Notable: Obama's Take on High School Writing Instruction

A notable exchange on high school education - worth sharing in high schools around the world - in the NYTimes Magazine's April 28 interview with President Obama  (emphasis added):

David Leonhart: Staying on the Great Depression, it led to a surge in high-school graduation. A high-school diploma during that decade or two went from being elite to the norm, and it became a ticket to the middle class. I’m curious what you think today’s ticket to the middle class is. Do you want everybody aspiring to a four-year-college degree? Is a two-year or vocational degree enough? Or is simply attending college, whether or not you graduate, sufficient to reach the middle class?

The President: to the extent that we can upgrade not only our high schools but also our community colleges to provide a sound technical basis for being able to perform complicated tasks in a 21st-century economy, then I think that not only is that good for the individuals, but that’s going to be critical for the economy as a whole.

I want to emphasize, though, that part of the challenge is making sure that folks are getting in high school what they need as well. You know, I use my grandmother as an example for a lot of things, but I think this is telling. My grandmother never got a college degree. She went to high school. Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill, even though she worked on a bomber assembly line. She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —

Leonhart: Today, you mean?

THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.

And that means that we’ve got to — in our education-reform agenda — we’ve got to focus not just on increasing graduation rates, but we’ve also got to make what’s learned in the high-school and college experience more robust and more effective.

I don't know about you other teachers out there, but I've bookmarked this to share with my students next fall - before assigning (and giving pre-inflationary grades to) any writing work.