We need a K-16 education system
By Bill Maxwell
Three out of every five community college students take remedial courses, which typically cover middle school or high school material. This is evidence of the yawning gap between those who are eligible to enroll in college and those who are actually ready to attend.
Bill Maxwell
This gap is inexcusable. Students should come to college ready to do college-level work. The gap could be reduced or even erased if we change how we educate people. With their “open-door” policies, community colleges tend to admit anyone with a high school diploma. But this comes at an extreme cost: they spend about $2 billion a year on remediation, teaching things that could or should have been learned in K-12.
In their book, From High School to College: Improving Opportunities for Success in Postsecondary Education, Michael W. Kirst and Andrea Venezia argue that the causes of remediation can be traced in part to the traditional “split between levels of our educational system and the subsequent lack of communication and connection between them.”
Indeed, we have two distinct systems: the K-12 system of elementary and secondary schools, and the postsecondary system of colleges and universities. Because we do not think of K-12 education and higher education as one continuous system, we often see rifts between public school teachers and college professors. Community college professors blame secondary school teachers for the remediation crisis; secondary teachers, in turn, point fingers at