Most College Students Lack Skills

More than 50% of students at four-year schools and more than 75% at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

And that's not even the scary part of the story...

Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation!

Saxon Lovefest?

If you Google "Saxon Math Textbooks" to find information on this series of math textbooks, every link is breathless with worship of these books. I don't understand it.

I know some studies proved that the books were very effective with children from low-income families. Now, I am not a fan of the new new math or constructivism or putting lots of pictures in math books or any of that crap, but all the sites I read chastised state textbook adoption boards for not adopting these books. The fact is these books suck! Having used them in an actual classroom setting, I believe the claims that they work well with below-average students, but if you have an average (or God help you, an above-average) student, these books are worse than useless. I believe they are detrimental.