06/01/2003

Nationally, higher education has been bellyaching long and loudly about the poor and deteriorating skill levels of their incoming students. What, the colleges moan, has K-12 been doing with the kids all these years?

Some years back, a few post-secondary institutions made headlines by trying to toss underprepared students back to their high schools for remediation. The gesture didn't work as such, but the public definitely got the message that higher ed has gotten stuck with work that was supposed to have been long accomplished by high school graduation.

Such was the situation when Rhode Island's current commissioner of higher education, Jack Warner, became the associate chancellor at the University of Massachusetts. Many Massachusetts public school students needed remedial reading, writing or math. Some needed all three.

Furthermore, high school standards were all over the place. The content of Algebra I in one school was woefully thin compared with Algebra I elsewhere. Colleges felt they had no choice but to perform diagnostic tests on all their students, including those who had been extensively tested by their public high schools. Clearly, K-12 and higher ed needed to get together and agree on some standardized high-school exit criteria to serve double duty both as a measure of eligibility to graduate from high school, and as a report to the college or assessment of incoming students' skills.

Apparently, Massachusetts's state tests, the infamous MCAS, were originally designed with this double duty in mind. Warner believes the MCAS is excellent precisely because it provides a clear image of what a student knows and is able to do. However, Warner gets a little hot under the collar about how and why it has evolved into a make-or-break, single measure of student success, especially when Massachusetts's 1993 Education Reform Act quite specifically requires multiple measures to evaluate both students and schools.

In any case, Warner proposes bridging the wasteful gap between K-12 and higher education by partnering to create mutually-agreed-upon exit criteria for high school students. The benefits might include:

Clearly articulating to high school seniors exactly what goals and standards they're shooting for, using multiple measures and not a single-shot test.

Certifying to the public and to employers whether certain basic standards were met, and thus expressing, at least minimally, what a youth knows and is able to do.

Eliminating diagnostic testing at the college level.

Giving students full credit for any certificate or associate's course work completed at the high school level, much the way advanced placement students can earn college credits.

Furthermore, in the course of conversations between K-12 and higher education, colleges might become more accountable to elementary and secondary about preparing teachers to help students meet these goals. When I was on the School Board, we often felt we had to start over with new teachers fresh out of prep programs, finding ways to prepare and support them in real, urban classrooms. (Prep programs give them way too much theory of and not enough content and how to.) A K-16 system would have to be mutually accountable for delivering better-prepared students to higher ed and better new teachers to K-12.

In any case, clearly stated goals and multiple measures are key to evaluating student success. When the Board of Governors hired Warner, it was interested in having him replicate a reporting system he'd set up for the MA public colleges to report back to the high schools how their students were doing. You can see the public reports at: http://www.mass.edu/p--p/includes/ir/c2school/2001/98partII.pdf .

Using social security numbers at first -- and later the student identifier that the 1993 law was kind enough to provide to Massachusetts educators -- Warner's system can track the progress of the students coming out of the state's public high schools. The reports at the above site show how many students entered from such-and-such high school, what percentage returned to college the following year, their collective grade point average and so on.

Massachusetts high schools also get private reports showing what percentage of those students needed remedial reading, writing, math or some combination. This information gives, perhaps, the clearest evidence of which high schools actually prepare their students for the college or university experience and which don't. Warner believes the relative rigors of course work are a far better predictor of college success than the SATs, but that you have to drill pretty deeply to know whether or not a given high school's Algebra II was really rigorous or not. Obviously, the Algebra II completers who all come from the same high school, but always need remedial math, were not asked to do rigorous work.

Warner warns against the numbers game of inflating the number of students enrolled in, say, Algebra II, without giving them real training. He says, "The set assumptions behind industrial-age schooling is to select and screen or sift and sort to get the best and the brightest. Whenever schools have found themselves in crisis, the response has always been either to lower standards and get more through the pipeline or to raise standards and get more of them to wash out. We have to replace that mentality with challenge and support. We need to set the highest standards, challenge the students to meet them and support them as they do. I take retention in college and persistence to a degree very seriously. I monitor results."

The idea, then, is to use assessments and public reporting all along the K-16 path, not to penalize, but to assess where each student and school stands. With such information, a K-16 system can continually look up and downstream, evaluate weaknesses and strengths, and communicate more clearly about what in the system must be changed to help students be successful. Such cooperation would mean heated dialogues between the high schools and colleges, but it would be well worth the effort.

Warner says that when he goes to meetings with K-12 Commissioner Peter McWalters, they walk in "joined at the hip," to get everyone starting to think in terms of K-16.

Rhode Island has a tendency to silo organizations, to use public agencies to create little fiefdoms that run according to their leaders' dictates and often not with an entirely scrupulous eye on their public charge. This tendency is coupled with academia's intrinsic snobbery that separates K-12 from the higher orders of college. But structuring as though K-12 and higher ed had no relationship wastes time, money and loses valuable opportunities for accountability.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.