I guess everyone knows that American education is in trouble.

Test scores coming back from the various state Departments of Education are routinely "spun" to put a pretty face on an ugly duckling.

"Well," they say, "we've improved over last year."

Welllllllll, maybe so but if the kids were "drowning in ignorance" in 50 feet and now they at 45 feet they're still drowning.

Look, only 55 percent of kids entering college will graduate within six years according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.

According to a recently-released report, Diploma to Nowhere, over one-third of all entering freshman will take one or more remedial courses in order to acquire basic academic skills.

Many universities, like the University of Wisconsin, Madison, now test ALL incoming freshmen to determine who is academically deficient.

And, according to the report, it's not just ordinary freshmen who get in by the skin of their teeth. Remediation is required of those who took "advanced" classes and who had "good grades."

It found that 43 percent of students attending two-year colleges required remediation and 29 percent of those at public four-year institutions.

In the California State University system, fully 60 percent of entering freshman needed help in English or math, or both.

And South Carolina's educational system ranks where compared to California's?

Oh, yeah, there are lots of reasons.

Fifty-nine percent of remediated students said their high school classes were too easy and nearly half "said" they would like to have had them "harder" to be better prepared for college.

Let's take a whack at that for a moment.

First of all, you can take all the students in a given high school who really DO want tough classes and teach class in a phone booth.

Second, you can take all the parents who really DO want tough classes and put them in another booth along side.

Third, you can take all the administrators who really ARE willing to put up with the flack from parents, school board members, and their own bosses for having "too high" a failure rate or too few As, and give them an office in a nearby two-man tent.

Last, most teachers I know - to include this one - have told students over and over again that however tough they think the class is, college is much more demanding, and they need to get with the program.

BUT THEY SIMPLY CAN NOT HEAR YOU.

And then there's the matter of the actual grade.

If anyone thinks that an "A" really means "A" work, think again, but then everyone is happy when the system turns out lots of "A" students.

A 2003 study by Stuart Rojstaczer of Duke discovered that, at UCLA for Pete's sake, high school graduates showed substantially higher grades than freshmen did 30 years earlier.

And the College Board announced Monday that students taking the College Boards who had all A's increased to 38 percent of all takers compared to 28 percent just ten years ago.

And guess what? Their scores on the verbal portion of the test went DOWN 12 points and the math three points.

In 1972, 25 percent of all entering college freshman had an A average.

By 2003, that had more than doubled to 53 percent ... and the kids are still drowning.

Faux grades are not just a problem at the high school level.

Prior to 2005, 91 percent of Harvard students graduated with "honors" with more than half of all grades given being "A's."

What's more, Rojstaczer admitted that he no longer gives any grade lower than a B, because if he did, no one would sign up for the course and his teaching career would hit the rocks.

He, like many high school teachers, realized the fight simply wasn't worth it and gave the students, the parents, and the administration what they wanted - "smart kids."

Clearly, our educational system is in "over its head" and kids are still "drowning" in a sea of mediocrity.