Our history of dissing high school grads

Sent to the New York Post, Jan 23, 2012

The Post reports that nearly 80% of city high school grads are not prepared for college work (“Make-believe grads,” Jan. 22). Colleges have been complaining about the low quality of incoming students for over 100 years in the United States.

In the 1880’s Harvard introduced remedial writing classes because so many entering students failed the new entrance exams. In 1894, Harvard criticized high school writing teachers for the poor performance of students entering college. Note that these were the best students in the country attending the best university of its time.

In 1930, Thomas Biggs of Teachers College found that only half of the high school students he studied could find the area of a circle, after a year of ancient history students did not know who Solon was, after a year of American history students could not describe the Monroe Doctrine, and students’ written English was “shocking” and “inadequate.”

Either high schools have always been terrible or we have always been expecting too much.

Stephen Krashen

Original article: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/make_believe_grads_ZyIynJbktxBaANFE3wcV5N#ixzz1kJV3Z7PN