<p>Has anyone seen this before? It is apparently happening at my kid's public high school.</p>
<p>They are proposing to close a large budget deficit by laying off many teachers. At the same time, they are proposing to add many "dual enrollment" classes to offer combined high school and college credit. Those dual enrollment classes would be taught by adjunct instructors provided by the community college.</p>
<p>Our state prohibits laying off teachers for purely economic reasons. Therefore, they have to rationalize it as a change of curriculum. So they are eliminating the current system of "honors" classes taught by high school teachers. A few would remain, but would now be renamed "advanced classes." Most of these classes would be replaced by the dual enrollment classes.</p>
<p>The administration is actually proposing that kids who are above average take TEN college level classes as a 11th grader. Under the current curriculum, these students would typically take one AP class and 3 or 4 year-long honors classes. </p>
<p>To top it all off, they are proposing to send all of the above average kids to a separate building that is rented space. That takes advantage of a loophole in the union teacher contract that limits the use of non-union teachers.</p>
<p>The community college instructors would not receive benefits and part of their costs would be subsidized by state grants and other funds provided to the community college from participating communities. The end result is that the CC adjuncts are much cheaper per class than regular school teachers.</p>
<p>I just read a study that high school teachers have better results teaching college level classes to high school students than outside college instructors. The study found that this result was from the fact that high school teachers are accustomed to teaching 16 and 17 year olds, and can relate better to them. They also have more education in educational methods than adjunct college instructors, who might have little or no educational training.</p>
<p>Anyone else see this occuring elsewhere? Any thoughts? </p>
<p>P.S. - I am a concerned parent, not a teacher.</p>
<p>I’ve not read this, but I can see that it would be a money saver. Not sure how it would work in terms of benefiting the student. I can tell you that schools will be looking for all kind so ways to save money with so many deficits out there. We’re broke here, I know and either the cuts will come or taxes will rise.</p>
<p>There is a high school in this area that is overcrowded. The guidance counselors are advising many juniors and seniors to take dual enrollment classes at the community college to help alleviate the overcrowding issues. I am not sure that this is in the best interest of all the kids being funneled to the community college.</p>
<p>I haven’t heard of this before. In our area, dual credit classes are not nearly as challenging as equivalent AP classes and probably less challenging than equivalent honors courses. I’d be concerned about the kids who were planning on taking mostly AP classes.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a good thing for many kids. There is a safety net to being in high school that is not there in college. College professors are often not trained in any psychology tenets dealing with teenagers. They are hired to teach a class, and that’s it. Adjuncts are often even further removed from those issues. Also, there is not that connect with the high school and the teachers. It takes a mature student to be taking these dual enrollment courses, in my opinion. I 'm not as worried about how challenging the course material is as I am about the other aspects of doing this sort of thing.</p>
<p>Actually more work,more classes, more opportunities for adjuncts. Not necessarily, adjuncts teaching the courses either.</p>
<p>My son is in a program where he is permitted to take one course per semester his senior year at the college whose campus also houses his high school. Nice benefit worth a pretty penny, given that the college is one of those $55K a year with r/b school. A course is easily worth $4K. He just walks over to the building where the course is being held and blends right in with the students. The professor is not given any notice that he is not a college student. Both courses he took/is taking this year are from professors, not adjuncts. </p>
<p>In this case, with just once course being taken at the college, and the school being right on the campus, I think it is a great idea. But I would not want to have him taking a slew of courses that way. He is still very much under the umbrella of his high school.</p>
<p>At our local arts high school, they laid off all the working artists because they didn’t have the right paperwork to be certified to teach high school. Apparently, art and music need to be taught by pedagogues, not working artists. No bureaucrat left behind.</p>
<p>I wonder how all of the high school moms will react to not being able to monitor their children in the college classes and how the immature students will react to being expected to take more responsibility for their education. I think dual enrollment is great for some students, but the reality is that many of them are not ready for this while in high school.</p>
<p>Not sure if I agree with that, since the current system is generally broken. Adjuncts usually get paid around $3,000 per class and don’t get benefits because they’re contract workers - in some cases, not even an office - and like it has been noted they don’t have training in pedagogy (although many of them have been teaching for many years and some may even be better than the tenured professors at the CC). IT does make more opportunities for adjuncts, but what most adjuncts really want is to get a tenure-track position and if those are being eliminated because they can simply pay someone $3,000 a course to come teach…they won’t ever get a tt position.</p>
<p>That said, I don’t support this (as a grad student with no children, just an observer). We had dual enrollment in my school but the counselors always advised the top honors students to take AP classes instead because they were more challenging and taught at a higher level. Not only that, but I usually took the class with a teacher I already had the year before for the prerequisite, so he or she was familiar with the class and had been teaching teenagers for many years (you had to be certified in honors to teach AP, which usually meant much work experience).</p>
<p>We know that there are lots of students that don’t have the maturity to succeed in college after graduating from high-school so it would be logical to assume that there are even more that wouldn’t succeed two years earlier.</p>
<p>There are reasons why community colleges are cheaper to operate than high-schools and part of that is the lower level of services. The OP’s district is thinking of doing this for the better than average students. I can’t imagine this working well but I can imagine that it will save a lot of money.</p>
<p>Our state prohibits laying off teachers for purely economic reasons.</p>
<p>Well, when you have a rule like that, then it forces people to do gymnastics to get around the rule. </p>
<p>It’s silly to have a rule that people can’t be laid off for “purely economic reasons”…Economic reasons should be the primary reason for a lay off.</p>
juillet is right. Adjuncts are basically exploited. Making more opportunities for them to be exploited is hardly a positive. I adjuncted for a number of years at a small college. There was some rule or other that any given adjunct could only teach 2 courses per semester, but they found ways to get around that and I often ended up with 3, which I did because we needed the money. One semester I had 3 there and 1 at the University, which was pretty much a nightmare with 2 small children. Not to mention that we only got paid twice during the semester, so they tried to take out way too much of it in taxes as well.</p>
<p>I knew people who did 5 or 6 at a time, driving from school to school so they could make some kind of living while they waited for a track position to open up. If schools can get away with just hiring adjuncts, then track positions don’t open up. Probably one of the main reasons community colleges are less expensive than other places is because so much of the faculty (often more than 50%) is made up of adjuncts.</p>
<p>“It’s silly to have a rule that people can’t be laid off for “purely economic reasons”…Economic reasons should be the primary reason for a lay off.”</p>
<p>In states where there are class-size limits, it makes sense that teachers can’t be laid off for economic reasons. After all, you can’t say that your need less teachers when you have X number of students and the number doesn’t change. It makes me wonder if class-size limits would be eliminated in the dual-enrollment classes. After all, it is not on school property, and the instructors don’t appear to be employees of the high school. So the lucky kids could end up with large classes, more work, less resources instructed by someone untrained to deal with them. Sounds like a brilliant strategy.</p>
<p>Adjuncts are paid less than a living wage and get no benefits. This is an amazingly cynical move. </p>
<p>It’s probably something that couldn’t happen here for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is lack of transportation. In addition, CC classes here are directed at kids who couldn’t cut it in non-honors HS classes, and subjects like calculus aren’t even available. It’s a different scene.</p>