-=> Quoting Matt Smith to William Lipp <=-
 LP> Unless & until students decide that
 LP> education is an important commodity,
 WL> I think this is the part most in need of
 WL> improvement right now.
 MS> It's naive to expect students to value K-12 education 
 MS> when they can see the economy does not.
 MS> When HS grades count for little in admission to most colleges (in
 MS> part  because colleges find them unreliable or inflated), when 
 MS> most colleges approach or are open-admission, students 
 MS> cannot be faulted for just observing that working their 
 MS> butts off and taking hard courses in HS does not pay off.  
 MS> Students will decide that education is an important 
 MS> commodity only when there is a payoff.    
You've got this polished into a nice sound bite.  But it nags at me
that something is askew, and I haven't figured out just where my
core disagreement is.  "Most colleges approach ... open admission"
hides a lot of details.  Colleges have sorted themselves out into
hierarchies, and the top tiers are nothing close to "open admissions."
But most kids are, by definition, headed to lower tier colleges if
any, so this simplification doesn't seem to be the core of my
objection.
Maybe the core is in the distinction between grades and education.  Leona
speaks of valuing education; you seem to be speaking to the value of
grades.  I think the economy values education in the old liberal arts
tradition of learning to think.  I think you're probably right that
grades are no longer a reliable measure of education, at least on the
high end (low grades are probably still a reliable measure of low
education).  Without a reliable measure of education to calibrate
their observations against, I guess we're forced into loose
judgemental calls on the value of education.  And it's probably
not reasonable to expect most kids to be good at this.
I was at a seminar a while back where the point was made that this was
easier when most people still worked on farms.  After a summer of
setting fence posts and reaping grain and clearing ditches, there
was a ready audience for "if you don't want to do this forever, the
way out is to pay attention in school."
 
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