High School Students Not Stressed Out Enough -- Seriously

Diana Jean Schemo's great article about high remediation rates in community colleges was, unfortunately, kind of buried in the Labor Day weekend slot a few days ago. If you missed it while barbecuing and closing up your pool, take a look. In a nutshell:

As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.

and:

The unyielding statistics showcase a deep disconnection between what high school teachers think that their students need to know and what professors, even at two-year colleges, expect them to know.

This quote in particular stands out:

As the debate rages, nearly half of all students seeking degrees begin their journeys at community colleges much like the Dundalk campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, two-story no-frills buildings named by letters, not benefactors or grateful alumni. The college’s interim vice chancellor for learning and developmental education, Alvin Starr, said he saw students who passed through high school never having read a book cover to cover.

“They’ve listened in class, taken notes and taken the test off of that,’’ Dr. Starr said.

People living and working in the upper-middle professional classes are deluged with anecdotes, books, and news stories bemoaning the ever-more-crushing workload being imposed on high schoolers. Along with Jay Mathews' excellent Washington Post Op-ed from a few weeks ago, this article is another reminder that most American high school students simply do not live their lives that way. Their biggest problem isn't schools that ask too much, it's schools that ask too little.

Unfortunately, the consequences of too-low expectations don't come back to the high schools that create them. They fall upon the students themselves, often just a few months after graduation, when they enroll in college and suddenly find out how little their diploma is actually worth.