More and more Florida grads taking remedial classes in college

From Ocala.com

by Brad Rogers

A year ago this week, a report on the state of education in Marion County was released by the College of Central Florida. Its author, CF’s Jillian Ramsammy, used words like “alarming,” “bleak” and “urgent” to describe the state of education in our community and called for “an unprecedented level of engagement and commitment ... through school, work, family, church and community” to elevate the importance of education.

Yet after a year, not only has there been no engagement or commitment, there has been little acknowledgement. Not by the business community, not by our city and county boards and, shockingly, not by our School Board.

That’s right, the Marion County Board of Public Instruction has been silent since Ramsammy wrote that the educational data “reveal an alarming educational deficit for Marion County.”

Much of the report, edited by former CF president Charles “Chick” Dassance, focuses on how to create a more educated workforce. Right now, only about 11 percent of Marion County’s workers have a four-year degree, way below the statewide average of 16 percent. To put that into perspective, Marion County would have to have 12,000 more bachelor’s degree holders to reach the state average.

But the stat Ramsammy cited that should have set off alarms and elicited a reaction, and a strong one, over at the School Board offices is this one:

Over half of the incoming freshman at CF during the 2009-10 school year — 59 percent of them, to be exact — “needed some type of academic remediation to get them ready to take college-level courses.”

In other words, sure, our FCAT scores are up, most of our schools are grade “A” and our graduation rate is above 80 percent, but an awful lot of the kids graduating from Marion County Public Schools aren’t ready for the next level. They are not prepared for college, which is increasingly an educational imperative for a decent standard of living.

So 59 percent of the kids entering CF aren’t properly educated and no one on the School Board, no one in the administration, nobody in the community stopped ask how that can be. How can a kid, indeed, hundreds of them, graduate with good grades and a good GPA, but not be ready to take college-level classes?

The School Board is so focused on cutting spending and cutting taxes, avoiding layoffs and avoiding right-wing wrath that it couldn’t stop to notice that the school system’s graduates aren’t ready for the next step. They are failing their mission to ensure every child in Marion County, Florida, gets a quality education from kindergarten to 12th grade so they can pursue their dreams.

Sadly, the Board of Public Instruction has morphed into the Board of Public Reduction. Yeah, yeah, the budget is an ongoing crisis. We get it. The sky is falling. Cut, slash, burn. Four-day week. No music, no art. Blah, blah, blah.

But while our School Board has been busy reducing our investment in public education, they have also, however unwittingly, neglected to keep their eye on their foremost mission — making sure our children are adequately educated to make it in the world. The proof of that failure is in CF’s remediation classes.

Yet, no one has said a word about it. And that, my friends, is alarming.

http://www.ocala.com/article/20120121/COLUMNISTS/120129946?p=2&tc=pg