Overcoming Fractured State Governance For Better Transition to College
During the 1990’s, several states attempted to coordinate the sectors through legislature and voluntary councils. For example, in Florida the legislature passed implementing legislation in 1999 that established a “unified, seamless K-20 education system.” This included creating a new, single, statewide K-20 board of education with broad authority. Meanwhile, a restructured Florida Department of Education is implementing a unified K-20 accountability system. The state is also integrating its extensive K-12 and postsecondary education student unit record systems. Policy analysis has improved in Florida since this unified system was created. With centralized student-unit records, the state board identified school districts where a disproportionately low number of students were enrolling in the state’s 4-year colleges or needed remedial education upon enrollment. The state analyzed high school and middle college course-taking patterns and recognized that students in these districts were not enrolling in a rigorous sequence of high school courses (Venezia et al., 2005).
In the wake of the failure of attempts to integrate the sectors through imposed systemic reform in the 1970’s, several states established more voluntary K-16 linkages in the 1990s. These initiatives have made some incremental progress, but they depend for longevity on the next generation of committed leaders from both levels. The most ambitious of these efforts are the Maryland and Georgia P16 councils (Kirst and Venezia, 2004). The goal of these councils is to profoundly change the ways in which schools and colleges operate, not just to add new “early intervention-style” programs. In order to bring separately governed and financed systems together on issues of mutual interest, a voluntary P16 council must have access to key leaders – including policymakers, communities, business and labor – and state policy levers (e.g., accountability provisions or shared student level data). While still evolving, Maryland and Georgia’s P-16 councils have put much more effort into improving teacher education than improving student pathways from secondary to postsecondary education. Recently, the Georgia statewide P-16 council began developing academic content standards for the first two years of college that are linked to the state’s K-12 standards.
It is too early to reach a final verdict on these voluntary alliances in Maryland and Georgia. A major question is whether they will survive the statewide leaders who instigated them. Will ad hoc, voluntarily adopted institutional policies for admissions and placement lead to sustained changes and improved rates of postsecondary success? Richardson et al.. raise the essential issue about whether governance structures will be effective apart from specific leaders:
Certainly, leaders matters, but even good leaders should not be expected to achieve consistent results in the presence of a system design that inhibits institutional collaboration and system synergy. Leadership can make a system perform better or worse than its structural design, but it cannot compensate for badly designed systems or mismatched policy environments (Richardson, Bracco, Callan, and Finney, 1999, p.17).
The evolution of governance leaves unanswered the question of what types of state and regional structures or arrangements will enhance K-16 deliberations, interaction, policy integration, and student outcomes. Clearly, policymakers, faculty, students, and parents across the K-16 spectrum need to be brought together.
