A revamp Louisiana’s high school diplomas may be in the wind.

State Superintendent John White said earlier this week the state needs to focus more on preparing students for community or technical schools or for jobs once they graduate from high school.

And, adopting the addition by subtraction principle, White said statistics indicate it’s time to do away with the Career diploma offering that was the brainchild of his predecessor, Paul Pastorek.

White said of the most recent 175,000 high school students in Louisiana, a little more than 1 percent pursued a Career diploma and less than 0.1 percent obtained one.

“The Career diploma has become a dropout diploma,” he told the Press Club of Baton Rouge.

White said he will recommend that the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education send the Career diploma option to the trash heap.

The fatal flaw in the Career diploma is that it required students in the eighth grade or their freshmen year in high school to choose a career path. To believe that 13- and 14-year-olds had the experience and wisdom to choose their career path at that tender age was Pollyanish at best on the part of Pastorek. Others wouldn’t be so kind, labeling it as asinine.

White has seen the errors of those ways

“We can’t have a system where a 12-year-old makes a life decision about their academic future,” he said. “We need one Louisiana diploma, not a three-part caste system.’’

He also said greater attention needs to be directed to high school students who have no intention of entering a four-year college. He noted that applies to 80 percent of high school students.

“What are we doing for the kids not getting a four-year degree?” he asked. “We have to change this and we can by changing our diploma system.”

In the short term, Louisiana will likely end up with two tracts to a high school diploma — Core 4 courses that prepare a student for college and Basic diploma courses that prepare them for a job after graduation or entry into a community or technical college.

White is late in coming around to the fact that only one in every five Louisiana public high school graduates enter college.

That flexibility is commendable, but it also has to be in moderation. The state’s education system cannot have the rigidity of an overly starched collar. Neither can it appear like a flag flapping in a stiff breeze or a sailboat tacking in search of a friendly breeze.

Educators who man the trenches daily have long complained that there’s been too many changes in educational theories and practices. They point out that the federal and state governments mandate conversions every third or fourth year, long before it can be determined if the latest and supposedly greatest ‘‘new’’ approaches to education have any solid evidence that they actually work.

Students shouldn’t be treated like lab rats in some educational experiment.

While teaching modalities may change, there’s no substitute for the basics of reading, writing and math. Those rudiments, along with critical thinking, still form the foundation for an education.

Without those fundamentals mastered early on, a student is doomed to misery further along in their education career.

This editorial was written by a member of the American Press Editorial Board. Its content reflects the collaborative opinion of the Board, whose members include Bobby Dower, Jim Beam, Crystal Stevenson and Donna Price.

(mgnonline.com)