In my previous post, I wanted to highlight the perverse juxtaposition of articles about GWU’s latest basketball win and the series the Washington Post is running about basketball recruiting. GWU is far from alone in the practices the articles discuss, but that’s the subject of the articles so that is the school I mentioned in the post.

The articles raise issues about the ways we’re failing student athletes, but there’s a larger issue: the ways that students are being failed altogether. After I posted, I saw once and future Harvard President Derek Bok’s editorial, “A Test Colleges Don’t Need.”   So many students reach college unable to string together coherent sentences, let alone coherent thoughts.  In the last 10 years, the answer to that problem has been more multidisciplinary courses, but that doesn’t get to the root of the problem – many students can’t read or write.

Although I disagree vehemently with the Bush administration’s plans to gauge college learning via standardized tests, if the plan starts a discussion that highlights how poorly high school graduates are prepared not only for college, but for life, than the plan isn’t a loss at all.  Unless the tests are instituted, then I suspect everyone will lose, but that’s a post for another day, and nothing I have to say on the subject would be nearly as convincing as what Bok has to say, anyway.