In Georgia, for example, a program called Quick Start provides companies with customized workforce training and retraining, free of charge, in partnership with the state's technical colleges.

Here in Chicago, the Austin Polytechnical Academy teaches students all aspects of industry and has its own manufacturing training center.

The question we need to ask bright young people today is this: Would they be better off with a college degree in mass communication, "poli sci," or sociology that gets them a job as a retail clerk or waiting tables, or would they be better off with a real skill that qualifies them for a high-paying manufacturing job?

Future administrative and secretarial positions will require more education such as an associate’s degree (said 21 percent of HR professionals) or a post-secondary certificate (said 11 percent);

For salaried, individual contributors and professionals, future positions will require a bachelor’s degree (said 71 percent of HR professionals) or an associate’s degree (said 12 percent);

Skilled laborers such as technicians, mechanics, and foremen will need a specific post-secondary certificate or specific credentials for future jobs (said 31 percent of HR professionals);

So it's possible that enrollments are leveling off (and shrinking slightly) now because the economy had begun rebounding enough by fall 2011 that some of those who had flocked to higher education during the recession began finding jobs. It's also possible that college tuition levels -- which have continued to rise in recent years, driven in part by cutbacks in state support and other traditional sources of colleges' revenue -- are pricing more students out of higher education.

When states began to adopt high-school exit exams a decade ago, the focus was on ensuring that students were mastering state curriculum standards. But with the national push to produce more college graduates and a better trained work force, the focus has changed to include college and career readiness, says the report from the Center on Education Policy.

In our recent research, we identified four specific areas -- academic habits, cultural know-how, the ability to balance school and other demands and engaging in help-seeking -- in which college faculty had clear expectations of their students. These expectations differed substantively from those in high school, and while meeting them was critical to college success, they remained largely unspoken.

Many college instructors think they already clearly articulate their expectations to students, but our research indicates that behavioral expectations must be made far more explicit and precise.

...For example, when an instructor asks students to "come to class prepared," what does she mean? If she means coming to class having completed a reading and being prepared to participate in discussions about it, she can include this expectation in the syllabus, explain it to students from the first day of class, and assign students to write out three questions or observations about the reading to discuss each week.

For example, the Senate committee heard testimony from Yasmine Issa, a single mother of twins who completed a training program in ultrasound technology at Career Education Corporation’s Sanford-Brown University in 2008 only to discover from potential employers that the program had not been accredited. . . . Issa, who paid $32,000 for the program ($15,000 of which came from federal student loans), wasn’t eligible to sit for the licensing exam or to find work as a sonographer.

. . . prospective students who click on the description of the unaccredited veterinary technology program that Sanford-Brown’s Portland, OR campus offers are told that “graduates who have diligently attended class and their clinical, studied, and practiced their skills should have the skills to seek entry-level employment as veterinary technicians.” What’s left unsaid, according to the report, is that students who enroll in this program at the Portland campus are likely to be left stranded because Oregon, like many other states, only allows graduates of accredited programs to take the licensing exam to become certified veterinary technicians.

It is true that many of the for-profits have high drop-out rates, but are they really any worse than some of our public universities, like the University of Texas at San Antonio or Chicago State University, schools with thousands of students but very low graduation rates? Should we impose some sort of selective admission standards on all schools wanting government handouts? I suspect that if one compiled a list of all institutions where the six-year graduation rate was below, say, 40 percent, a larger number of students would attend public as opposed to for-profit institutions.

The attack on the for-profits is an attack based on ideology, a dislike of capitalism, more than on a comprehensive and objective concern for students. The clearly one-sided nature of Harkin's criticism may be one reason that his report was not issued by all the Democrats on the Senate education committee--my guess is some did not want to be associated with this unbalanced attack.

No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world's industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

Twelve other countries had more than twice the percentage of advanced students as the United States: in order of math excellence, they are Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, Macao-China, Australia, Germany, and Austria.

The remaining countries that educate a greater proportion of their students to a high level are Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, France, Estonia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Slovak Republic, Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Ireland and Lithuania.

Our future middle school math teachers knew about as much math as their peers in Thailand and Oman -- and nowhere near what future teachers in Taiwan and Singapore knew. Moreover, the results showed dramatic variation depending on the teacher-training program.

Math is more important than ever at the NSA. Chances are, the world's growing rivers of data contain terrorist secrets, and it's up to the agency's math teams to find them.

... The agency is even co-sponsoring math and programming contests run by TopCoder, a Connecticut company whose matches attract geeks from all over the world.

Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life. That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth. All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss. Most adults have no contact with math at work, nor do they curl up with an algebra book for relaxation.

Why create a need to make it palatable to all and spend taxpayers' money on pointless endeavors without demonstrable results or accountability?

"In education, with respect to discipline, my concern would be that school districts are afraid they will be hauled before a court or some administration agency and threatened with a loss of federal funding whenever they have a racial imbalance of one kind or another," he said. He explained that educators might become hypersensitive to students' race or ethnicity in discipline decisions, resulting in disciplining some students who shouldn't be and not disciplining others who deserve it.

The district implemented a "discipline ladder," for example, that spelled out the level of the disciplinary action students would receive for specific kinds of infractions, such as chewing gum in class or talking back to teachers. The policy emphasized that students should receive out-of-school suspensions or be referred to police only for serious misconduct, such as causing harm to someone in a fight.

The result was that referrals to law-enforcement officers dropped by 63 percent and out-of-school suspensions declined by 43 percent in the district from the 2008-09 school year to the 2009-10 school year, she said.

The strongest predictor of student success in school has long been family income and parents' education level. So we can applaud and shower with attention the students and teachers and schools that beat the odds, but it's a bad idea to pretend that the exceptions are anything but exceptions.

The rate of black fourth graders in DC scoring above Basic on the NAEP math exam increased from 45 to 50 percent. For low-income students, the rate increased from 43 to 48 percent. Both increases were statistically significant. For low-income 8th graders, 28 to 34 percent. For black 8th graders, 31 to 36 percent. 4th grade reading? 29 to 35 percent for low-income students, 33 to 37 percent for black students. (8th grade reading scores increased too, although not at statistically significant level.)

In other words, Michelle Rhee said poverty was no excuse for her own performance, and then delivered.

But let me put it this way: Say we have a group of low-income minority students with chronic health problems whose parents are unemployed. They can attend one of two schools. The first has crumbling facilities, no coherent curriculum, indifferent leadership, and a poorly trained staff of unmotivated teachers who can never be fired. We suspect that academic results in this school are very bad, but we don't know for sure because the only available data comes from the school itself, which reports that students are doing "fine, all things considered."

The second school has new facilities, a rich curriculum, and a strong principal. Teachers are well-trained and work in a cooperative, mutually supportive environment. Excellent teaching is rewarded, and there is no tolerance for incompetence. Student results on national criterion-referenced tests are reported to the community every year.

Do you care which school those children attend? Or are you indifferent, because the differences between them are "likely to be overwhelmed by the impact of unemployment"?