To walk the stage and hear your name called after four long years can be one of the most rewarding things for a student. To be the first one in your family to graduate, to finish the last step before you move on to college, or to finally see all your hard work come to mean something in the form of a diploma. Now getting into the cap and gown is great, but at the end of the day, all these things don’t mean anything towards the success of a person. Graduating High School can be a great achievement, but it doesn’t mean much to others. They care about what you are as a person and a student. Whether you are seeking a job or going to college after high school, employers and universities only seek to know that you truly gained intelligence and working skills throughout the four-year process.
The problem in the past years has been the decreasing expectations of an average high school graduate. Now kids can do much less and still graduate. Some people stare at the increasing rate of high school graduates and say, “Oh wow! We are getting so much smarter!” But all that is happening is that the students are given an easier path to graduate.
After kids graduate from high school, they are less prepared. They aren’t as ready to go into the real world and get a job. They are now under-prepared and less educated going into vigorous college courses. Raising expectations for the future student body will ensure students earn their graduation.
Allesandra Young writes in a News Channel 8 article that, “the graduation rate for the 2023-2024 school year was at an all-time high of nearly 90%.”
This is great, more kids are graduating, but each one of these students is graduating with the expectation of being less than it was 5 years ago. All we are doing is letting kids slack off and still receive short-term success, this will get them nowhere as they will be in for a rude awakening in the real world.
On the site Boston.com Steve LeBlanc writes about how, “When Massachusetts voters decided to ditch the state’s standardized tests as a high school graduation requirement on Election Day, they joined a trend that has steadily chipped away at the use of high-stakes tests over the past two decades.”
LeBlanc puts this situation perfectly, talking about the importance of high school requirements not being thrown away in the trash, talking about how kids don’t even have to take exams or standardized tests anymore. The government really can play a huge role in being able to change the standards that are changing so rapidly.
After asking Wharton High School student Alexander Johnstone one simple question: “Do you think you have slowly started to be expected less as a student throughout high school?”
He responded to this by saying, “Absolutely, it kind of feels like the older I get the less teachers think I’m capable of.”
If we don’t make a change in what is expected and required for a kid to graduate, then slowly and slowly there will be fewer students and people in our society who are prepared for their next step in life.