In East San Jose, college is as possible as A-G
Although it’s only two months into the school year, I already know that 250 of my 400 classmates at Overfelt High in East San Jose will not go to college. How can I predict that dismal future? I have researched the statistics and I have experienced the uneven school curriculum firsthand.
Currently, two-thirds of the graduates from the East Side Union High School District do not qualify for a UC or CSU system school. To me, that is too many being told they cannot achieve and they cannot dream, too many in a community where “no’s” are much easier to come by than an encouraging “yes.”
Students can graduate with straight As from an East Side Union high school and still not be eligible for a four-year state college. Why? Because they were not enrolled in the right courses.
The A-G requirements are the classes high school students must pass in order to be eligible for a University of California or California State University school. The A-G requirements differ only slightly from our current graduation requirements – one more year of math (for three years total), two years of foreign language, and one year of fine arts (we currently require one year of foreign language or fine arts.).
I persoally did not learn about the A-G requirements from a counselor or my school. I was not involved in AVID, Puente, the Electronics Academy, or any other small learning community that guides students to college. I had to fend for myself and find my own way to college. Fortunately, I found Californians for Justice my freshman year. This non-profit organization broadened my horizons. Through CFJ, I learned about the A-G requirements and how to challenge myself, to talk to my counselors, and to demand that I was placed in AP courses. I know that not every student is as fortunate as I am. I have seen family members and close friends drop out of high school because they did not feel challenged. No one reached out to them; they just slipped through the cracks in our system.
Eighty percent of respondents in a student-led CFJ survey of East Side Union students, parents, and community members said they believe that it is imperative to enact the A-G requirements as the graduation requirements. Many of us are low-income students of color fighting for our chance to pursue higher education, to reach our full potential, to be the doctors, the lawyers, the politicians and every other profession only our dreams can capture. We need these requirements to make our dreams a reality.
Tomorrow, at the next East Side Union school board meeting, we are calling on board members to vote yes on a resolution that would make the A-G courses a default curriculum for 9th and 10th graders. This resolution is a significant first step towards ensuring that all of our students graduate with options for college and 21st century careers. The A-G curriculum adds just three classes to our high school’s graduation requirement. So why haven’t we made a small change to ensure that all of our students graduate prepared for college and 21st century careers?
Askari V. Gonzalez is a senior at William C. Overfelt High School in East San Jose who plans on attending a 4-year university in Fall 2011, with a double-major in creative writing and political science. He aspires to be an author as well as a public high school teacher in a low-income community and eventually to become involved in politics as a school trustee and future senator of California. He wrote this piece for the San Jose Mercury News Opinion Page.
This seems like a no brainer! Although I find it puzzling that a default curriculum is even required. Shouldn’t our high schools be requiring positive responses from students? Shouldn’t every student be given clear guidelines for planning his future?
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Seems like a no-brainer to me, too. We should be challenging students to go beyond the bare minimum to graduate and give them the opportunity to prepare for college, rather than finding out the requirements too late and having to catch up in community college, or give up. I really hope this passes.
Manny Barbara, VP of SVEF, posted a video on the A-G requirements on YouTube and I encourage you all to check it out (sorry for my shaky hand… I made the mistake of drinking coffee): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD-JDQRDQWs
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Overall I support adopting the full set of A-G requirements as high school graduation requirements, but as the mom of a current 11th-grader and a 2009 high school grad, I’ll still clarify why this isn’t a total no-brainer.
In cases where this would mean an extra year of math, for example, that would mean an extra year of torture for quite a number of kids. (And by the way, that would also apply to the vast majority of working newspaper journalists, in my experience — they are a flamboyantly math-challenged demographic overall. So some of those praising this requirement would shut up PDQ if it applied to them.)
Some students are equally challenged by foreign language — especially some with learning disabilities — including those with a mild degree of disability that doesn’t require special-ed services, but still leads to some challenges.
So for some students, those extra requirements might be the difference between dropping out and not. It can be another obstacle, another way they feel set up to fail.
For some students, flexibility is really essential for their success, and adding to the hard-and-fast requirements is the opposite of flexibility. If that extra math class is torture to a student who really wants to take an art class beyond the required minimum instead, you can see why the A-G requirements suddenly don’t look so appealing.
There are some classes popular with students and legitimately educational that don’t qualify under the A-G requirements, and imposing those requirements makes it harder to offer or take those classes. I’ve heard that some high school journalism and psychology classes don’t qualify, for example — but haven’t double-checked this.
As I say, I do think that the benefits of making the A-G requirements synonymous with high school graduation requirements outweigh the drawbacks, but in real life it’s not as clear-cut as it sounds in theory.
By the way, students may graduate from high school with a D in a required class, but a C is required for the class to count as a UC/CSU requirement. (Little-known fact: a high enough grade on an AP test or SAT II subject test will compensate for a missed/failed/D class in the UC/CSU requirements — we did have to deploy this obscure option for my quirky older child and it did work.)
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Given that the word used was “default curriculum”, I assume that a student who finds any subject to be torture can opt out. Are you really arguing that UC should change its requirements?
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No, I’m not even remotely arguing that UC should change its requirements. I’m simply pointing out that there ARE some downsides to the concept of requiring that students pass the full set of A-G classes to graduate from high school. My comment addressed a hypothetical situation in which the requirements were actually required. (I’m not sure how an opt-out option would work — one set of requirements that are on an opt-out basis, and another set that are genuinely required?)
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