Monday, December 21, 2009

High school, meet college. College, meet high school.

More than half of Denver Public Schools students have to take at least one remedial class when they hit college, Jeremy Meyer of the Denver Post reports. I am sure that is a pretty typical stat, one worth lots of exploration. This is a good story, or stories, for both higher ed and K-12 reporters. You can always write about students who thought they were smart till they landed in “developmental,” non-credit, community college math, but even more important is the massive, gaping hole between what states expect of their high schoolers (as evidenced in standards and exams) and what various colleges want their students to know and do. I can’t imagine the various parties communicate much about this huge systemic problem, but if they do, I would love to know.

3 comments:

  1. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have a charter school operator, Envision Schools, that boasts that it never gives any student a grade lower than C. This sounds good to those who don't think it through, but you can see the logical outcome when its graduates reach college. Anyway, Envision was peddling its charter-school-operation services in Denver, last I heard (with false claims about the achievement of its San Francisco schools, by the by).

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  2. Amazed. And disgusted. Also quite curious as to what could be *in* a curriculum guide for high school chemistry, if moles and stoichiometry are out.

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  3. There are also MANY more students taking college level classes while in High School. At least in Maryland, the children have the opportunity to take many more AP classes than I had many years ago.

    We live in interesting times... The harder classes cover much more material than they used to and the standard classes cover much less.

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