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Against the Grain
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FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA The high schools fail Faced with criticism -- much of it based on pernicious assumptions of racial inferiority -- over a proposal to beef up admission standards at UNLV and UNR to the point where a 3.0 high school Grade Point Average would be required for entering freshmen by 2006, Nevada's university regents are already backing down, talking about a compromise 2.75 standard or even extending the deadline to 2009 ... which might as well be forever, in the world of politics. But some of the information that's come out in the course of this debate far overshadows mere angel-counting in an attempt to divine an appropriate entering GPA. It's becoming clear that -- thanks to epidemic grade inflation and social promotion -- a vast number of students being accepted by the state's major universities lack the proficiency to do college level work, no matter what grades they've been awarded in high school. Even among college freshmen who arrived at UNLV in the fall of 2001 with high school GPAs of 3.0 or higher, nearly 40 percent ended up enrolled in remedial English and math classes at the university, as Review-Journal education reporter Natalie Patton revealed in a front page story on Nov. 30, 2001. Professors are reporting these kids -- having consistently seen A's and B's on their high school report cards -- are shocked to learn they are in no way prepared to do college work, reports university Regent Mark Alden of Las Vegas. "Until now, I don't think there's been a clear picture of how kids are unprepared even though they have the grades," Alden comments. "These kids are ending up in developmental ed. It's worse in Las Vegas and Clark County, but it's all over the state." Yes, raising the bar would reduce the demand for remedial education slightly -- fully 52 percent of entering freshmen with high school GPAs between 2.5 and 2.74 turn out to need these catch-up courses. But once we realize that fully 38 percent of UNLV freshmen who arrive toting GPAs higher than 3.0 also need the remedial courses, the endemic nature of the problem grows obvious. It's not as though the expectations for college freshmen have exactly grown more rigorous over the past 60 years. Entering freshmen at four-year colleges before the Second World War were expected to be able to read Latin (that's why preparatory schools were often called "Latin schools") and at least have a passing acquaintance with French or German -- expectations for their detailed knowledge of mathematics and American history were also correspondingly higher. Yes, those who enter today's local high schools without English as their first language may present a special case. But that excuse only goes so far -- have the kids in question at least mastered secondary-level math and science in their primary language? Only if they got their schooling overseas, one suspects. (Ask any European exchange student how hard he or she finds the high school curriculum here. After a few polite demurrals, they will usually admit, "We had all this material several years ago.") "Maybe we don't have a good understanding with the high schools of what they do and what we expect of the students who come from our high schools to our universities," says grandmotherly Nevada Board of Regents Chairwoman Thalia Dondero, in a classic understatement. In fact, the education bureaucracy has been de-emphasizing and then virtually eliminating memorization requirements for everything from multiplication tables to spelling methodology to the diagramming of sentences for decades, replacing solid and proven academic lesson plans with feel-good nostrums and the glorified equivalent of show-and-tell on the theory that students will fare better if they "feel good about themselves" than if they're occasionally brought to tears by having to confront the fact they're failing and just may have to knuckle down. It hasn't worked, but this feel-good alternative fantasy world has been allowed to metastasize now for more than 30 years, until all involved realize -- no matter what their deflective protestations about how hard it is to teach the ill-fed and the unloved -- that the shock of a cold-water reality check (giving today's high school juniors the same test their grandparents would have been expected to pass to get into a four-year college before 1960) simply cannot be allowed to happen, lest a failure rate above 90 percent expose their whole shambling bureaucratic cadaver for what it really is. (No, the answer that "technology changes and most of that stuff would be out-of-date" does not hold water. Today's students should still know what James Watt had to do with steam power, even if they're also taught how to design a microchip -- which they're not. And their ignorance of the debates over ratification of the Constitution and of Jackson and Van Buren and the National Bank would be hideously dangerous even if they were taught the real, detailed story of the ill-considered embrace of socialism by the Farley-Roosevelt administration instead - which they also are not.) Setting admission requirements "is not a process intended to be exclusionary," simpers UNLV president Carol Harter, thereby summing up the whole problem in a nutshell, since the exclusion of the unprepared is precisely what a college admissions department must do, if our best students are to have any chance of moving head at a competitive pace. What difference does it make where the GPA "bar" is set, if even those earning A's would be laughed out of their freshmen year at any self-respecting university in Europe or Japan? Only those who refuse to admit the evidence of their own eyes can fail to recognize that what we are witnessing here is the nearly complete failure and implosion of the government welfare schools. (It makes no more sense to say "My taxes pay for my kid's school" than it does to say "My taxes pay for my Food Stamps" -- the subsets of recipients and "donors" are never the same, or the whole exercise in redistributionism would be pointless.) Since those in charge resist any course change as this engine hurtles towards the cliff, the only solution is to get your own kids out while there's still time. Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page
editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter
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