Based on a new report from Renaissance Learning, an educational and learning assessment company, “college ready” students are reading fiction and nonfiction books on a 7th grade level by the time they arrive at campus.
“We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level,” said Dr. Sandra Stotsky, an education expert and professor emerita at the University of Arkansas.
Stotsky, in a recent interview with Breitbart Texas, argued that while K-12 schools deserve much of the blame, colleges are not “sending a signal to the nation’s high schools that high school level reading is needed for college readiness.” She said that in one review of freshman summer reading assignments, five of the top seven books selected by colleges were on a 7th grade reading level.
“[Colleges] seem to be suggesting that a middle school level of reading is satisfactory, even though most college textbooks and adult literary works written before 1970 require mature reading skills,” she said.
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