@Cyber Liberty@Dexter @Sanguine @Sanguine
This relates to what I was referring to on another thread about "School-to-work." If a student wants to break the predetermination that was made in Middle School that he/she isn't "college material," that student has to enter what this author refers to as a "black hole."
The most serious problems aren't overcrowding in poor high school classrooms with underpaid teachers. The two problems I have seen are as follows:
1) Some kids aren't college material and never will be--and yet they have been told that they need to go to college to have good life. If they want a six-figure income eventually, they'd better be encouraged to look elsewhere. (Sadly, a lot of young folks could make that kind of money with no prior training in the oil industry's
presently available openings, but they can't pass a drug screen.)
2) Some kids, on the other hand, could become college students if they got better primary and secondary instruction in the classrooms we already have under the teachers we already have. (This second problem, related to but different from the first one, is a pervasive problem in America's culture, filtering into our schools from the top via progressive administrators and from the bottom via social and family decay. [For example, a California teacher once told me that the Constitution was taken completely out of California's schools years ago. Now California's schools are reportedly the worst in the nation.])
One of the saddest things about the black hole mess is that a lot of colleges are trying to suck kids out of the black holes of inadequate remedial education (and to make them paying customers in college) by seriously dumbing down the college curriculum--leaving the kids one degree older and deeper in debt.