You're Nobody Until You Go To College

The above title must be the sign in every guidance counselor's office in every high school in the state. Perhaps the reason is that everyone knows that a high school diploma isn't worth much.

Despite passing FCAT, most PHCC students need remedial courses - St. Petersburg Times

Thanks to The Gradebook for the link above.

What is this all about? Kids are graduating from our high schools, so what is the problem? The high schools are doing their job, so get off their backs. I was told for many, many years that the education professionals were experts and I was just a parent who was too emotionally involved to be objective about what was going on in the classroom. Just leave the education to them and make sure my kid was in his/her seat on money-counting day was the message du jour.

There must be a heck of a lot money being poured into making parents be accountable for the education of their children. The reason I have come to this conclusion is that every time I read how the FCAT and graduation rates have little correlation to the level of education that a student actually obtained, I always see a comment that the failure of the system is due to the students and the parents.

Here are a few quotes from the article that reminds of us whose fault it is:

"They passed (the FCAT), so they're thinking they did all right.........

..."And it is working to get the word out that students really do need to take college-prep courses if they're planning on going to college."

""We lecture them," said Pat Barton, a guidance counselor at Central. "We don't start in the senior year; we start in the freshman year. We tell them, 'You have to be able to pass tests to do college work.'

""But they don't all listen," she added."

""Many of them don't believe they truly belong there, but they're taking a chance on you and the college," she said."

To me, the most interesting part of this article is how the upper and lower level educational systems blame each other. I think it is odd that the kids are left out of this accountability debate:

"Beard, the PHCC vice president, said he has often wished that K-12 districts would do a more thorough job of teaching students about careers and what they will need to succeed in college.

"Either (students) are not informed, or they're informed but it doesn't quite register what courses they'll need in college," he said.

But Hernando superintendent Wayne Alexander said many in the K-12 world are frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of accountability in higher education.

"One of the things the state has yet to do is define what college readiness is," he said, wishing aloud for a state testing system that would encompass post-secondary education. "It really boils down to who's going to hold the professors accountable."

I can hear Elmer Fudd telling us how "vehwy, vehwy scary" it would be if he was a student. If the leaders of school systems don't know how to help kids be "college ready", how the hell does a kid know?

Oh, I forgot. It would be the parents to know what means "college ready". You know, the parents who leave the education to the expert systems.