Ill-Prepared College Freshmen Prompt New UNLV Study

The area's college freshmen are spending more and more time in remedial classes, prompting a new research project by UNLV research staff.

This past Sunday's Las Vegas Sun reports that last year, "more than a third of the Nevada high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million."

UNLV staff refuse to blame teachers, but rather the system needs to be more scrutinized. One answer seems to be "better tests." Well, in our asinine test-driven curriculum, where we spend more time teaching our kids how to take a three-hour exam than teaching them how to read and write and spell and balance a checkbook and how to find Florida on a map, that's the weak way out of the situation.

Sun:

[Neal] Smatresk, who served as UNLV’s executive vice president and provost before being appointed president in August, said the ultimate purpose of his initiative is to reduce the need for incoming UNLV freshmen to take remedial classes.

“It’s not about blaming teachers, it’s about revealing the problems we have and then honestly developing strategies to resolve them,” Smatresk said. “We would like to call it an attempt to help the teachers.”

When I recently blogged about public education in North Carolina, I covered this very issue. See this post I wrote back on November 27, 2007 over at Guilford School Watch. Also see this one from March of 2007.

It is startling, folks. It is about time someone wake up and smell the coffee because it is a travesty of justice that our children are ill-prepared and ill-equipped to handle college-level work.

E.C. :)