When it comes to problems in education, people are divided: Either they care primarily about pre-collegiate or collegiate education. Of the two, K-12 seems to generate more concern.
“Let us concentrate on the schools,” goes the argument. “By the time students get to college it will be too late.” True, perhaps, but to ignore falling standards in our colleges and universities is to ignore a significant reason for the collapse in high school.
There are a lot of good high schools and colleges, of course. But no one who cares about the success of our young can fail to note the signs of collapse. Parents of more than one million children now feel they must find time to homeschool, while those whose children are still trapped in the public system are scrambling to find charter schools for them.
One need not search far for the reasons. In 1994, more than 25 percent of high school seniors who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test could not read at a basic level. In history, 50 percent failed to achieve this level. And in math, fewer than half of our high school seniors “appeared to have a firm grasp of seventh-grade content.”
No wonder some school systems are responding by throwing in the towel. According to published reports, Clark County, Nevada, has decided that the few low grades still given are too painful to bear. From now on, “students who earn D’s or below will be characterized not as borderline passing or failing but as emerging.” (Question: Will the very worst students receive a “not emerging” grade? What in the world would that mean?)
Only a few decades ago, it would have been surprising just how many of these students end up attending college. According to the Hudson Institute’s Brunno Manno, “74 percent of recent high school graduates seeking college admission lacked proficiency or demonstrated only partial proficiency in verbal skills.” In algebra, the figure was more than 80 percent. In fact, while only about 35 percent of high school students take a college preparatory curriculum, some 55 to 60 percent of them are able to enroll in college.
One thing is clear. College entrance requirements, except at our most elite institutions, are not what they once were. According to the latest figures, some 90 percent of the nation’s four-year colleges now find it necessary to offer remedial courses. And the acceptance of unqualified students is not limited to the less prestigious schools (although the rate is surely higher there). The University of California system takes only the top 12.5 percent of the state’s high school graduates. Nevertheless, on average, almost 40 percent of its entering class is unable to write at the university level.
But does this really matter? Are not those who go on to graduate from our colleges and universities as well educated as they should be, even if many of them arrived unprepared and needed a little help along the way? Would that it were so.
A 1993 study by the National Center for Education Statistics revealed that half of the 5,000 four-year college graduates surveyed could not read or interpret a simple bus schedule, while 44 percent could not distinguish between two opposing views in a newspaper article. So it is hardly surprising that 92 percent of them couldn’t identify the source of the phrase, “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Teachers, administrators, and certainly students know that today’s high school graduates can always find a college ready to accept their applications, and they also know that once they get there they will face reduced course requirements. Pre-collegiate standards will be raised only if colleges are willing to say “no” to the clearly unprepared.
That, unfortunately, is not likely to happen. The pressures to maintain enrollments are simply too high. (To keep their doors open, today’s colleges and universities must enroll close to 14.5 million students.) In a recent Harper’s article by Mark Edmundson, a college financial officer is quoted as admitting that “colleges don’t have admissions offices anymore; they have marketing departments.” All this has resulted in what Edmundson rightly terms an unmitigated coddling of students from kindergarten to college graduation. They can never be “offended” (read: “challenged”), and they certainly cannot be expected to treat their education any more seriously than do the schools and colleges in which they have spent their lives.
High school graduation requirements must be raised. But that will avail us little if colleges and universities continue to welcome unprepared students (and eagerly at that). This is why efforts to reform K-12 must pay corresponding attention to strengthening college entrance requirements.