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Thursday, January 4, 2007
College: Ready or Not
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Education Week’s “Quality Counts” report covers a lot of ground this year. Although there’s no in-depth reporting on the issues, it does provide a helpful survey of some of the latest buzzwords, including “early childhood education” and “college readiness.”
The latter topic is covered by an editorial from David S. Spence, president of Atlanta’s own Southern Regional Education Board, whom I interviewed for my article yesterday.
According to Quality Counts, Georgia is among the majority of states that have yet to define what it means for students to be ready for college. Surprisingly, Spence says it can take as few as two years to align public K-12 and university systems (curriculums and testing) so the standards are in place.
Considering that, in 2002, only 32 percent of Georgia’s ninth-graders were expected to finish high school and go to college, will even two years be soon enough?
UPDATE: To clarify: that last statistic is based on the number of high school freshman finishing high school within four years. While it’s cited in the Quality Counts report, the information came from “Measuring Up,” a report on the state of higher education released in September.
I was struck by this particularly scathing excerpt from the Measuring Up site:
“Georgia’s underperformance in educating its young population could limit the state’s access to a competitive workforce and weaken its economy over time. Compared with leading states, relatively few 9th graders in Georgia graduate from high school in four years. Since the early 1990s, Georgia has seen a double-digit drop in the percentage of 9th graders graduating from high school, and this rate is now among the lowest in the country. Of those who do graduate, few go on to college.”
