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By Root 6712 0

and a majority of students who can read, who can pass standardized state tests. These schools are often okay, but not really good. Too many teachers are not that well educated, not that on fire to be teachers, and not that challenged within the system to be terrific. Such schools often lack any coherent or compelling idea about what a good education consists of, what high schools should emphasize, how to be really vibrant learning communities. These ‘okay’ schools may send kids like yours and mine on a good path—good colleges, good job options—but even in these schools, too many kids are not living up to their intellectual or personal potential. They’re not engaged, and not headed to become the inventors, entrepreneurs, and stewards of the Earth that we’re going to need.”

According to the Department of Education, about a third of first-year students entering college had taken at least one remedial course in reading, writing, or math. The number is even higher for black and Hispanic students. At public two-year colleges, that average number rises to above 40 percent. And having to take just one remedial course is highly correlated with failure to graduate from college.

Engel’s point cannot be emphasized enough: We must close the gap between minorities and average whites, because there are virtually no jobs that will provide a decent standard of living anymore for those who can’t get some form of post–high school education, let alone a decent high school education that imparts critical thinking, reading, and basic math skills. But we also have to raise the whole American average, because even if the achievement levels of black and Hispanic young people can rise to the level of average white students but our average is in the middle of the world pack, we will not have the critical mass of workers necessary to do the best jobs, let alone invent new ones. Making a Harlem school perform as well as a Scarsdale school is necessary, but only getting both schools to perform as well as or better than a school in Shanghai is insufficient. We need to close the gap between our achievement and our potential today, but our long-term economic vitality depends on raising the potential of our entire society tomorrow. We need to lift the bottom faster and the top higher.

We also need more routes to the top. Many of the good jobs opening up in this country do not require four years of college, but they do require high-quality vocational training. Learning to repair the engine of an electric car, or a robotic cutting tool, or a new gas-powered vehicle that has more computing power in it than the Apollo space capsule—these are not skills you can pick up in a semester of high school shop class. It is vital that high schools and community colleges offer vigorous vocational tracks and that we treat them with the same esteem as we do the liberal arts or “college” tracks. Maybe we don’t have to channel students as formally as do Singapore, Finland, and Germany—where early in high school students move either onto a track for four-year college or into vocational training of two or more years—but we do need to make clear that everyone needs postsecondary education, that there is a range of opportunities, that students need to start preparing for those different opportunities in high school, and, ultimately, that learning how to deconstruct a laptop computer in the local community college is as valuable as learning how to deconstruct The Catcher in the Rye at the state university.

A high school education today, says Duncan, should prepare a student to attend a university or a vocational college “without remediation,” because that is the ticket to a decent job. Until now the goal has just been “to get people to graduate” from high school, he added. But graduation alone is not enough. There are too few decent jobs for such people anymore, and few or none for the young person without a high school degree. A high school education must prepare students for the next step of education or skill-building. “That’s the fundamental shift,” said Duncan. “We should