The Basic Skills Initiative
By jshehorn, posted 16 September 2007
What is your college planning as a response to the Basic Skills Initiative?
If you haven’t seen the “poppy copy,” as the Basic Skills as a Foundation for Student Success in California Community Colleges report is lovingly called, you can check it out at California Community College BSI.
comments on "The Basic Skills Initiative"
Comment left by Tony Tremaine 131 days ago
While I agree it is a good idea to offer basic skills, it is NOT a good idea to begin this at the Community College level. CC’s must push back at high schools, who must push back at grammar schools to provide the basics. The 13th year of school is NOT the place to start serving basic skills.
Hard up for students, business- minded administrators and some cloudy thinking faculty are pushing for any students they can get, and thus ruining the transfer-level status of Community Colleges. In the end, this will work to eliminate the Community Colleges, for the government will not pay twice and three times to have students taught the same curriculum.
Basic Skills in the Community Colleges is firstly a scam and secondly a death sentence.
BTW: Closely allied to basic skills is the government’s big push to put so many classes online and why it will want to put everything online and offer its idea of, say, the best Math 100 class to those who need one. Really, why should the government pay for numerous variations of the same class, some better than others, when it can pick the most successful of each class and offer it online? Because with online degree programs the government could satisfy the masses and leave no child behind, without a degree, in theory.
Sadly, most online children will be poorly educated and be left holding a nearly useless online degree, for instructors and well-educated parents understand inherently that education without a physical classroom and live instructor is not the best education possible by any means.
As a result, in the future, classroom-based instruction will be reserved for the wealthy, who can afford to pay for real teachers and the live interaction the best education demands.
You either understand this or you don’t.
The writing’s on the wall if you can read.
The only way to be fair is to continue to hold to the best and highest standards possible in education, accepting anyone who is ready to join a particular class after having passed the prerequisite for it.