COLLEGE

I won’t flood you with the entire thing, but this list is worth a chuckle. And I’ll give you a taste. There are 75 points on the full list.

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College
Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape
the lives of students entering college…

Most students entering college for the first time this fall were born in 1991.

1. For these students, Martha Graham, Pan American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always been dead.
2. Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Kevorkian, and Mike Tyson have always been felons.
3. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
5. Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister.
6. Salsa has always outsold ketchup.

OTH, trying it out on 10,000 kids might not be easy.

 The change that’s getting by far the most attention is the decision to do away with traditional grade levels – for kids younger than eighth grade, this first year, though the district plans to phase in the reform through high school a year at a time. Ultimately, there will be 10 multiage levels, rather than 12 grades, and students might be in different levels depending on the subject. They’ll move up only as they demonstrate mastery of the material.

Yeah, but this is kind of what I was thinking:

 It’s also unclear what will happen if large numbers of kids arrive in high school still unable to demonstrate proficiency in certain subjects, like math, and a bottleneck gets created. Since no student can move forward without a “B” equivalent, it’s also essentially impossible for students to have lower than a 3.0 GPA, which could be a challenge to explain to colleges. 

I’m not sure if I’m understanding this right.  It seems to me that if they aren’t proficient, then they shouldn’t have that “B”.  And I was thinking of the bottleneck in other direction of kids NOT getting into high school even if their ages put them there.

And the whole GPA thing is kind of what homeschoolers have to explain when we build transcripts for college.  If they can understand it coming from us, I think they can handle it.