwood High’s latest ACT average is 15.4. Carroll High School’s is 15.1. Wossman High is 15.7. In neighboring Morehouse Parish, Bastrop High School is 14.7.
How bad is that? A student with a 3.7 GPA but only scores 15 on the ACT only has a 51% chance of being accepted.
It’s even harder for students with lower GPA. A 3.0 average student needs a 21 on the ACT to have a 51% chance of being accepted.
Making it even more difficult, colleges not only consider the GPA of the student but the difficulty of the subjects that produced the GPA. Students that get a high GPA without taking difficult courses are skipped over too.
Have we lowered the expectations of our students? Increasingly, we are hearing more educators say, “College is not for everybody.” That is a true statement, but at the rate we are going those capable of higher-order thinking are going to be fewer.
It is reminiscent of a statement once said by Rev. James Earl Jackson, pastor of the Faith Harvest Baptist Church in Monroe, who says that the new slavemaster “Does not prevent us from getting a higher education, he simply makes a lesser education more appealing.”
The state has made vocational schools more appealing to educators. Schools that promote a career path, which is easier than the college path, can receive the same recognition and praise they would receive for graduating a high number of college-bound students.
Schools with high “Work Keys” scores, which involve an extremely diluted workplace examination, get the same or more praise from the state as if they had a high ACT average.
In the aftermath, more students are graduating without rigorous study that produces better thinkers. Some graduates have never written a 10-page term paper or a five-page research paper. Some have not read a book or novel with more than 200 pages. Many have very little knowledge of history, world literature, the arts and civics.
All of these, in addition to reading, analyzing, and research skills are critical to higher-order thinking; they are not needed by common laborers.
Sadly, the Monroe City Schools, with a black supermajority of board members, places its focus on building buildings and is not rigorously pursing a plan to correct this downward trend.
Each year, our systems are failing to raise the expectations of minority students.
A decade from now, we will see the result: Fewer lawyers, doctors, nurses, researchers, scientist, and fewer teachers.
It’s heart-breaking to watch the dumbing down of an entire generation.
It’s a bleak future that very few in the educational circles want to speak about publicly.
Whether they speak about it or not this repeated pattern of 15s on the ACT is writing the epitaph for a failing generation.
