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

XQ: Super School Live, an hour-long program on innovative high schools, will air tonight on ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. Participating performers will include Tom The XQ Institute, which has awarded $100 million in grants to innovative “super schools” across the country is funding the program. Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is one of the funders. Hanks, Common, Jennifer Hudson, Samuel L. Jackson, Sheryl Crow, and Yo-Yo Ma. The glitzy show promotes a false narrative that o

New high schools are “demolishing the classroom,”, writes Leslie Nguyen-Okwu on OZY. With a $10 million grant from the XQ: Super Schools Project, New Harmony High in Louisiana will put students on barges to study rising sea levels and coastal preservation. . . . students will learn in a living, breathing lab on the water and get hands-on experience in studying biology, river ecology and environmental justice, in addition to the usual reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic. “[The stu