When high school graduates start their first semester at college, they quickly realize that they are not fully prepared for their new role as a college student. Countless students and university professors have taken notice that rather than helping students succeed, high school education has been causing students to become unsuccessful in college. This is mainly due to the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001. The act was implemented to ‘‘ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education” (NCLB, 15). However, the NCLB act has been a huge failure. It punishes high schools and their students who struggle to meet policy requirements, limits student learning through standardized
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Standardized tests hinder student learning as teachers must take a large portion of their class time to focus on the standardized test, or else risk having a drop in student test scores. Using so much class time to focus on passing these tests however, are causing students to learn much less in high school. For me personally, I noticed in high school how my classes often revolved around standardized tests. Instead of learning more essential skills that would help me in school, college, or even life, my teachers would give out small assignments and projects that would relate to topics or questions that would be on the standardized tests. This hurt me and my classmates as we were all not only being ill taught in high school, but we were also being ill prepared for college. As stated earlier, standardized testing is a product of the NCLB act to measure AYP. However, through my own experience in high school I believe that AYP isn’t a measure of learning in the classroom, rather it’s a measurement of how well students like me memorized and regurgitated problems on the standardized …show more content…
In high school, students must sit in class and try to memorize all the information spoken by the teacher to do well in the class rather than think broadly about the material. This causes students to think non-critically. As Paulo Friere’s states in “The Banking Concept of Education”, “the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness…they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them” (Frierre, 3). This hurts college students because unlike high school teachers, college professors expect their students to think critically throughout the semester. In the book, The Transition to College Writing written by Keith Hjortshoj, Hjortshoj explains how college professors think students are ready for college, stating “college teachers tend to assume that [students] are already familiar with…expectations or that [students] will make the necessary adjustments on [their] own” (Hjortshoj, 9). However, I was not familiar to the expectations for college as I was ill prepared in high school. And personally, I had a rough time adjusting to think critically once I started college. I was so used to using the “copy and paste” mentality throughout high school, that it took a lot of practice before I could think critically in
Standardized tests hinder student learning as teachers must take a large portion of their class time to focus on the standardized test, or else risk having a drop in student test scores. Using so much class time to focus on passing these tests however, are causing students to learn much less in high school. For me personally, I noticed in high school how my classes often revolved around standardized tests. Instead of learning more essential skills that would help me in school, college, or even life, my teachers would give out small assignments and projects that would relate to topics or questions that would be on the standardized tests. This hurt me and my classmates as we were all not only being ill taught in high school, but we were also being ill prepared for college. As stated earlier, standardized testing is a product of the NCLB act to measure AYP. However, through my own experience in high school I believe that AYP isn’t a measure of learning in the classroom, rather it’s a measurement of how well students like me memorized and regurgitated problems on the standardized …show more content…
In high school, students must sit in class and try to memorize all the information spoken by the teacher to do well in the class rather than think broadly about the material. This causes students to think non-critically. As Paulo Friere’s states in “The Banking Concept of Education”, “the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness…they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them” (Frierre, 3). This hurts college students because unlike high school teachers, college professors expect their students to think critically throughout the semester. In the book, The Transition to College Writing written by Keith Hjortshoj, Hjortshoj explains how college professors think students are ready for college, stating “college teachers tend to assume that [students] are already familiar with…expectations or that [students] will make the necessary adjustments on [their] own” (Hjortshoj, 9). However, I was not familiar to the expectations for college as I was ill prepared in high school. And personally, I had a rough time adjusting to think critically once I started college. I was so used to using the “copy and paste” mentality throughout high school, that it took a lot of practice before I could think critically in