The Blog of Ms. Mercer

A recent comment on an old post at dangerously irrelevant had me looking at one of the links to a study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I love the results for California because if you think about them, they really make absolutely no sense:

 We are failing on academic achievement, and bridging the race/income gap (the majority of our students, BTW), but we get high marks for rigor of standards, our teaching force (based on testing teaching candidates), and most interestingly, post-secondary and workforce readiness. My first thought was, oh, that’s becasue of the huge inmigration of folks with Masters/Doctorates who come into the state (How to start a discussion with a doctorate in S.F.? Ask him for a no-whip on the mocha he’s making for you at the coffee bar). Strangely, it was not for that but a number of factors including, AP test taking (a lot more of all kinds of students taking AP classes now), requiring a High School Exit Exam at 10th grade standards (we do and about 85-90% of ALL students had passed it on the last go-round), percentage of high school graduates, and how many students were college ready by 19 (this sounds dead wrong because a significant percentage of starting college students are having to take remedial courses at both community colleges and CSU system). Those last two figures should be low based on everything I have seen.  So, if our kids are so low academically, why does the Chamber think most of our students are ready for college and the workforce? Are the tests showing them “failing” wrong? Are the methods for determining workforce/college readiness wrong? Something must be because those two metrics contradict each other. You be the judge…