Editorial Report 13b

In this editorial report, I am including some of my old content and comparing it to what I have in my upcoming draft. There have been some signficant changes made since last week, so it is a pretty robust update:

The Rough Cut
This essay will be about the college-readiness of high schoolers, with a specific focus on preparedness for science courses. There are many who claim that high schoolers are unprepared for the challenges of college and therefore advise that high schools be fundamentally altered: either by incorporating a common core curriculum into schools, or by allowing parents to freely switch public schools via the creation of a charter system, etc. In this essay, I argue that such moves actually harm students more than they help them. 

The Revised Version
 

There’s a popular myth floating around that high schoolers arrive at traditional four-year colleges unprepared. Strong evidence appears to support the claim: in 2010, 29% of four-year college freshmen enrolled in a remedial course1. Among all college attendees, only 56% graduate within six years. An overwhelming majority of these students arrive with high school GPAs over 3.0, and 95% do nearly all the work required by their high school. In sum, these statistics paint a picture of mediocre high schools funneling students through their system, providing meager academic support, and setting their students up for failure. Data like these are often used to present the crumbling state of our public schools and to suggest that a major overhaul of our high school system is required. One major overhaul typically mentioned involves increasing the number of charter schools available in a community. In this paper, I argue that the underpreparedness of high-schoolers is exaggerated and used as a propaganda tool by conservative libertarians. By insisting that high schoolers are unprepared for college, they advance their agenda of closing public schools in exchange for charter schools that exclusively target these college-bound high schoolers and ignore low and average-achieving students. 

• The major changes here have been both in content. I restructured the introduction (and the entire essay) to focus more on what motives people have when they claim that high schools require restructuring. Thus, I no longer suggest that a solution is bad, but rather than a solution is coming from ulterior motives.