Speed Gibson

There's another report out about Minnesota high school graduates needing remedial education in college. The problem seems to be getting worse. The problem seems clear enough: serious and increasing diploma fraud in our public schools. Consider:

Paul Carney, an English instructor at Minnesota State Community and Technical College in Fergus Falls, had college and high school teachers read the same student essays and judge whether they were college-ready. In some cases, five of the six high school teachers viewed an essay as college-ready when none of the college instructors did.

When they sat down to talk about it, Carney said, he found high school teachers focused mainly on the minimal skills to get teens to pass the state basic-skills writing test, a 10th-grade exam that requires only the ability to write a few paragraphs with a beginning, middle and end.

I heard a similar high school teacher response on the radio, that they were being "forced" to teach to the required state tests, rather than to what the students "need" in college.

It says a lot to me that these educators don't seem to realize that such statements really constitute a confession, not an excuse.