The point being, kids are being graduted from high shool yet they are not ready for college level courses. Is that the responsibility of the student?

What about this startling statistic?

Wow, 65% of irresponsible students. Really?

A person has to have a high school diploma for college. You'd think people, once receiving a diploma, were beyond remedial in course work. Remedial work needs to begin before college. Thus, the responsibility for remedial programs is the schools, imo.

65% is a staggering fail rate.

Is this the backlash of no child left behind?

The Department of Education in NYC thinks there is a problem beyond the responsibility of the students. At 65% student remediation nationwide, it seems a little more than student responsibility.

Kids are no longer being taught to learn, they are taught to regurgitate information in order to pass the state exams. IME - This has had little, if anything to do with their college classes.

Not necessarily.

Don't forget that there are a lot of students in community college who have GEDs. Perfectly acceptable for admittance and FA. Certainly the curriculum for a GED differs from a traditional HS experience.

Or, a student must make certain scores on the mandatory placement testing.

Also, a student may pass a certain amount of courses and then be able to apply for assistance.

Many many college students are not coming out of traditional high schools, at least not in the community colleges of which you speak.

It's all about "Ability to Benefit." Any of the above 3 options are acceptable forms of proving that one has an ability to benefit from higher education.

@Glatt
More reading will help. English is not learned. It is absorbed.

*nods* It's a problem over here too.

Unfortunately it's one of those really tricky little nuts to crack, and whne you attempt to solve the problem you just make new problems.

So, we had a real problem here with a lack of consistency across the education system. With schools selecting their own individual curriculums, it was entirely possible for kids in one school to come through their education with a good grounding in all the basics, whilst kids from another school might come out with serious gaps in their education. At the same time we had a serious, and rapidly growing, problem with functional illiteracy amongst school leavers.

In order to try and get to grips with this, various measures were introduced. New ways of teaching were explored, standardized curriculums and exams were introduced. In order to try and find out why children were falling behind, and to attempt to stem that fall, new methods of testing and monitoring were introduced, at various stages in the child's schooling.

So, now we have a much clearer idea of what the schools are doing, what children are at risk, and various strategies to tackle those problems. We know that every chiild has access to certain standard elements of the curriculum, and that an exam result in that subject means the same regardless of which school they went to.

Unfortunately, results from testing and the level of attainment/achievement that can be tracked in a child all get fed into the school's grade and affects its ability to attract certain types of specialist funding, amongst other things. With schools competing in league tables, and desperately trying to avoid the perils of Offsted and Special Measures (a mechanismm for rescuing failing schools) the most important thing is that kids get their grades.

Ummmm, yes. But think about the way children learned in the past.
No, of course I do not have first hand experience, but I read Little Women, the Anne (of Green Gables) series, the Little House series, the What Katy Did series.

Things in the good old days were learned by repetition.
This does not equate understanding.
Exams were couched in terms that reflected learning.
Times and dates and places were important, yes.
So the old crusties that write comments now think children are SO ignorant. But mostly, if you asked them questions relevant to today, the fogies wear their ignorance with pride.

"No child left behind" should mean that all children are educated regardless of what their parents earn. There are enough things compromising the sobriquet "Land of the free and the home of the brave" without making reading and writing income dependent. Even my parents' newspaper stops short of the idea that poor children should be shoved up chimneys - but only just - they simply use Sir Alan Sugar (like an English Donald Trump) as a reason why everyone should be millionaires without any Govt funding.

Odd, when they're pulling down paltry journo salaries.
If it was possible for everyone to do everything and get paid top dolllars, how come they still have a job?!

FTR - if Jamie is right and the system is failing nearly 50% of children, then it needs to be fixed. Even given a margin of error we should know better by now. That's the issue. It's not WORSE (as Labour claimed under the Tories; as the Tories caimed under Labour) we just have more tests now.

I had a first class education at two state schools.
Didn't get me anywhere.
But I got a love of learning.

I'm talking about changes over the last 25 years Sundae. The National Curriculum was introduced when we were at school.

And that's kind of the point I was making anyway: you fix one problem and another problem springs up. It was absolutely necessary to get a grip on what schools were doing, and ensure that there was parity across the system, so that kids in a particular school, or town weren't disadvantaged: particularly important given the lack of choice at that time. It was and is necessary to be able to form some sort of picture of individual children'sprogress and learning journeys, and likewise to have some kind of measurable standards on which to judge the performance of teachers and schools.

But there is a price to increased monitoring, particularly when so much else gets tied into those achievement levels. The SATs in particular seem to have changed primary education, putting enormous pressure on teachers and schools to teach to the test instead of more generalised learning skills.

Can't let a chance to post this pass by:

Unfotunately, the most cost-effective way to ensure that no child is left behind is to make sure that none get too far ahead.

Even cheaper to shoot the lowest 20%.

Like piercehawkeye45 said it is a shared responsibility. New York State does, however, have very well thought out standards and highly educated teachers outside the very scary places. They also have large sub-populations that actively oppose learning. You could shoot <10% and turn things around. As noted NCLB is part of the problem because the cookie cutter education destroys motivation... I'm just grouchy because I have parents who only send their kids to school to get them out of their hair and we had another visit from Child Protective this week regarding maybe the sweetest little kid in my charge.


* instead of shooting you could drop mandatory attendance.

Indeed, standardised testing - especially when the teacher's career depends on their class doing well - leads to rote learning of what is needed for the test and nothing more. All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.

Dropping mandatory attendance would lead to the production of an uneducated underclass with no prospects of betterment, no chance of a livable income, and little reason to be part of society. That would suck. That was why universal education was mandated in the first place. I'm not saying everyone should go to college or university, or be all academic and stuff, but everyone should get enough education to make them able to support themselves and be engaged with society around them. The latter is why I am opposed to home schooling.

NY would appear to have achieved that permanent underclass with mandatory ed. The only difference is the ineducable are in a position to suppress the learning of those around them. In some ways the home-schooled are more engaged in their communities than kids bused and stored in age leveled classrooms. (they are however usually teh nutz)

I dont believe any child is 'ineducable'. Some may be harder to reach than others, and some may be unreachable by those teachers, in those classrooms, under that system.

Unfortunately, if education is not mandated the kids that lose out on an education aren't necessarily the ones who would be difficult to reach.

I see two ways to improve. 1) Highly Coercive and Less Free - strip incompetent parents of all rights and responsibility. Put the kids in decent homes 2) More Free- let them go their own way and teach the ones who stick around.

I don't see either being found acceptable so we'll continue with the status quo except that probably 10% of the teachers across New York will be laid off next year because the budget crisis is very real.