Utah is uneducated

This story ran on the news tonight: Utah Not Educated Enough for Two Stores.

I don’t know why it surprises some people. I’m also not sure why Crate and Barrel or the Cheesecake Factory require a minimum population with college degrees. When they were previewing the story, I thought they might be book stores or something along those lines. What do home decorations and cheesecake have to do with college degrees?

The story says that only 28% of people in Utah have college degrees, and the percentage of young people enrolled has dropped five percent in the last ten years. The Utah Commissioner for higher education’s solutions are to encourage high schoolers to take tougher courses and to encourage them all to go to college.

I don’t think encouragement will be enough. Utah doesn’t even require that it’s young people actually be in a classroom. A student can be absent 1/3 of all school days, an entire term, and be anywhere from an hour to three hours tardy on the days they are there, and there is nothing that schools can do about it. Utah has just barely, this year, started requiring high school seniors be able to do basic reading, writing, and math before graduation and to prove that by taking a test. I could not believe how many people were against that and fought that, particularly because their children could not pass the test. If that were my child, I would not be mad at the test, I’d be mad at the Utah school system for not preparing my child from the beginning.

Utah is too concerned with protecting parents’ rights to have stupid kids right now to do much to fix the education problems in this state. And until the state is willing to make a lot of people mad and start holding parents responsible, it is going to be very hard to make any improvements.

Utah talks the talk of valuing education. It’s time they started walking the walk. Maybe a lack of good cheesecake will help motivate them.