If Berkeley college students can’t learn, Ok-12 faculties want remediation

It’s time for some remedial education for California’s public school system.

UC Berkeley students — ostensibly the best K-12 educators are producing — can’t read much.

That news is striking.

This isn’t a mid-tier college, after all — or a less-selective campus in the prestigious University of California system.

This is one of the most elite public universities in the world.

And some students there can’t read more than five (5) pages a day per course.

You read that right.

Multiple professors told the media they’ve had to scale back reading expectations — with one instructor assigning just 35 pages a week, down from 100.

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” Carlos Noreña told student media.

Good grief and indeed: How can students genuinely learn history if they barely read about it?

Granted, California college students have long stepped on campus ill-prepared and in need of remedial coursework. That much is not new.

What’s alarming is the acceleration of the trend — and its reach into the most elite centers of learning in California.

Talk about off-brand for Berkeley. 

For decades, the university’s been renowned not just for its free-speech legacy and protest politics (before the latter was everywhere), but for its academic rigor.

UCB turned away nearly 90% of its undergraduate applicants last fall. And those admitted had straight A’s in high school, or very close to it.

So why the struggle to read more than a pamphlet?

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Grade inflation is part of it, along with shrinking student attention spans in a digital, social media, bite-sized-content world.

Other causes are more political. These include K-12 standards lowered in the name of buzzwords like equity, fairness and social justice, and political advocacy that soaks up class time and distracts from student focus on reading, writing, arithmetic and other foundational learning.

All this matters because students at Berkeley and other top universities are expected to engage with complex ideas — and that can require reams of reading.

Consider: How can students become effective doctors if they can’t read science textbooks? Or lawyers, if they can’t digest hundreds of pages of court documents? Or Researchers if they can’t, well, read research?

And next question: How does California turn the page on this sorry chapter?

To start, by restoring higher academic standards, recalibrating testing and grading systems to reflect true learning, scrapping ideological lesson plans in favor of critical thinking — and reading — and reinstating the Scholastic Aptitude Test for all college admissions statewide.

In recent weeks, hundreds of UC faculty members have supported the reinstatement of the SAT to better screen students for college readiness. Turns out the test, scrapped by UC in 2020 on grounds of “equity,” was a good predictor of college success after all.

Setting merit aside and then coddling students with lighter workloads is not the answer.

Better student learning is.

It might be time to send California’s entire K-12 apparatus back to school.