12TH GRADE: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS GONE TRADITIONAL FOUR YEARS OF HIGH SCHOOL FAILS TO GET KIDS READY FOR REAL LIFE.

Byline: Paul Douglas White Local View

THE first order of business after celebrating this year's round of 12th- grade high school graduations should be to take steps to make them the last ones.

Keeping teenagers in high school until 12th grade typifies how out of step our traditional public high school system has become with regards to meeting our children's needs and preparing them for a changing world. California State Superintendent of Education Jack O'Connell admitted as much recently when he said that our high schools ``are not adequately preparing our students for college, the workplace, or to become effective citizens in our participatory democracy.''

Some of the immediately needed changes to our high school system include the following:

--Eleventh and 12th grades are obsolete and should be eliminated.

The U.S. is the only developed country in the world that continues to herd all its students through virtually the same program until they're 18. By 16, students have clearly demonstrated whether their future lies with a traditional liberal arts college program or job-specific vocational training.

Allowing students to hang around for two meaningless extra years of high school wastes their time, delays their maturity and responsibility, and is the major reason why high school campuses have become incubators for drug/alcohol problems, racial and gang conflicts, and teenage pregnancy.

--High schools need to stop advocating against proficiency tests, which enable students to graduate early, and general equivalency diplomas.

In an age when merely earning the credits for a high school diploma guarantees nothing regarding the certificate-bearer's literacy level, passing the GED or the California High School Proficiency Exam should be considered the gold standard because they require provable literacy skills and because both are normed so that 40 percent of each year's graduating seniors can't pass them.

In other words, employers hiring GED or CHSPE graduates guarantee themselves employees in the top 60 percent of their class, who have proved that they can read, write and perform basic math operations. A graduate with a credit-earned diploma offers employers no such security.

The nostalgic pining about the importance of ``walking the stage'' to get a diploma was valid in Grandma's day, when a high school diploma meant something, but times have changed. Today, it's just an arbitrary point one passes, like elementary or middle school completion, on the way to gaining the additional vocational skills and/or academic content requisite for anyone who wants any kind of future. The current practice of treating high school graduation like the end of a monumental education odyssey confuses countless children and their families, who think that somehow their future prosperity and success are assured because they hung around a high school for four years.

--Bypass high school altogether and start full-time college or vocational training now. Here's a little-known fact that could change the face of secondary education in California, but it's almost never disclosed to students: No high school diploma or minimum age, whatsoever, is required to attend community college full time.

Any California resident, at any age or time, can enroll at a community college campus and take an assessment test. If his or her math and English scores are at freshman level, then classes immediately start to count toward an associate's degree.

But what if a prospective community college student's math and English skills are below that standard? No problem. Community colleges offer several levels of remedial classes in both subject areas. As soon as students' skills are up to freshman level, they're on their way to a college diploma.

Best of all, on a college campus one totally avoids the nonsense of cutting class, sleeping during instruction, gangs and fighting, ``free days,'' etc., because students advance in college by proving that they've learned something. If they work, they move ahead.

That's why learning still takes place at the college level. And that's the way our public school system was meant to operate, until lack of accountability and fiscal self-interest made social promotion much easier, and therefore more attractive to schools than achievement-based advancement.

For better or worse, this year's graduating seniors are through with the existing system and are off to pursue their futures.

But for the millions of students still in high school (and their parents), it's not too late to strongly consider the alternatives to hanging around high school for four years, doing nothing but extending adolescence and increasing the chances of many negative outcomes. There's an alternative education route that fits every child's skills and future plans, and it should be pursued as rapidly as possible.

The public high school system, has, by and large, devolved into an adult employment center whose primary goal is to meet its own needs - and not the children's. The promises of traditional high school programs have become as empty as a day-after-graduation auditorium.