Over the past two weeks I visited two community colleges in Maryland to get a sense of what students know upon graduation from high school.

It turns out, not much. Eighty percent of all incoming students at Baltimore City Community College need remedial help. At The Community College of Baltimore County, the number is 74 percent. Statewide the average is 56 percent for the small percentage of students in community colleges who move directly from high school to campus, according to the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

Many students enter community colleges after a long hiatus from high school. The average age of students at both BCCC and CCBC is 27. The time lapse ensures that complex math formulas or the names of characters in books read years prior will be forgotten.

But time can't explain why so many students place into math classes teaching them how to add, subtract and multiply whole numbers and English classes that give them the tools to write a sentence. That's right, a sentence.

Learning how to write a short essay the length of this column can be two noncredit classes away in some schools. In fact, it takes many students so long to finish noncredit remedial classes that they run out of financial aid before they take their first college-level course. Many drop out in the process because earning a degree seems out of reach given their lives and financial circumstances.

One 22-year-old student in a remedial English class at BCCC told me she was great at reading and writing in high school, but had a difficult time with math. If that was the case, why was she spending her time trying to figure out how to join two sentence fragments into one? Who made her think she was excelling? More importantly, how did she earn a degree?

Academics call this problem a lack of "alignment" between high school curriculum and knowledge required to succeed in college and life.

I would call it a complete and utter moral failure of our education system in a state whose public schools have been ranked number one for three consecutive years by an allegedly prestigious education journal.

As "Doing the Math," an April 2009 report published by the Abell Foundation, says in a more measured tone, "Given the significant and growing need for mathematics remediation, it is reasonable to question how well Maryland is preparing its high school students to succeed in post-secondary institutions." The same could be said of basic English education, much less history, geography and other important topics.

Administrators at CCBC and BCCC fortunately don't spend their time blaming others for their students' problems. CCBC is a national leader in moving students from remedial levels to degree programs. BCCC is launching a new program called "Promise Academy" to cut the time needed for those students needing the most remedial help to move from noncredit to credit courses. I will write about how they and other schools are tackling the issue in a future column.

But the sad truth is that Marylanders are "investing" in a K-12 public education system that fails the majority of its students.