
Why high schools can’t raise standards
Forty to 50 percent of high school graduates aren’t prepared to pass a community college class, writes Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. If high schools raise standards to the community college-ready level — 10th-grade reading and writing, Algebra I, a smattering of geometry and statistics — graduation rates will fall sharply. That’s politically impossible, he writes. The alternative is to “let the high school diploma” continue to be