College readiness: amazingly low scores (and even worse by race)

Kizmet helpfully posted an article about apparent racial discrimination in South African universities. This information comes in the same week that ACT (American College Testing Service) published its 2013 data on the college readiness of the hundreds of thousands of students who took the ACT exams, intending to go to college.

Nationwide, only 26% of test takers met the benchmark scores indicating a 75% chance of achieving a "C" average in college. Broken down by race, the numbers are:
Asian 43% White 33% Hispanic 14% African-American 5%

And these are the high school juniors and seniors with an announced intention of going on to college.

The full report is at: http://tinyurl.com/le9q84m

Are the tests too hard? Are colleges too tough? Or are our high schools, in general, doing an incredibly bad job?

 

I'm guessing that the last choice is the case. But it can't possibly be that simple could it? The idea that nationwide high schools are failing to educate is hard to understand. A kid goes K-8 and does OK then all of a sudden tha local school system falls apart? This is a sociological phenomenon. This is about families. This is about priorities. This is about accountability. Don't automatically blame it on the school system.

 

Yes, the problem is that many kids enter Kindergarten unprepared. There's a slew of research about reading to kids when they're little and having books in your house, and I think people have gotten away from that now. My little girl will start Kindergarten in two weeks, and we're already worried that she'll be bored because she's had 2 years of preschool.

I will add, though, that my former school's SAT scores were awful. It wasn't necessarily because everyone did poorly. There were just a bunch of folks who were forced to take the tests and didn't care about it. They qualified for the test for free, and many of them would just fall asleep in the middle of the test so they wouldn't get good scores at all.

-Matt