Edweek Diploma Counts Report Loaded With Good Information

 Edweek’s annual diploma counts –www.edweek.org/go/dc09– focuses on college readinesss, student navigation of the application and financial aid process, and k-16 data systems. There are more problems here than solutions, but it is a good overview of the current status. The momentum is building for these issues, but we are still short of concrete solutions. The issue also highlights debates like are the same standards required for 4 year college academic prepardness and for workforce preparation.

Raise The Age Of Compulsory Education To 19?

  Ina New York Times column today Harold Levy, former NYC K12 schools chancellor, wants to add a year of compulsory education and extend it from 18 to 19. He cites Obama’s statement, ” I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education and career training”. But then Levy goes on to cover several other topics before ending with a plea to produce more qualified college applicants. His op ed loses its focus because preparation needs to precede a call for compulsory education extention to age 19. What good is it to send even more underprepared students to college if they cannot succeed? How much will it cost to lower college remediation that is in excess of 60% for community colleges? For some answers go to http://bridgeproject.stanford.edu.

Who Will Represent Postsecondary Education In Discussions Of K12 Common Academic Standards?

There is much publicity about 46 states coming together to formulate common standards to overcome the hodge  podge of standards and tests that NCLB has spawned- see http://www.csso.org. But who will represent higher education? There are so many different institutions and systems that no obvious grouping  is appropriate. Even the testing companies like ETS and ACT may be at the table. If higher education has a weak voice then we will repeat the disastrous experience of 1995-2005 when k12 academic standards were formulated without alignment with postsecondary education.

Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students ?

  A new report by American Enterprise Institute is rasing quite a ruckus , and with good reason. The study can be accessed at www.aei.org/paper/10019. It compares 6 year graduation rates from similar colleges in terms of similar levels of admissions selectivity, and the college averages by selectivity band are all over the map from 35% graduation to 88 percent. This is useful information, and I applaud the authors initiative. Ed Trust has done some similar studies in the past.

  But I have a major caveat. Many students graduate after six years, and for broad access colleges 8 or more years is not unusual- see Cliff Adelman- The Tool Box Revisited. Students must work and go part time, so the 6 year cut year is becoming less of a fair standard for some types of colleges.

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.

College Costs Soar Over Past Twenty Years

  The US Education Department’s Digest of Education Statistics reports that between 1976-77 and 2007-08 average undergraduate tuition, fees, room and board increased from $7,914 to $15,665 after adjusting for inflation. Federal financial aid did not come close to matching these cost increases over that period. Obama’s increases in Pell grants will help, but I suspect more students will opt for less expensive community colleges in the coming decade.

New Push To Lower College Remediation

May 28, 2009

By SAM DILLON New York Times

MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — After Bethany Martin graduated from high school here last June, she was surprised when the local community college told her that she had to retake classes like basic composition, for no college credit. Each remedial course costs her $350, more than a week’s pay from her job at a Chick-fil-A restaurant.

Ms. Martin blames chaotic high school classes. “The kids just took over,” she recalls. But her college instructors say that even well-run high school courses often fail to teach what students need to know in college. They say that Ms. Martin’s senior English class, for instance, focused on literature, but little on writing.

Like Ms. Martin, more than a million college freshmen across the nation must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree. Poorly run public schools are a part of the problem, but so is a disconnect between high schools and colleges.

“We need to better align what we expect somebody to be able to do to graduate high school with what we expect them to do in college,” said Billie A. Unger, the dean at Ms. Martin’s school, Blue Ridge Community and Technical College, who oversees “developmental” classes, a nice word for remedial. “If I’m to be a pro football player, and you teach me basketball all through school, I’ll end up in developmental sports,” she said.

Now the Obama administration is pressing states to get public school and higher education authorities working together. President Obama recently set the goal of again making the United States the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates by 2020, which means a lot more students who start college will have to graduate.

So the stimulus law that Mr. Obama signed in February requires states receiving stabilization money to work to improve courses and tests so that high school graduates can succeed in college without remedial classes.

Experts called the new requirements an important shift in federal policy, which until now has focused on promoting college access and financial aid.

“This is a breakthrough, the first time we’ve had federal policies try to move the public schools and the postsecondary systems closer together by demanding preparation in high school and persistence in college,” said Michael Kirst, a Stanford University professor emeritus who has studied the proliferation of remedial courses on American campuses.

More than 60 percent of students enrolling at two-year colleges, and 20 percent to 30 percent at four-year colleges, take remedial courses, Dr. Kirst estimated, although he said flawed official record-keeping had made a precise accounting impossible.

“Right now, high schools hand students off to colleges and declare victory,” Dr. Kirst said. “They say, ‘A high percentage of our graduates went to college,’ but they don’t look at how many had to take remedial courses or never got a degree. And the colleges blame the high schools for not preparing students, but don’t work to align the courses. The two systems don’t communicate well at all.”

The disconnect between public schools and higher education came under discussion recently at Blue Ridge College, where Education Secretary Arne Duncan led a town hall-style meeting.

“When colleges say the problem is with the way kids come out of high school, and high schools say the problem is the way the kids come out of middle school, we don’t get anywhere,” Mr. Duncan said after the meeting. “We all have to hold ourselves accountable.”

Gayle Manchin, the wife of Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat, participated in the meeting. In an interview afterward, she said she learned of the disconnect between secondary and postsecondary worlds when teaching at a state university in the last decade. Even some high school honors students failed college placement exams and were assigned to her developmental courses, she said.

“Boy, were they surprised,” Ms. Manchin said.

Steven L. Paine, the schools superintendent in West Virginia, said the state now requires three years of high school math to graduate, up from two, and has begun working with some 40 other states to develop “college and career-ready standards” for its public schools.

That effort dates to 2005, when 13 states agreed to work together to develop better definitions of what students need to know to be ready for college, more rigorous courses to teach those standards and tougher examinations to test them, said Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a Washington-based organization that is coordinating the effort.

California has come up with an innovative early-warning system in which students take required math and English tests at the end of 11th grade, Mr. Cohen said.

“When you get the results back, you’re told, ‘Congratulations, you are ready to do college-level work,’ ” Mr. Cohen said. “The other message says, ‘The results show you’re not ready for college, but the good news is you have a whole year to get the skills you need.’ ”

California developed that system by bringing together educators from the public high school and the state university systems to work on ways to improve high school graduates’ transition to college.

Martinsburg High School, five blocks southeast of Blue Ridge College, turns out scores of graduates who end up in the college’s remedial classes. Ms. Martin, 19, works part-time at Chick-fil-A for $7.50 an hour when she is not at college. In an interview, she recalled some high school classes in which she could have learned more.

“My 10th-grade English class was out of control,” she said. “The guys would talk and shout, and the teacher wouldn’t do anything.”

A chemistry teacher, she said, spent two weeks teaching students to convert inches to centimeters.

“The third week he just stopped teaching,” she said. “Kids were sitting on the lab counters and sleeping and going out to McDonald’s.”

Other Martinsburg graduates described similar experiences.

Regina Phillips, who became the high school’s principal last summer, said she took over a school in trouble. Three English teachers and five math teachers were uncertified, she said.

“The dropout rate was below standard,” Ms. Phillips said. “In many courses, the rigor wasn’t there.”

She has hired new teachers, cracked down on tardiness and indiscipline, and is encouraging the school’s excellent music program, she said.

“Over time, we’ll be providing the colleges with the level of students they deserve,” Ms. Phillips said.

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Governance For K-16 Is Fractured

State Governance Efforts to Overcome the K-16 Divide

In the 1970’s, several states, including Idaho, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Virginia tried to bridge the K-16 gap through gubernatorial-appointed secretaries of education. The positions were created with the expectation that centralized, state-level leadership for K-12 and higher education could better coordinate and integrate education policy, including such areas as teacher education. After almost three decades, however, none of these states’ K-16 system goals and policies are as aligned as they were originally intended. This disconnected governance is reflected in a range of disconnected policies, as shown in the following examples of current policies in states that have attempted coordination through trying to overcome the fact that separate boards and departments govern k12 and postsecondary education.

In Idaho, strong public concern for the quality of K-12 education had pulled the Secretary and Board’s attention to K-12 issues, which led to greater independence and less scrutiny of higher education. In Virginia, compulsory 11^th grade end-of-course exams contained relevant content to judge higher education readiness, but there has been no serious discussion of using Virginia K-12 standards of learning for postsecondary admission or placement. Similarly in Pennsylvania, students’ performance on the high-stakes high school exit exam does not relate to any postsecondary standards. Tying performance on such state exams to postsecondary admissions and/or placement would help address students’ low motivation to perform well, as well provide clearer signals to students about the skills needed to do college work without remediation. In Massachusetts, higher education leaders increased academic requirements and decreased remedial courses at public colleges. This policy, however, was initiated by the higher education system without significant involvement of the secretary of education or K-12 educators. In Oregon, the state tried to improve K-14 educational pathways by placing the community colleges under the state board of education. But Oregon’s promising competency-based exit exam, the Certificate of Advanced Mastery (CAM) for 11^th and 12^th grade students was dropped, and the community colleges were never enthusiastic about incorporating CAM in placement decisions. Once again, we find that more alignment of K-16 policy does not necessarily occur within a more consolidated governance structure.

Community College Enrollment Explodes But Federal Support Does Not Keep Up

According to the US Department of Education enrollment at our 1,045 community colleges grew  by 741% from 1963 to 2006 compared with 197% at public four year colleges. From 2000 to 2005 community college enrollment grew by 4.2 million students. This is astounding enrollment growth, but federal aid for students to attend has not kept up. According to the Delta Project on College Costs , federal aid to community colleges is one third of the amount given per full time equivalent student to public four year colleges. This makes a  good case for the Obama Administrations’ new focus on community colleges, but it is unclear whether more federal aid will be forthcoming after the stimulus package. Obama’s 2010 budget did not have much to close the gap between 2 and 4 year colleges.

Chicago AP and IB Graduates Do Not Go To Selective Colleges

  A study by the Consortium On Chicago School Research raises troubling questions about navigating the road from high school to college. Half of the graduates of Chicago’ selective enrollment high schools with honors, AP, and IB courses did not enroll in colleges that match their qualifications, and 17% did not enroll in any college. These students lacked the expert advice to take full advantage of their academic attainment, and were first generation college students. This demonstrates how many pieces must come together to help students navigate the college puzzle. Study is at http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/content/publications.php