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Quote of the day
Comes from Mark Schneider, commissioner of statistics at the National Center for Education Statistics. Commenting on the Center's recent findings regarding drastically declining literacy among American college graduates, Schneider expressed his own dismay in unforgettably stark terms: "What's disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels."
According to the Center's latest findings, only 41% of graduate students tested in 2003 scored as "proficient" readers, while only 31% of undergrads did. That's a lot of tuition for not a lot of result. But, as Dolores Perin of Columbia Teachers College notes, the problem is not so much that colleges fail to educate students as that colleges are admitting students that have not been educated by the K-12 system, and then failing to remediate them properly. Functional illiteracy is hardly produced in college--but it is being ignored, neglected, and hence exacerbated there.
Posted by acta online at December 28, 2005 12:52 PM
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