The Homa Files

Last week, the Maryland state Board of Education approved an environmental literacy graduation requirement: High school seniors in Maryland will have to demonstrate literacy on environmental matters to graduate from now on.

According to the AP, public schools will be required to infuse core subjects with lessons on conservation, smart growth and other environmental topics.

Maybe that’s a good idea, but consider:

According to the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, only about 74 percent of all students in Maryland graduate from high school with a regular diploma.

Less than 2/3s of Hispanics and African-Americans get a high school diploma.

The obvious questions:

1) Will the HS graduation rate go up or down when an additional criteria – any criteria – is added?

I’m betting the down side …

2) Recent statistics indicate that a large proportion of HS graduates get their diploma with an adequate foundation in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Shouldn’t attention be laser-focused on those subjects?

3) Seriously, does it matter if inner city kids are schooled in ‘smart growth’?

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This entry was posted on July 1, 2011 at 6:30 am and is filed under Education - Academics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.