COLUMBUS, Ohio – Forty percent of Ohio college freshmen last year paid a public university or community college to teach them math and English skills they should have learned in high school.

That’s according to a new report from the Ohio Board of Regents, the state body charged with monitoring the condition of higher education in the Buckeye State.

The board’s report also reveals that even graduates of so-called “excellent” schools needed academic remediation at double-digit rates, according to the Associated Press.

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Ohio school leaders and teachers should be embarrassed by the report, because it clearly shows they’ve been passing thousands of students through the K-12 system with little concern as to whether or not they’ve mastered the material. It’s almost as if they believe obtaining a high school diploma should be only slightly more difficult than obtaining a library card or a driver’s license.

But instead of apologizing for their lousy collective performance, many school officials are touting the new Common Core math and English learning standards as the innovation that’s finally going to turn things around.

As one school leader told Vindy.com, “The Common Core was written across all content areas. There’s more reading and writing required in every subject area, but that’s going to take some time to matriculate through to graduation and into the colleges.”

It’s true that Common Core is being sold to Americans in 45 states as the way to make high school graduates college- and career-ready, but the fact remains that this latest approach to K-12 education has never been field tested anywhere in the country.

That means it’s way, way too early for school leaders to pin their hopes on Common Core.

And even if they could, we have to assume that quality of instruction has something to do with student success or failure. Ohio teachers have clearly failed when it comes to teaching the fundamentals under the old learning standards. Are they suddenly and miraculously going to become experts at teaching the Common Core standards?

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But for the sake of argument, let’s assume Common Core will work as it’s being advertised and more American students will leave high school better prepared for college, and therefore, less in need of remediation.

What does that really mean?

A number of thoughtful analysts say it means that Common Core is designed to help prepare kids for a community college or a non-selective university where they will train for a career in whichever field happens to be in-demand at the moment.

In other words, the new one-size-fits-all standards may very well cut down on the remediation rates, but they will cause a new set of problems that are just as concerning.

For example, the new standards will have a leveling effect, which will leave above-average students less-prepared to enter a highly competitive college or university. And once they get to college, Common Core-trained students will also be in less of a position to obtain a college degree in one of the all-important STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, or math.

That’s because the new standards slow down the rate of math instruction in high school to the point where many students won’t be introduced to pre-calculus until their freshman year of college. As analysts have noted, students who enter college without pre-calculus training are simply too far behind the curve to acquire in four years of college all the math instruction they need for a STEM degree.

Other analysts warn that while Common Core may improve students’ practical reading and writing skills, it will deprive students of a solid background in the great literature of our society. Without such training, students will have no training in how to think about the “big issues” of life, such as beauty, truth and virtue.

So, yes, Common Core may help eliminate the disturbing trend of having large numbers of college students need remedial math and English classes.

But as far as we can tell, the cure will be worse than the disease.