Considering the amount of time (or lack thereof) dedicated to quality instruction, particularly at the secondary level, these scores don’t surprise me in the least. For starters, we have a school day that is a mere 6 hours in length. Take out ‘walking time’ and lunch, and you’re down to about 5.25 hours. Instead of focusing on the fundamentals and skills demand exists for, we waste our students time with classes that offer little or no educational value. By putting an emphasis on reading, mathematics, science, and technology, lengthening the school day / academic calendar year, and pushing students to excel, we could avoid future embarrassment of our communities.

Tom, let’s be fair here. What is really a good school? One that sets its students up to be productive members of society after graduation? To possibly prepare a student to be successful in college if that’s the direction they choose to go? I know of a few Barrington students who have gone on to US top 10 universities and done quite well. If we want to argue that the Harvard, Stanford, MIT schools are not among the tops in the world, well you’re welcome to make that argument. Some of the top students in the world go to those colleges and graduates from Barrington and EG also go there and are successful. This is one thing that I’ve always wanted to look at is a comparison of high schools in terms of college preparedness. I can’t just judge a HS as being “successful” because maybe some kid would judge himself to be a success to get a job at the local car fixit shop and work there for his whole life, or to be an apprentice plumber and work his way up through that system. Who am I to say that he’s “unsuccessful” because he didn’t go to college? This is why I’d want to judge the high schools on just college preparedness and not make any further claims than that. It seems like a huge undertaking, and about the only way I can figure out how to get any idea on it would be to survey collegiate admissions officers on which schools turn out the best applicants and then compare that to something else, maybe GPA or graduation rates? Then again, is Bill Gates or Matt Damon a “failure” because they dropped out of college? But back to the original point, I have no idea how our top… Read more »

As a postscript to the previous comments I made, I want to clarify how this work on student proficiency has been supported.
Most of the work mentioned was supported by the Ocean State Policy Research Institute where I’m one of the Education Fellows. The balance of the effort was supported by my own company, Asora Education.