A friend has been corresponding with a college professor in Arkansas. He asked about well prepared students are for college studies. This was the answer he received. As usual, in the current world of education, no one’s names will be mentioned for fear of offending the vindictive and powerful:
“How are you????
“In response, from the Higher Education end, we see these overly tested students and it affects them through their senior year. They expect you to tell them what is going to be on the test, review that, give them the test over exactly that material, and then review the entire test on what they missed.
They do not know how to take notes, outline a chapter for studying, what their learning style is, how to use deductive reasoning and have no critical thinking skills. This is common talk amongst University professors.
In my human physiology class, I have to teach note taking skills and resist them when they want study guides, word list, etc. Anything that is spoon-fed is what they want. NCLB Baby Birds.
Given all these paper tools and a plethora of online tools, they are not used. We can track their usage statistics. I don’t think they know how to use them to self-educate or supplement what they are to be learning.
They cannot Google because they do not know how computers work, the guts of it all, like Boolean logic.
Therefore, they will not be prepared for the workplace after a degree if they are allowed to be No College Left Behind.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And this is only going to get worse. Wait until the kids who were denied playtime and the development of social and communication skills in kindergarten get to college. Truly quality early childhood education which should include kindergarten, allows children to safely explore and figure things out on their own which develops their intelligence. It also allows for activities that help build fine and gross motor skills, both important for the development of concentration and persistence, and risk taking, and needed for later success in college and life!
Maybe if enough colleges and universities start rejecting entrance, in the first place, to enough students who are so woefully unprepared, a critical mass of angry, rejected high school students, parents and educators will begin to demand a reform of our education policies.
Or maybe not.
It may be easier to accept the short-comings and ‘remediate’ the unprepared students as they hit their freshman classes. It may be easier…even make financial sense to some institutions of higher learning…to “dumb down” their freshman class required courses in order to “smarten up” their entering classes to be able to handle college level work. After all, at $25,000 to $60,000 a year, many schools will not want to bite too hard at the hands that feed them.
Many of the problems being forced upon us, more precisely upon our children and their schools, are a direct result of a public school education system facing a growing “perfect storm” of chronic underfunding colliding with a growing achievement gap. Make no mistake about it. What we see, in ever-increasing middle and high school gaps of academic achievements and skill levels, starts in kindergarten and our primary grades. It is a process that inexorably seals the low-performance fate of too many children before they even get to middle school, let alone high school and college.
We see growing disparities in children who enter kindergartens. Some already know their letters and colors…have been jump-started educationally…by many fine pre-schools. But some have never opened a book, colored, know how to function in a class setting, or have been read to. Growing diversities of culture and race bring great promise…and great problems.
They are not insurmountable challenges. There is much sound educational policy and practice. But we can’t possibly even begin to solve our problems and help insure the success of all our children until we honestly, blamelessly talk about everything from proper, dependable funding to improper political and for-profit pilfering of public school education.
The tip-of-the-iceberg perception is that too many of our children, too many public schools, are failing.
The real danger, just below the surface, is that too many of the adults who should know better are flunking miserably at their responsibilities to them.
Remediation has become a major part of most universities. It is now euphemistically called “developmental education.”
Mea culpa. Here I was, silly me, operating under the impression that all edication was, by definition, developmental!
Well, I home school. We don’t like tests in our house because I don’t find them overly useful. I’d much rather have a conversation or let them write me a paper on what they learned from it. I don’t know how we’re doing, I’ll let you know next year when my daughter starts dual enrollment but I figure given they are both self learners and know how to use the library, the internet, and a set of encyclopedias we aren’t doing too bad. I am not a fan of force fed education. I’d much rather teach them how to learn, to love to learn, and to watch them do so with gusto.