College Freshmen Ain’t Learned Good

Sherry Saavedra of the San Diego Union Tribune writes that high school students simply aren’t ready for college:

What students learn in high school doesn’t match with what they need to know as college freshmen, according to a national study released yesterday.

The real difficulty here is deciding whether to file this story under “N” for “No S#@$” or “S” for “Sherlock.” But read on:

A really common complaint from (college) faculty is students not being able to put together a complete sentence properly,” said Erin Goldin, director of the Writing Center, which provides tutoring at Cal State San Marcos.

The ACT’s survey highlights several disconnects between what high school teachers think their kids should know and what college professors need them to know. A few examples:

• With reading and writing, college instructors stress the need for fundamentals; high schools don’t bother.
• With the sciences, college instructors want students to understand the inquiry process; high schools focus on content.
• With math, college instructors emphasize mastery of basic concepts; high schools want to expose students to advanced concepts.

It’s a serious problem. How serious?

Many of these students end up in college unprepared to do the work. Nearly one-third of new freshman required remedial help in English at San Diego State University in fall 2006, for example, while half were unprepared in the subject at Cal State San Marcos.

And SDSU isn’t a bad school. Students - yes, even our AP darlings - enter college woefully unprepared. The ACT blames [rightly] the imposition of ineffective state standards on curriculum for the students’ lack of college prep. But some states and districts are, believe it or not, working with colleges to help develop appropriate curricula. It’s a big project:

La Jolla High Principal Dana Shelburne said there are expectations from the California State University and University of California systems, the private colleges, the state and federal government, parents and political and philosophical groups. Simultaneously, schools are also expected to do everything from feed and clothe students to provide remediation and pave the way to athletic scholarships.

“We’re drinking from something of a fire hydrant,” Shelburne said. “Information and requests come out at us in such a flood . . . What a high school graduate is supposed to know to satisfy all the stakeholders is a question that has yet to be satisfied in my estimation.”

Principal Shelburne misses the mark. The idea isn’t to satisfy every community or organization who speaks up, it’s to deliver the necessary skills to the students. That requires principals to make a distinction between right and wrong, beneficial and harmful, effective and ineffectual. They have to use their judgment, preferably based on professional expertise, to define the course for their school. That means they have to say yes to some people and no to others and base those decisions on solid evidence and reasoning.

You know, leadership.

UPDATE at 4/10/07, 7.41pm:

RightWingNation goes into more detail and references plenty of data to back it up.

UPDATE at 4/11/07, 3.10pm:

Take a look at Ken DeRosa’s comments on d-edreckoning, too.