The Community College Placement Mess

Jay Matthews:

Newspaper reporters, a group to which I belonged until recently, usually don’t write about old reports, unless of course the documents have been suppressed for years by nefarious government minions. If a reporter tells her editor she has found a neat piece of research from 2007 in the bottom of her drawer, the editor will tell her it isn’t news and advise that she put a calendar in her cubicle.
We columnists, on the other hand, are free to roam the past, particularly when we stumble across something as remarkable as “Investigating the Alignment of High School and Community College Assessments in California,” a 41-page report by Richard S. Brown & David N. Niemi, published by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in June 2007.
I know. The title is sleep-inducing. But for the millions of people who care about community colleges — including the nearly half of all U.S. college students who attend them — it is a must-read.