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Whither high school English?
ACT reports that of the 1.2 millions high school seniors who took the exam last year, only 51% had the reading skills necessary to begin college or to succeed in a job-training program. This is the lowest percentage in a decade, ACT notes. The numbers get even more disturbing when broken down along lines of race and class: Only 21% of black students were ready for college-level reading, while 33% of Hispanic students were; among students from families with annual incomes below $30,000, only 33% had the reading skills they would need in college.
The results are not surprising, considering that only 25% of college graduates test as "proficient" readers. What is worth noting: tests show that more eighth- and tenth-graders are on track to be ready for college than actually are prepared by the end of high school. In other words, high schools are failing to ensure that they develop students' reading skills appropriately, and they are dropping the ball in earnest during those crucial final two years of college preparation. They are then passing the problem on to colleges, which, we already know, fail dramatically to provide the depth and quality of remediation students clearly need. So clear is it to outside observers that American higher education is dramatically and devastatingly failing its students that the New York Times ran a staff editorial last Sunday calling for colleges and universities to wake up to the problem and to make themselves accountable to the public they are supposed to serve.
But the Times is a lone voice in the wilderness at the moment, even though the current findings on American literacy should be a scandal of national proportions. As Cynthia Schmeiser, senior vice president for research and development at ACT, told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The states are silent. ... When states aren't communicating what students should know, the bottom line is you can't get what you're not being asked to learn." ACT found that more than half the states in the U.S. don't define reading standards past the eighth grade.
Read the ACT report here.
Posted by acta online at March 1, 2006 10:13 AM
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