No Child Left Prepared?
"An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.
Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.
“We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world,” said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as “actually pretty scary, alarming.”
Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.
When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong."
Comments
Jeff, it is a problem. It is partially a reflection on the schools; and partially a reflection on what is happening in the home.
But we also need to remember the rudiments of IQ tests. The average IQ is 100. This means that half the population is below 100.
Some folks are incapable of college level work. I have seen numerous instances of folks who have impairments in this respect becoming discouraged, and drop out of school-- often around 8th or 9th grade.
There needs to be more places in the economy where people can find jobs that will support them and their families without needing a college education. We need to remember that lots of people have poor to marginal educational capabilities.
Posted by: Joe Guarino | April 22, 2008 11:54 AM