By every matrix—standard tests, need for remedial English and math when going into college, violence and racism on campus—California government schools are war zones.
“Janet Godwin, the head of the ACT, told Education Week: “Fewer students leaving high school are meeting all four college readiness benchmarks [on ACT tests]. Just 21 percent of high school seniors are meeting all of these benchmarks; 43 percent of students meet none of them.”
High school teachers know that today’s graduates are poorly prepared for college, Izumi says. “Yet, many of these poorly prepared high school graduates are getting into college because of their inflated grade point averages.”
Longtime former California teacher Christy Lozano told Izumi, “A lot of these kids are coming out of high school with a fifth-grade reading level. They can’t go to [community college] and make up for that.”
California government schools are going diploma’s to functional illiterates.
Why High School Graduates Turn Out to Be College Illiterates
‘You can see that the companies don’t want these graduates’
By Katy Grimes, California Globe, 6/14/24 https://californiaglobe.com/fr/why-high-school-graduates-turn-out-to-be-college-illiterates/
“Too many high school graduates are in for a rude awakening when they discover that their K-12 public education has left them woefully unprepared for the rigors of college coursework,” warns Lance Izumi, senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute.
College readiness has reached historic lows, including the lowest scores in 30 years on the ACT and declining scores on the SAT, the two primary standardized tests used for college admissions, Education Week recently reported.
“The ACT measures college readiness in English composition, social sciences, algebra, and biology,” Izumi said.
Janet Godwin, the head of the ACT, told Education Week: “Fewer students leaving high school are meeting all four college readiness benchmarks [on ACT tests]. Just 21 percent of high school seniors are meeting all of these benchmarks; 43 percent of students meet none of them.”
High school teachers know that today’s graduates are poorly prepared for college, Izumi says. “Yet, many of these poorly prepared high school graduates are getting into college because of their inflated grade point averages.”
Longtime former California teacher Christy Lozano told Izumi, “A lot of these kids are coming out of high school with a fifth-grade reading level. They can’t go to [community college] and make up for that.”
Izumi reports that a major study by the ACT found that from 2010 to 2022 the grade point average in high school English, math, science, and social studies courses among students taking the ACT college-entrance test increased year over year, while their ACT scores decreased in every one of those subjects.
Izumi continues:
“According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, professors from Wellesley to Cal State Los Angeles now have students who do not read well and do not work very hard. Many students have a weak vocabulary, poor reading endurance, are unable to analyze complete or lengthy texts, and lack the context to understand various arguments and points of view.
The situation in math at colleges is even worse, which is not surprising since high school grade inflation increased at the greatest rate in math.
For my soon-to-be-released book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning in America’s Schools, which will be published by the Pacific Research Institute, I interviewed a math instructor at a California college who teaches calculus. He said that among his students, lack of foundational algebra knowledge is “the number one deficiency and it’s chronic.”
“So when a student comes to college,” he observed, “without algebra skills and without analytical skills there is really no hope.”
“It causes a lot of problems because that person is not ready to be educated at the level of calculus.”
In my book The Great Classroom Collapse, I conclude that too many K-12 schools “are putting political ideology over what works, whether it be a misguided equity agenda that seeks to dumb down learning to the lowest common denominator” or progressive curricula and instructional methods that are being used “in intellectual defiance of empirical evidence showing that are ineffective and are damaging children.”
What career prospects do these unschooled, unprepared college students have?
“You can see that the companies don’t want these graduates,” he noted. “So a company in Silicon Valley that’s specializing in artificial intelligence wants heavy hitters and you’re never going to be a part of that.”
According to Education Week, “There’s nothing worse than approaching a challenging situation grossly unprepared—except, perhaps, believing you’re well-equipped for the task only to find that you’ve overestimated your preparedness,” which is a scenario “that’s becoming increasingly common for college-bound seniors.”
Read Lance Izumi’s devastating article here. I’ve long warned about inflated grade point averages – today we are seeing just how inflated they are, and uneducated, undereducated and unprepared high school graduates are.
Is public education bankrupt or can it be overhauled?
The major problem with the California education system, and perhaps other states, is that we do not educate students, we indoctrinate them. Teachers are not educators. They are monitors, and not very good at monitoring. Read “Personal Opinions of One Common Man” due out soon.