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Proyecto Visión 21

The Class of 2025 needs our help beginning today

 

Francisco Miraval

I do not know why I was surprised when I recently read the results of a report published by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) indicating that most of the students at public and private high schools in the United States do not write at the proper level. After all, working in the educational field, I should have known that fact.

The report, based in exams administrated in 2011 to 50,000 students in grades 8 and 12, reveals that only 24 percent of students in those grades were able to write a well-developed essay, with good organization and free from grammatical or spelling mistakes. Another 3 percent of students received an “Advanced” score. The rest of the students only showed partial mastery of writing skills.

The situation gets even more complicated among minority students, because there is a significant achievement gap (around 10 percent of the total score) separating White students from Hispanic and African American students. The same achievement gap also affects male students and students from low-income families.

To understand the true dimensions of this problem we need to take into consideration two additional elements: the results of writing exams from previous years and what is expected to happen in the future.

Five years ago, 33 percent of students in grade 8 and 24 of students in grade 12 received a “Satisfactory” score in the writing test, showing solid writing skills.

In other words, it seems the situation is getting worst. However, there is an important clarification to be made. Five years ago, the exams were completed using pencils and paper. In 2011, all exams were electronically completed in laptops. For that reason, NAGB said it is not possible to compare the previous results with the new ones.

Whatever the case, it seems students wrote better essays using pencils and paper than using computers, mainly, according to a NAGB advisor, because students do not use computers to write essays and, therefore, they are unfamiliar with word processors and their functions, such as grammar and spell-checkers.

And if in 2012, in spite of new technologies, only one in four high school students writes at grade level (even less among minority students), what can we expect in the future?

This month, four million children in the United States entered kindergarten. Because of the year when they are expected to graduate from high school, they are known as the Class of 2025. This class is different from previous classes because this is the first “minority majority” generation, that is, more than 50 percent of students are not White.  In addition, according to a story in the September 12, 2012, issue of EducationWeek, most of those children are Spanish-speakers, followed by Asians. 

In other words, the class of 2025 will be the first high school graduation class where most of the students will belong to minorities. If we want to give them a chance, we should commit ourselves to help the class of 2025 starting today. After all, they are our children.

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