Michael Petrilli argues that we should tell a lot more students that college is not for them. He writes:
But what if such a cautionary sermon is exactly what some teenagers need? What if encouraging students to take a shot at the college track—despite very long odds of crossing its finish line—does them more harm than good? What if our own hyper-credentialed life experiences and ideologies are blinding us to alternative pathways to the middle class? Including some that might be a lot more viable for a great many young people? What if we should be following the lead of countries like Germany, where “tracking” isn’t a dirty word but a common-sense way to prepare teenagers for respected, well-paid work?Here’s a stark fact: According to research by Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, less than 10 percent of poor children now graduate with a four-year college degree.
Almost everyone writing about education in the United States today focuses on the need for more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) workers.
While there is certainly value in studying those fields, The Atlantic’s Michael Teitelbaum argues STEM isn’t about finding jobs:
Among college-educated information technology workers under age 30, temporary workers from abroad constitute a large majority. Even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad—U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.
Claims of workforce shortages in science and engineering are hardly new. Indeed there have been no fewer than five “rounds” of “alarm/boom/bust” cycles since World War II. Each lasted about 10 to 15 years, and was initiated by alarms of “shortages,” followed by policies to increase the supply of scientists and engineers. Unfortunately most were followed by painful busts—mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and funding cuts that inflicted severe damage to careers of both mature professionals and the booming numbers of emerging graduates, while also discouraging new entrants to these fields.
“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.” –Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
There will be two days of the propaganda test, Tuesday and the Wednesday/Thursday block schedule: Wednesday for 6th Period, Thursday for 3rd/5th.
Tuesday is over the major concepts and authors, including:
- George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language
- Chomsky and Herman’s The Manufacture of Consent
- Jacques Ellul’s The Characteristics of Propaganda
- Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Data Smog, Central and Peripheral Communication
The block schedule test will be a review of propaganda techniques.
All the notes are available online.
Given the compressed schedule of the Smarter Balanced Assessment and concern about AP test preparation, I’ve decided to change the due date for the Propaganda research paper to May 20. You may still send me drafts before the final due date, other than during the Weeks of Doom AP test preparation.
In exchange for this change, we do have a new analysis essay due on Sunday, March 23. You will write the Welty analysis paper by then and submit it to Google Docs.
Recap of Writing Assignments:
- Sunday, March 16: Two rhetorical devices due, as well as optional Louv Analysis
- Tuesday, March 18: 2nd Revision of Carson essay due
- Sunday, March 23: Welty Analysis Essay Due
- Tuesday, May 20: Last Draft of the Propaganda Research Paper Due
Daniel Levinson and Erika Broadhurst argue that the threat of doctors abusing drugs, including drug use that involves reusing needles on patients, requires drug testing of doctors:
Hospitals can do more to protect patients. Improved security, such as surveillance of drug storage areas, tighter chain of custody on drugs, and better tracking of controlled substances are obvious areas to target.
ut we should go further. We believe hospitals should be required to perform random drug tests on all health care workers with access to drugs. The tests should be comprehensive enough to screen for fentanyl and other commonly abused drugs and must keep up with evolving drug abuse patterns.
This is hardly a radical suggestion. By federal law, many workers in transportation or other safety-sensitive areas are already subject to random drug tests. These include pilots, school bus drivers, truck drivers, flight attendants, train engineers, subway operators, ship captains and pipeline emergency response crews.
