Education problems

In his syndicated column on July 15, E.J. Dionne reports on the silent crisis overtaking our education system: “Today, the United States stands 10th in the percentage of 25- to-34-year-olds who have earned a postsecondary degree. We’re behind Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and France.” On NPR last week Dionne said that the main reason Americans don’t finish college is that they are unprepared. This struck a note with me because some Delaware Valley grads entering Penn State, where most of them end up, must take no-credit remedial courses before they are allowed to proceed with college-level courses. Parents in the district should be outraged, particularly because they are paying college tuition for those courses. Those students are unprepared for college, as Dionne says. Our college graduation rates are dropping, even as our local schools are reporting falling college entrances and increased military enrollments by graduating seniors. And for those who haven’t noticed, of the Delaware Valley class of 2009, almost 500 students, maybe one graduate will be attending a top-tier university in the fall, the third such entrance in four years. Sadly, of the those three Delaware Valley graduates out of the last four classes who went on to top-tier colleges -- that’s three out of almost 1900 students -- one of them has washed out. Our test scores have reached “average” in a low-scoring state. We have sent three graduates to highly selective colleges in four years. But our annual spending per student, almost $12,000, is about what private schools spend. And they are the feeder schools for our great universities. What’s wrong with this picture? Tony Splendora Milford