When I read the lead article in last Wednesday’s Emerald (Oregon House bill requires high schoolers to plot course for future), I was speechless. It might be the worst idea for fixing education that I have ever seen, but worse, it disadvantages students from low-income families and students of color. But more on that in a second.
HB 2732 would require all high school students in Oregon to prove they have applied to either an institution of higher education, the U.S. Armed Forces or an apprenticeship program. The debate outlined in the Emerald confirmed my fears; legislators in Salem have literally no idea what they are doing. In the U.S., college preparedness is abysmal; some universities estimate half of their incoming freshman class is in need of remedial education in math and writing. The cost of college is out of control. Salem’s response is to fix none of these, but instead require students to choose one of three exclusionary career paths.
The first and most obvious problem with this plan is that college, apprenticeship and the armed forces are not the only three viable post-high school options. In my hometown, it was not at all uncommon for high school graduates to go get a job at a lumber mill. The positions paid rather well, had good benefits, and, until recently, offered stable employment. Unfortunately, the recession has impacted the lumber industry rather harshly, and many of these individuals are no longer employed. That doesn’t mean their post-graduation plans were bad, however; people from all sectors have been losing their jobs.
HB 2732 is also bigoted. It is not bigoted in the way everyone defines the word, that is, as overt and race-related, but it is a clear and salient example of institutionalized bias against the socioeconomically disadvantaged. How is a student below the poverty line, with parents who maybe graduated from high school but maybe didn’t, supposed to pay for the application fee to a university? How are they supposed to even do the application in the first place? Universities are not always the most user-friendly places, and HB 2732 ignores the reality that for many high school students, universities seem totally out of reach.
Instead, this legislation increases the likelihood students will choose an apprenticeship or service in the military not because it’s what they want to do, but because they are poor. That is what this legislation represents to me, as the son of working-class Oregonians. Fortunately for me, I did apply for college, even though I did so without help. But if I hadn’t, then apparently working for a lumber mill isn’t good enough in Oregon anymore.
This legislation also represents how truly incapable our representatives are of solving the education crisis. So incapable, in fact, that they don’t even appear to know what the problem is. In the Emerald article, Rep. Peter Buckley (D-Ashland) is quoted as saying that, some years ago at a high school in his district, only three of 28 students in an Advanced Placement class were attending college. Rep. Buckley did not specify what high school he visited, but I have trouble accepting those statistics as reality, given that half of all adults over 25 in Ashland have a bachelor’s degree or better. @@city-data.com@@ When compared with Oregon’s averages in urban areas (31 percent) and in rural areas (18 percent), Ashland is doing much better than alright.
Assuming they are true, they are probably from a rural school. Rep. Buckley’s support for this bill will do little for them, however. Some of these students might know only one or two people with a college degree, probably their teacher and their doctor. Why would these students consider college a viable option, when they don’t really even know anyone who’s gone to college? Instead, the state will mandate that students become apprentices, which is an archaic and outdated way of viewing labor. Alternatively, it will mandate that students join the military, perpetuating the analogy of enlistment as indentured servitude for people who are too broke to make it in America.
Of course, the legislators in Salem don’t see this, because it’s not really going to affect their children. It will affect the children of those poor, unemployed people in rural Oregon. But if we make them all be electricians or send them to the Middle East, that will fix the problem, right?