Powerful Forces Draw Academe Into the Fray

Economic fears and the high-school-reform movement have colleges under pressure to help improve the education of children

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By PETER SCHMIDT

After two decades, the revolution in the nation's elementary and secondary schools has finally reached academe's ivory towers. If college administrators listen beyond their institutions' walls, they can hear crowds of students and parents voicing frustration over colleges' high remediation rates and low graduation rates, visionaries urging the creation of entirely new education systems that would closely link schools and colleges, and political leaders issuing an ultimatum: Tend to the education of the masses, or the next thing you will hear will be battering rams.

For years most higher-education leaders thought they could stay above the fray, neither joining nor opposing the forces marching under the banner of education reform. With one public-opinion survey after another showing that people thought favorably of colleges — even as they were calling for the heads of schoolteachers, principals, and superintendents — it had seemed that colleges were safe from the forces of change unleashed by the 1983 publication of "A Nation at Risk," a highly critical federal report on the need for school reform.

Now, however, it appears that colleges themselves are at risk unless they become more engaged in the transformation of elementary and secondary schools.

Higher-education institutions are already spending billions of dollars on remedial education for students who arrive on campuses unprepared for college-level work. Last fall three prominent education-research organizations — the Institute for Educational Leadership, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research — estimated in a report called "The Governance Divide" that 40 percent of four-year-college students and 63 percent of two-year-college students end up taking at least one remedial course. Many studies of minority-student achievement conclude that colleges will not be able to recruit and graduate classes that reflect society's diversity until schools close gaps in student performance.

Economists note with alarm that jobs in the fastest-growing sectors in our economy require some education or training beyond high school, but that the share of the work force with bachelor's degrees is expected to decline in the next 15 years. That is due largely to the retirement of well-educated baby boomers and the growth of minority populations that continue to struggle in the nation's schools. Business leaders argue that the United States cannot afford to continue having a high-school-graduation rate that, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, lags behind those of more than a dozen other industrialized nations, including the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, and Italy.

Mindful of such economic statistics, the National Governors Association has joined several prominent philanthropies and education organizations in undertaking ambitious efforts to overhaul high schools. The leaders of those efforts are convinced that high schools will not be able to prepare substantially more students for colleges unless colleges make clear their expectations of students; take an active role in helping to shape high-school offerings, tests, and academic standards; and drastically improve the academic preparation of school administrators and teachers. Without the involvement of colleges, the high-school-reform effort will fail, its leaders warn.

Education-policy makers frequently use the image of a pipeline to describe the segments of education that people flow through. If the pipes in our own homes were as leaky, we all would have a lot of buckets on our floors.

Many children run into trouble from the outset because they receive inadequate prenatal care or are malnourished or abused or denied intellectual stimulation in their homes. Because about two-thirds of mothers of children under the age of 5 are in the work force, many policy makers have concluded that states and colleges need to think of the pipeline as beginning in preschool, and must become more involved with early-childhood education. But most states have been hesitant to take on the costs of financing preschools and have been deterred from setting standards for early-childhood education, for fear of being accused of intruding into families' child-rearing decisions.

If children are far behind before starting grade school, they do not stand much chance of catching up. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that, on both reading and mathematics tests, fewer than a third of eighth graders scored as proficient or advanced. The effects of race and class can be seen in the fact that black eighth graders were less than a third as likely as white ones to post such scores.

The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems estimates, based on federal data, that 68 out of every 100 ninth graders will graduate from their high schools on time, and that just 18 of them go on to promptly enroll in college and earn associate's degrees within three years or bachelor's degrees within six years from the institutions where they started. Although estimates of high-school-dropout rates are notoriously unreliable, and the center's analysis was unable to account for students who transfer from one high school or college to another, many policy makers nonetheless see its findings as cause for deep concern.

Stanford University's higher-education institute notes in a 2003 report, "Betraying the College Dream," that schools and colleges in the United States have much less to do with each other than their counterparts in most other industrialized nations do. The report is one of several in recent years that have assigned colleges much of the blame for high schools' failure to prepare students for college work.

Indiana's commissioner of higher education, Stanley G. Jones, says the disjunction between school and college leaders was obvious when the state's late governor, Frank L. O'Bannon, brought them together in 1998 to try to jointly develop education policy. "Many of them did not know each other, and those who did, did not like each other," Mr. Jones recalls.

"Postsecondary kind of looks down on the K-12 stuff," says Michael D. Usdan, a senior fellow at the Institute for Educational Leadership. "The cultures are different."

In surveys conducted for its 2003 report, the Stanford institute found that an overwhelming majority of college admissions and placement officers were unaware of the standards and assessments being used by elementary and secondary schools. At the same time, elementary- and secondary-school educators and students generally knew little or nothing of the entrance and placement policies of public colleges in their states. The researchers also found that high-school course work was disconnected from college course work, and that high-school tests and college entrance and placement requirements often emphasized different skills.

There is little reason to believe that much has changed since a 1992 survey by the Southern Regional Education Board found that, in the southeastern United States alone, colleges were administering 75 different placement tests, in 125 combinations. David S. Spence, president of that 16-state group, says: "Just think about it. In any state it is very possible that no two or three campuses together are sending the same signals to the high schools. So what are the high schools supposed to do? What message do they get?"

Compounding the problem is a lack of reliable data on students' progress through the pipeline. Just three states have longitudinal data systems that enable them to track students' progress from preschool through the fourth year of college, according to a report issued last month by Achieve Inc., a nonprofit group created by governors and business leaders to promote education achievement.

The guidance counselors on whom high schools rely to make sure that students prepare for college tend to be stretched too thin to handle the job. Most have to deal with several hundred students each, and their job descriptions also include coordinating testing programs and tending to students' mental-health needs.

The Stanford study, which examined five states in depth, found that just 68 percent of high-school students in Oregon ever discussed college-admissions requirements with guidance counselors, and that even smaller shares did so in California, Georgia, Maryland, and Illinois. Less than 12 percent of the high-school students surveyed knew what courses they needed to take to get admitted to major public universities in their respective states.

Students are paying a price for the school-college disconnect. A 2004 survey commissioned by Achieve found that fewer than a fourth of high-school graduates felt significantly challenged in high school. More than half of the respondents said high school left them unprepared for work or college. Statistics from the U.S. Education Department show that college freshmen in remedial-reading courses are about 40 percent less likely to graduate than those who avoid such placement.

A Chronicle survey of college professors, conducted in January and discussed in detail starting on Page 9, found that 44 percent believe that students enter higher education unprepared to produce college-level writing. A parallel Chronicle survey found that only 10 percent of high-school teachers share that view.

Some higher-education institutions, including Boston College, Portland State University, and the University of Texas at El Paso, already are deeply involved in collaborative efforts to turn around their local school systems. But many others have been able to insulate themselves from the problems of elementary and secondary education by cherry-picking the best high-school graduates. As long as tuition and state aid are covering the costs of remediation, public colleges have little financial incentive to try to reduce the numbers of freshmen needing to take English composition or introductory algebra.

That is changing fast.

As described in this special report, more than half of the states have established panels to coordinate the work of schools and colleges. At both the national and local level, there has been an explosion of interest in efforts to bring educators together.

"Dealing with the entire pipeline conceptually often is a hard thing to do," says Terese S. Rainwater, who tracked state collaboratives as a researcher for the Education Commission of the States and now directs an effort by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education to push high-school students to push themselves harder. To bring about changes that will improve educational achievement, she says, "it is easier to deal with discrete pieces."

Many of the new efforts appear to be heeding such advice. A report issued by Achieve last month notes that 35 states are working to align their high schools' academic standards with college expectations. Rather than rely on high-school students to make sure they take the courses needed for college, eight states now require them to take college-preparatory curricula, unless their parents show up at school to opt them out. At the same time, public colleges are taking steps to improve the preparation of schoolteachers by beefing up both the colleges of education and the liberal-arts programs in which teachers acquire much of the knowledge they will pass along. The colleges are also providing incentives for professors of education to work more closely with schools.

There is still plenty of work left to be done. Michael W. Kirst, a professor of education at Stanford who advises such efforts, says, "Some of the states have some of the policies we recommend. Nobody has the package."

The articles in this special report examine the ways in which colleges are — or should be — reaching out to the schools beyond their walls, and how experts view the attempts to increase high-schools' and colleges' graduation rates.