One of the American education system’s biggest failures has been its policy concerning … failure. For too long, the problem of students failing to achieve at the skill level appropriate to their grade has just kicked down the road to the next level. All the way until they enroll in college. At North Carolina’s community colleges, 41 percent of recent high school students need remedial math, while 36 need remedial English.
Here’s a big news flash: college is not the appropriate place to teach young people how to read and do simple calculations.
North Carolina’s legislature is finally doing something about it. Jenna Robinson writes how a couple of bills may make it through this year’s legislative session that will ensure that students who cannot demonstrate a reasonable skill level after their junior year will receive remediation in their senior year instead of pushing it off until after graduation.
Of course, let’s hope that things don’t stop there. With any luck, the high schools will realize that they’re not the proper level for remediation, either, and push it back to the junior high schools, who in turn will back it to the elementary schools. Who then will put pressure on the major culprit: the college education schools that have long championed ineffective theories and methods, thereby condemning lots of young people to waste their entire educations pretending to learn.