The primary thing the GED measures is thinking skill: the test taker’s ability to comprehend, apply, synthesize, evaluate and analyze. Most adult education programs follow the same curriculum used in high school, focusing on teaching facts and skills instead of teaching analysis, evaluation, and other thinking skills. Not only is this curriculum not relevant to the skills people need in the workplace and life, but it is taught in the traditional factory school approach. It is failing, just as the high school system is failing. The students who succeed with this approach have already passed high school. Students who dropped out of high school need a different approach.

The report The Silent Epidemic ( essentialed.org/thesilentepidemic3-06.pdf ) describes a study supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which found that most high school dropouts leave school because they found school uninteresting, boring, and not relevant to their lives. The majority of these students had grade point averages of C or better and could have succeeded in school had they continued. To reach these students, more than a traditional classroom approach… the approach they found uninteresting, boring, and irrelevant… is needed.

Adult education faces challenges beyond students’ disillusionment with traditional classrooms. Adult education GED programs, in replicating a high school curriculum, replicate high school’s shortfalls, as well. Students who were unable to learn in high school can be lost in the GED classroom. GED students come to adult education with varying abilities and skill levels, and the traditional high school curriculum expects students to be prepared for whatever level of material is being taught that day in class. The same material is taught to all students, whether they are prepared for it or not. Many GED students have gaps in their education that need to be addressed, gaps that they are embarrassed by or even may not realize.

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