Birds of a feather have under-prepared students together

Back in the early days of KERA, another state, Maryland, ran a very parallel reform effort. Most of the same radical ideas that we were trying in Kentucky were also being attempted in Maryland’s schools. In fact, the two states even collaborated on reports about their testing systems because they were so similar.

Now, it looks like the results of these parallel education experiments worked out about the same. The Baltimore Sun reports that Maryland now has alarmingly high college freshman remediation rates, numbers that seem eerily close to those for Kentucky.

Imagine that. Same experiments – same results.

This graph shows the remedial rates for recent high school graduates in Kentucky, but it sounds like the graph doesn’t look much different in Maryland.

Source: Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education