THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409090313
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 50 lines
Among public-school systems in South Hampton Roads, Virginia Beach's system fared best in a study of how public-school graduates fare in state-supported colleges. But it didn't exactly fare well. Statewide, one in four of last fall's first-time freshmen needed remedial work. Regionwide, more than one in three. Citywide, almost one in three.
School Superintendent Sidney Faucette told reporter Jon Glass that he'd ``stake (his) career on the fact that kids who go through college prep in this city will do well at any college in the nation.'' Good. Those kids are staking their careers on it, too.
But this study, by the state's Council on Higher Education, points up the needs of a different student population: Kids who get by in high school and get out inadequately prepared to move up through college or on the job. Remedial courses aren't esoteric stuff. They're math and language skills basic to performance academically and vocationally; skills each student should have mastered after 13 years in public schools - and tens of thousands per-student in public tax funds. Yet having helped pay once for K-12, Virginia taxpayers pay again, $25 million more in '92-'93, for remedial college courses. And the students must ante up as well.
The learning lag may often lie in home problems schools can't fix. But that doesn't let high schools off the hook for diplomas that don't mean the mastery they should. Catching those deficiencies long before graduation is the high schools' job, not the colleges'. Not even the community colleges' job, if high schools were doing theirs.
Virginia schools are moving in that direction with the literacy passport test. A state panel suggested that more school districts reimburse colleges for remedial courses their grads require. Another state panel is revising curricula. Some state panel should study ways to base state funding to colleges other than head count, a disincentive to toughening high school graduation and college admission requirements. But restructuring K-12 to meet the very changed skill needs of students and graduates, and resisting the trend toward dumping students into a mainstream it's hoped will lift all boats, are major antidotes. Leaving 13 years of public school with neither adequate academic or job skills is just unacceptable. In that regard, Roy Nichols, Norfolk's school superintendent, may be pondering the right tracks: either college-prep or ``tech-prep,'' but no just getting by. by CNB