Kids today! Low expectations! Low standards! Bad teachers! Lazy kids! Cell phones! Social media!

We are in the midst of yet another panic about high schools failing to prepare their students for college. I speak now as an historian. When college enrollments were limited to those who graduated from elite private high schools and to those from public schools with exceptional grades, there was no outcry about unready, unprepared students. When public colleges and universities lowered their admission standards to accept almost anyone who wanted to go to college, the outcry began. It reached a crescendo in 1983 with the publication of the Reagan-era “A Nation at Risk,” which sounded the alarm about low standards and “a rising tide of mediocrity.”

As James Harvey, who was on the research team that drafted “A Nation at Risk” wrote, high-level members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education “cooked the books.” The report was intended to salute American schools for their success in opening their doors to students who were previously excluded or dropped out, but the bigwigs turned it into an indictment instead, cherry-picking statistics to condemn the schools and giving birth to decades of failed “reforms.”

Peter Greene writes here about the current surge in

High school graduates aren’t ready for college! The articles about this problem are popping up all over (here, here and here). Chad Aldeman, who I think of as a relatively level-headed member of the reformy crowd, just dropped a piece passing on UC’s increasing number of math-failing froshies. 

The National Center for Education Statistics has a paper that looks at those numbers for 1999-2000, 2003-2004, and 2007-2008, and while it breaks them down a variety of ways, the overall conclusion is that 1999-2000 was worse than either of the other years sampled, and all of the numbers hovered around the twenties, low or high. But this article from Chicagoland says that over a third of students entering college need remedial help, based on 2008 stats from the government– same as the previous report. A Harvard professor looking at a 2003 study comes up with one third as well. The Inside Higher Ed Bridge to Nowherereport throws around a 30% number. And I would swear that I recently heard 46% tossed into the remediation soup as well. Most of these sources do not compare the current figures to any from the alleged golden age of non-remediation. So can I at least suggest that the numbers are “controversial” or “contested” or maybe even “pulled out of a variety of different orifices”

Apparently today’s freshmen were not saved by an entire educational career spent under the guidance (more or less) of Common Core. But before we start using the success rate of college freshmen as an indictment of high school quality, let me suggest a few more factors to also consider.

Admissions process: As the generations entering college get smaller and smaller, and more and more people decide college isn’t worth the bother and/or expense, colleges are doing their best to fill up with students who possess a warm body and can write checks that don’t bounce. Lowering the bar is going to result in students with less college ready capabilities.

Measuring remediation needs: If we’re talking about students who need remediation, we need to talk about how the college is identifying that need. Because sometimes it’s a not-very-good assessment test.

Marketing: One of the big policy pushes, especially from neoliberals dems, has been to get everyone to go to college. “Get a college education, or you will be doomed to living in a van down by the river eating cat food on a hot plate!” has been a big message, and it has scared a lot of people into college who might have been better served by a trade school or another post-high school option.

And perhaps most important is this last one, because if we’re seeing an actual dip in educational attainment, I can think of one factor that distinguishes the education of the generation now entering college that is different from the generations that came before.

Test-centered education is not great: Today’s college freshmen got thirteen years of more-or-lee (depending on their state) Common Core flavored education, which in practice has meant thirteen years of getting prepped for the Big Standardized Test. If we are questioning the quality of the K-12 system, it seems only sensible to look at the policy that has taken control of K-12 education in this country. Maybe centering education on passing a single mediocre math and reading multiple choice test is not a great idea.

There is an extraordinary irony here. Many of the folks now saying, “Boy, you public school teachers are really messing up your job” are the same folks who spent the last twenty years saying, “Here, public school teachers– we are going to tell you how to do your job and you’re going to listen to us or else.” This is an old education story– “accountability” never means “accountability for policy makers.”

We could dig up a few other responses, like questioning why “just raise expectations” is a useful prescription for high schools, but not for colleges.

And there is always the possibility that this is one more faux crisis. But if there is an issue here, it would be useful to look at it more closely than simply declaring that Kids These Days are graduating from high school with underdeveloped thinky parts and it’s probably the fault of Those Damned Teachers and their lousy public schools.