College Ready?

What does it mean to be college ready?  Just a few superficial thoughts on a highly complex problem:

1.      Being college ready should not mean the memorization of a million facts.  21^st Century gizmos deliver all the facts you ever need to know right to your hip pocket or purse.  Nor should it mean mastery of a million formulas.  Ditto previous rationale.

2.      Being college ready should mean the ability to process all the information that is delivered to your hip pocket or purse, form conclusions, inferences, identify trends, apply the correct facts and correct formulas.  It should mean knowing how to ask the right questions.  It should mean being creative and working collaboratively.  It should mean knowing how to teach oneself new information.  Should mean metacognition and critical thinking.  It should mean having a rich sense of our cultural and political heritage, appreciation for the fine arts, and a sense of our place in the vast universe from various philosophical perspectives.

Interesting to me is that none of the stuff I listed in paragraph #2 tends to be measured well on a standardized test.  (I know, I know, Pearson will argue that requiring multi-step problems and determining inferences from reading passages measures the stuff in paragraph #2.  They are wrong.  You only measure the stuff in paragraph #2 by interaction, creative writing, research and dialog.  The fruit of creative thinking and problem solving can never be pre-determined as having one right answer on a bubble sheet.)

Interesting to me is that the more we focus on kids doing better on standardized tests driven by state defined curriculum standards the less attention we spend on the stuff in paragraph #2.

Interesting to me is that before public schools started doing such a great job of graduating so many kids, colleges were not complaining that kids were not college ready.  In 1970 there were 8,581,000 students in institutions of higher learning in this country.  In 2009 there were 20,428,000!  (NCES)  Our total population in 1970 was 205,052,174.  Our total population in 2010 was 308,745,538.  (US Census)  Our total population increased by 103,693,364, or 50%.  Our college population increased by 11,847,000 or 130%!  Suddenly we hear complaints from colleges that students are not “college ready.”  The solution to this problem, of course, has been to assume that we in public schools were not teaching them.  How can we find out if we are teaching them in public schools?  More standardized tests.  What happens if we focus more and more on standardized tests?  Less college ready.  Go figure.

Or, perhaps interesting to you is another way to look at all the above data.  That is to say that public schools did such a great job of preparing vast numbers of kids for colleges that it is now clear that the colleges were not prepared for the kids.  In other words, kids were college ready, but colleges were not kid ready.  Especially kids who had learned to demonstrate mastery on a standardized test.  Now that’s a whole 'nuther topic.