WL>  LP> Unless & until students decide that
WL>  LP> education is an important commodity,
WL> 
WL>  MS> It's naive to expect students to value K-12 education 
WL>  MS> when they can see the economy does not.
WL>  MS> When HS grades count for little in admission to most colleges 
WL>  MS> Students will decide that education is an important 
WL>  MS> commodity only when there is a payoff.    
WL> 
WL> You've got this polished into a nice sound bite.  But it nags at me
WL> that something is askew, and I haven't figured out just where my
WL> core disagreement is.  "Most colleges approach ... open admission"
WL> hides a lot of details.  Colleges have sorted themselves out into
WL> hierarchies, and the top tiers are nothing close to "open 
WL> admissions."
WL> But most kids are, by definition, headed to lower tier colleges
    Decades ago, few colleges were open admissions.  That made the value of 
education higher to HS kids, because they knew that getting into almost any 
college depended on getting good SATs and good grades in college-prep 
courses.  With most kids now going to lower-tier colleges that now are in 
practice near open admissions as you said, kids see that HS learning in the 
form of good SATs and good grades in tough courses just is not valued in the 
college-admissions "economy".
    But I'm talking about something more basic when I say that kids won't 
value education until the economy does.  When 7th-grade Junior sees Daddy 
downsized despite his Masters in Engineering and Summa Cum Laude, Junior 
cannot be blamed for questioning the value of education.  Downsizing has done 
more to make kids doubt the value of education than anything else has, 
because it convinces kids that at best the economy is a crapshoot rather than 
rewarding people for hard work.
WL> Maybe the core is in the distinction between grades and education.  
    Supposedly, the two relate!  (I never had a teacher who'd admit they 
didn't.)
WL> speaks of valuing education; you seem to be speaking to the value of
WL> grades.  I think the economy values education in the old liberal arts
WL> tradition of learning to think.  
    Widespread downsizing not only makes that a questionable assumption, but 
it makes kids doubt it.
WL> I was at a seminar a while back where the point was made that this 
WL> was
WL> easier when most people still worked on farms.  After a summer of
WL> setting fence posts and reaping grain and clearing ditches, there
WL> was a ready audience for "if you don't want to do this forever, the
WL> way out is to pay attention in school."
    True, but that was when it was hard to get into college.
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