There isn’t much good kid news lately due to a lot of focus on Katrina, which is very appropriate, because we are, in many ways, a nation in mourning right now.  There were a few stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education that caught my eye, because they were dealing with the same issue:  our kids are simply not prepared for college when they leave high school. 

With all the rhetoric out there, you’d think that we’d be making some progress, but alas, it seems we having just been talking, like so many other things.  The Chronicle is a paid subscription magazine, so I cannot share the text with you, but I can say that one article indicates that professors experience a great deal of job satisfaction, except when they are dealing with academically unprepared students.  We might say that is their job, but then, another study pops up from The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education suggesting improved coordination between high schools and colleges to improve preparedness.  This has been a particularly frustrating issue for us, because we see the attitudes of the kids who grow up in our local “elite” school district with all the right academics, and even if we stretched to afford a house there, we’re not sure we want the other stuff that comes with it.  We would love to hear how other families are dealing with balancing their own education standards with what is offered in their local area.  It seems that it should not be this hard, but somewhere along the way, the focus of our schools shifted, and many of us are trying to renew the academic excellence we experienced as kids.