From a blog called Right Wing Nation, we read the following news excerpt (disregard the politics, this is just about this one issue in education):

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The only adjective that can adequately describe this news from Los Angeles:

In the fall of 2004, 48,000 ninth-graders took beginning algebra; 44% flunked, nearly twice the failure rate as in English. Seventeen percent finished with Ds.

. . . Among those who repeated the class in the spring, nearly three-quarters flunked again.

The school district could have seen this coming if officials had looked at the huge numbers of high school students failing basic math.

Reading down, I see this — which doesn’t surprise me in the least:

At Cal State Northridge, the largest supplier of new teachers to Los Angeles Unified, 35% of future elementary school instructors earned Ds or Fs in their first college-level math class last year.

Some of these students had already taken remedial classes that reviewed high school algebra and geometry.

I can tell you that “college-level” doesn’t mean what you think it does. Actual college-level math is reserved for math and science majors; non-majors take watered-down, idiotized courses. “Calculus for non-majors” often gets to the concept of derivatives at the end of the semester.

Worse, math departments often reserve their most dumbed-down math courses for education majors.

Certainly, passing students on is a problem — but why are these education majors allowed to get a degree?
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He’s got a point.