Mixed Messages in Education

Our educational systems are charged with providing skills and promoting achievement and it only seems reasonable that we promote students to achievement beyond that which sustains poverty. The same skills and knowledge necessary to move to the next level of college academics must be presumed to be necessary for sustaining entry level work in the age of information technology.

Mixed Messages


The shift to K-16 academics will correctly initiate a coordination of standards and the assessment of such standards that will ultimately eliminate mixed messages inherent in our educational processes. The current disconnect allows for high school graduation requirements that are vastly different from college entrance requirements. Students, particularly poor and minority students, are promoted through existing K-12 processes with the false expectation that they have meet the requirements for further education. However, colleges and universities have much different, and in most cases, more difficult entrance requirements. The student accustomed to an educational system that stresses achievement at one grade level in order to advance to the next grade level is then bamboozled when transitioning from high school to college. That student, if accepted into higher education, is too often forced into remedial coursework, extending the established two and four year college curriculums beyond the established two or four years. Even more devastating for poor and minority students, particularly those that are dependent upon financial assistance, is that the funds expended to cover the necessary remedial coursework cuts into their financial assistance. Their tenure in institutions of higher education is extended beyond the limits of assistance. These students may never complete a college program because they will lack funds beyond the fourth year of enrollment or they will be forced to endure a heavier than normal workload to accumulate credits once remedial studies are completed. Educators and educational institutions must come together and build a collaborative set of rigorous standards and assessments that allow for the transition from high school to college without the need for this remedial training.

Educators must be willing to understand and adhere to requirements of higher education. Likewise, higher education must collaborate with educators to define what is needed for students to excel. Both entities must prepare instruction and train educators to reach the same goals. A system that provides for the publishing and sharing of assessments would ensure that educators, administrators, politicians and the community understand the expectations at all levels of K-16. All concerned entities could then assist in ensuring that educators reach the known and established goals.

Current standardized student-testing attempts to measure parameters that are thought to be characteristic and fair to large populations of students. Writing comprehension, for example, is often measured by the student’s ability to document personal and expressive narratives. Not because it accurately measures skills and abilities, but because it is the perceived skill set that can be most fairly distributed and measured amongst the largest population of students. Likewise, mathematics is too often reduced to the verbal instruction of coursework below the Algebra II level of skill. Again, the result of perceptions that low-level verbal instruction is most easily and fairly distributable and measurable amongst the mass of students. Rigorous standards will eliminate the current insistence upon educators to devise testing to meet such artificial goals. The rigor requested must extend beyond menial measures to prepare and assess the student’s ability to communicate in real-world workplace scenarios. The age of information technology requires that students are trained and capable to rationalize, analyze, report, interpret and summarize. These skills are of such importance in our fast-paced world of information technology that they need to be appropriately conveyed and specifically assessed for every student, at every grade level, K-16…