Are High Schools Failing Their Students?
The Need Does earning a diploma guarantee that a high school graduate is ready for work and college? It should, for very practical reasons. Entrance requirements for colleges have increased. Employers expect more. Students must be able to communicate effectively, think critically, analyze and interpret data, and evaluate a variety of materials. Sixty-seven percent of new jobs in the market today require some postsecondary education (Achieve Inc., 2006). Yet despite these demands, many high school graduates are inadequately prepared to continue their education or to enter the workforce. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), at least 28 percent of students entering four-year public colleges in the fall of 2000 were required to take remedial courses when they started, especially in mathematics and language arts, as did 42 percent of those enrolled in two-year public colleges (NCES, 2004). Employers also have noted that many recent high school graduates do not p
