If more than half of the graduates of a driver's education program had to take additional classes in behind-the-wheel basics before they could even qualify to take the test for their license, the value of their driver's ed certificate would be suspect, at best.
Yet here in Florida, a state notorious for paying lip service to educational excellence and multimillions of dollars for various reform efforts, around 55 percent of the students entering our public universities and colleges must enroll in basic math, reading and writing "preparation" classes to boost their skills to college level.
And those remedial classes cost Florida taxpayers more than $70 million in 2005 alone.
With apologies to "The Music Man," we got trouble, folks, right here in the Sunshine State, with a capital T and that rhymes with C, and that stands for "crummy."
In a story published Monday, the Palm Beach Post reported that a statewide task force recommends the adoption of a definition for "college and career readiness," and that all Florida high-school students be required to take classes that are more academically demanding.
If you've lived in this state for any length of time and this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Disappointingly low proficiency levels among Florida's students are an old story, and urgent efforts to address the issue are too.
The good news is that these efforts have not all been for naught. The bad news is that victory remains far from our grasp, and in a state where an educated, highly skilled work force is critical to its long-term economic health, success that can be described only as modest is, in fact, failure.
Historically, politicians and others have sought to place blame squarely on public schools and a system of education that was too eager to promote students without making sure their skills matched their grade level.
Much of the blame was well aimed, but not all of it. Public schools have become over the past several decades a dumping ground for a host of other ills not of their making: dysfunctional families, drug and alcohol abuse, and the growing gap between America's haves and have-nots.
Former Gov. Jeb Bush understood that dissatisfaction with public education ran deep. While he didn't create the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, Mr. Bush made it the centerpiece of his education reform effort. FCAT's enhanced importance is one of his administration's most significant legacies, however one feels about the way the test is used to measure student achievement and individual school progress.
Even if one takes the view that the former governor used the FCAT like a two-by-four to roust the education bureaucracy into action, it is increasingly clear that several years' worth of FCAT-heavy instruction haven't produced adequate results.
For too many college-bound Florida high-school grads, the three R's still mean only one thing: remediation. For Florida taxpayers, that's a bum deal.
Now, with a new education commissioner aboard and Gov. Charlie Crist eager to leave his own education legacy, it is important that the FCAT not be viewed as immutable, and that it be seen as one tool in a toolbox — and not necessarily the most important one.
Restoring high quality to public schools and making sure that high-school graduates have a diploma that, academically speaking, is worth more than the paper it's written on are among the biggest challenges facing policymakers.
Unfortunately, while basic solutions are fairly straightforward — high standards, high expectations, no excuses — implementation and affordability are far more complex and costly. But if Florida's leaders ever intend to pay at least as much attention to reality as they do to rhetoric, they had better saddle up and start riding in a different direction.