New York may be an extreme example but there is little doubt that a huge number of American high school kids are graduating without the necessary skills to do well in college and compete for a well-paying job.

The New York Times:

The new statistics, part of a push to realign state standards with college performance, show that only 23 percent of students in New York City graduated ready for college or careers in 2009, not counting special-education students. That is well under half the current graduation rate of 64 percent, a number often promoted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as evidence that his education policies are working.

But New York City is still doing better than the state's other large urban districts. In Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers, less than 17 percent of students met the proposed standards, including just 5 percent in Rochester.

The Board of Regents, which sets the state's education policies, met on Monday to begin discussing what to do with this data, and will most likely issue a decision in March. One option is to make schools and districts place an asterisk next to the current graduation rate, or have them report both the current graduation rate and the college ready rate, said Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents.

Oh yeah - that will fix the problem. Placing an asterisk next to the graduation rate will almost certainly remedy bad teachers, bad facilities, bad curricula, and bad management. The Regents should be the model for the rest of the country for how to fix the criminally bad education system.

I know that's not all they're going to do. I was just being facetious. Their big idea is to make tests for 3rd through 8th grade "more difficult to pass" so that kids are better prepared for high school.

Well - not really. What they will be better prepared for is...taking tests in high school. You see, one of the real idiotic things about "No Child Left Behind" is the number of tests given to kids throughout their school career. School districts realize this so they spend an inordinate amount of time not teaching kids history, math, literature, and the like, but rather teaching them how to pass tests in those subjects.

It's madness. And it is beginning to show up in how truly uneducated our students are.

By the way, New York state spends on average about $19,000 per student. Do parents in the state think they are getting their money's worth?