Another interesting bit in The Gadfly is this piece, which describes how thousands of Massachusetts students who pass the MCAS and graduate high school nonetheless have to take remedial courses at 2- and 4-year colleges--i.e., they're not ready to do college-level work. Many drop out.
The MCAS is supposed to be one of the nation's toughest exit exams. So if thousands of students who pass it can't get along at university, this should alert policymakers to a piece of common sense that has, in the age of No Child Left Behind, become taboo: Not every student can or should attend college.
The "all kids to college" push is something of an unquestioned mantra in ed-reform circles, which has always puzzled me. Of course the only way all students, or even most students, will get to college is if college admission (and by extension, college degrees) means nothing. We already see this happening in states that have attempted to tie high school graduation to high school exit exams; they can either make receipt of high school diplomas an easier task or export more dropouts to the streets.
A??university diploma has no intrinsic value. So when we hear that all kids must go to college because??the good jobs employ only those who possess??at least a Bachelor's degree, we can be confident that (suspending disbelief) when everyone in America finally does attend college, the good jobs will demand applicants with Master's degrees. And so it goes.
A better idea: High schools (and ed reformers) should lose their "college or nothing" mindset. Lots of kids won't, can't, don't want to attend a university, and they deserve high school pathways, such as career and technical education, that do not leave them as 18-year-olds??with zero prospects.