Too Dumb for
Students used to multitasking and
hopping from link to link will have
difficulty tackling complex texts—
and college-level reading.
Mark Bauerlein
Back in September 2008, some 3 million people in the United States became college freshmen— the largest cohort ever. But the weeks before school started brought a setback. The students took a placement test, and many found that they
probably wouldn’t be able to handle the work to come. If they
were to enroll in a regular calculus or freshman composition
course, chances are they would fail. They had graduated from
high school, but they didn’t have the knowledge and skills
to tackle readings, tests, and papers at the next level. So the
college assigned these freshmen to a remedial unit in math,
reading, or writing—a precollege course for no credit that
aimed to send them into spring semester ready to earn grades
of C or higher.
Ready—or Not?
That’s the fate of 43 percent of students at two-year public
colleges and 29 percent of students at four-year public colleges (Strong American Schools, 2008; U.S. Department of
Education, 2003).
It shouldn’t happen. A high school diploma is supposed
to signify college readiness. To earn a diploma and then find
out a few months later that you need more high school–level
training is dispiriting and probably contributes to the high
dropout rate—around 30 percent—in the first year of college
(ACT, 2010). It also burdens colleges with providing preparation that should have taken place earlier.
Will more technology in high school classrooms help? Not
in the crucial area of reading. When teachers fill the syllabus
with digital texts, having students read and write blogs, wikis,
Facebook pages, multimedia assemblages, and the like, they
28 Educational lEadErship / FEbruary 2011
do little to address the primary reason that so many students
end up not ready for college-level reading. When they assign
traditional texts—novels, speeches, science articles, and so
on—in digital format with embedded links, hypertext, word-search capability, and other aids, they likewise avoid the
primary cause of unreadiness.
That cause is, precisely, the inability to grasp complex
texts. The most prominent monitor of college readiness,
ACT, draws that conclusion after years of collecting data on
high school students heading to college. In a 2006 report
titled Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About
College Readiness in Reading, ACT identifies this inability as
the decisive gap between college-ready and college-unready
students. When measured by their understanding of various
“textual elements” (such as main idea, word meanings, and
