Rollen wrote:
When we reduce standards so everybody can pass then eventually we are going to be irrigating fields with Gatorade.


But, but.... electrolytes are what plants crave!

Dano wrote:
You are still in the college Prep mentality. Why is college entrance so important? Why not how many get through and enter into the trades?


Ok, you got me. I threw those out as examples, simply because those are the figures by which I would have measured my own success. I agree that there should be emphasis on the trades or other useful job skills (as well as life skills frankly - home economics should be required for all students), but in my passion to get a response written, I passed right over them. So perhaps we measure success thusly: How many students did you send to gainful employment + how many of the genuinely intelligent ones went to college? I say genuinely intelligent because I have graded college freshman composition papers before. The fact that those people got into college (even a community college) with such a poor command of the grammar and sentence structure of their native language made me weep for society. I literally sat in the bar and cried on the papers I was helping my friend grade. Stupidity is sad.

I agree with pretty much everything else Dano said, with the possible exception of wanting to improve the public education system rather than use public money to get students into schools that don't suck. I agree that is in my best interest to have more students educated more effectively, I just disagree with what might be the best method to go about achieving that goal.