Linky, Linky!

• Jay Matthews in the WaPo returns to community college placement and remediation with a follow-up to his commentary on Sarah Headden’s call for an entirely new approach.

• We know some of you were on the debate team. Relive your glory days and hone your arguments with this NPR coverage of a debate about whether too many high school grads go to college.

• Jamie Merisotis, president of Lumina Foundation, and Charles Kolb, president of Committee on Economic Development, make it clear where they stand on that debate. In their piece earlier this month for CSM, they argue for increased training and education partnerships between employers and higher education. 

• Get Ready! A new MDRC study, Getting Ready for College, looks at the early impacts of developmental summer bridge programs in Texas. The final report on these programs won’t be released until next year, but preliminary results show promise.

• Joanne Jacobs links to a John Locke Foundation study which shows that “as North Carolina’s high school graduation rate rose by 2.3 percent from 2006 to 2009, the community college remediation rate increased by 7 percent.”The report goes one to call out “low academic standards and expectations” as “one of a number of factors that provide marginal students an easier path to graduation.” We’d like to point out that the increase in remediation is also due to an influx of workers dislocated by the recession who haven’t been in school for years. The issue is more about alignment of standards between high school exit and college entrance than it is about lowering standards. North Carolina is already hard at work on this issue; the state was an early adopter of the Common Core Standards and one of the N.C. DEI State Policy team’s policy priorities is the alignment of standards for high school graduation, aiming to reduce the need for developmental education for recent high school graduates.

• There’s a lot of different ways to approach the readiness question, of course. Check out this EdWeek article about a pilot program seeking to restructure high schools for college readiness.