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Working Together to Improve Student Achievement, Kindergarten Through College
By Kati Haycock, Director, The Education Trust
- Editor's note: The following article outlines the importance for K-12 teachers to work with faculty on the university level in order to make more clear the demands and expectations for today's students. Haycock supports the notion that standards-based assessment is crucial to ensure that secondary school teachers are adequately preparing their students for their college courses, and that college faculty know what to expect from their incoming students. An active partnership between the K-12 teachers and college faculty promotes the continuity of quality experience on each step of a student's education.
- While the following article does not refer to psychology, per se, the American Psychological Association is already entertaining the reforms presented here by developing national standards for the teaching of high school psychology and by fostering linkages between high school and college teachers to promote student achievement.
"Psychology is a science with connections to both the social and natural sciences...The success of psychology in contributing solutions to behavioral problems will depend, in part, on an educated citizenry versed in the critical thinking skills that underlie science...Variations in course design at the high school level have suggested that student experiences in their first exposure to psychology are wildly divergent both in content areas and level of challenge...[Standards] can be used by policymakers, educational leaders, curriculum developers, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders to determine what high school psychology students should know and how they can demonstrate their understanding...These standards are an important step in improving the quality of such courses, and their adoption is crucial..."
-- Ludy Benjamin, Jr., Ph.D., Gregory Kimble, Ph.D., and Laura Maitland from draft copy, APA National Standards: The Teaching of High School Psychology
Across the country, K-12 educators are engaged in a serious effort aimed at ensuring that all high school students can read, write, compute, and reason at high levels. Their success at this task would be a dream come true for faculty members in the nation's colleges and universities, who have been complaining for years about their entering freshmen's low skill levels and about the high cost of remediation.
Despite its obvious stake in the K-12 effort though, higher education has provided shockingly little support. Indeed, it sometimes seems as though "higher" educators have grown so accustomed to receiving underprepared students from "lower" educators that they literally can't imagine an alternative scenario -- or at least can't imagine it clearly enough to actually roll up their sleeves and help create one.
Our two systems of education, it turns out, are so intertwined that we simply cannot achieve big changes in one without changing the other.
Partnership Programs and Their Limits
The road to deeper understanding of the many connections between higher education and K-12 is littered with countless small "partnerships" between schools and colleges.
- In the seventies, a first wave of these partnerships focused on improving college readiness among minority and poor students at local high schools. Students who participated in these programs were counseled (and still are) to take college preparatory courses in high school. They also received extra support or "enrichment" opportunities.
- In the eighties, a second wave of partnership activity was launched in response to A Nation at Risk. Those programs sought excellence rather than equity and focused primarily on new professional development opportunities for teachers.
- By 1990, virtually every college president in the country could -- and would, given the slightest excuse -- pull out a long list of both equity- and excellence-oriented programs that were available on their campuses.
From Programmatic to Systemic
Higher education and K-12 leaders in six cities set out several years ago to rethink ways in which their institutions could work together.
Clearly launching one more special program -- even 100 more special programs -- wouldn't change these patterns. Instead, these leaders sought to identify key leverage points toward which they could direct institutional energies in ways that would have a much larger impact on student achievement, especially among minority and low-income students.
Along the road, all of us involved in this initiative have learned a number of lessons that will be especially useful to college and K-12 leaders across the country. In fact, the core strategy that we chose -- standards-based systemic reform -- has been embraced by leaders in 47 states and is enshrined in federal education policy.
Key Elements
In a nutshell, standards-based systemic reform is a fancy term for a relatively simple idea: Clear goals for student learning should drive virtually everything within the education system rather then the detailed prescriptions of educational inputs that have been in the driver's seat for decades. In this schema, the goals are fixed (usually at the state level), but educators (and often parents) at the school level are empowered to decide how to get their students to reach the goals. The primary role for central authorities, including districts and state education officials, is to monitor progress and provide assistance when the "locals" need help.
Briefly, the chief elements of standards-based systemic reform are:
- Clear, high standards that describe what all students should know and be able to do (and how well) by benchmark grade levels;
- New assessments that measure student performance against those standards rather than against other students' performance;
- Curricula that align with these standards and assessments;
- Professional development programs for teachers that will enable them to match their curricula and instructional practices with the goal of helping all students meet the standards;
- Decentralization of decision making about the means of education; and
- Accountability systems that measure and reward results, and that ensure change when improvements are not forthcoming.
A Need for Coordination, K-16
As communities took the necessary steps to put these changes in place, it didn't take the K-12 leaders in our Community Compacts very long to figure out that changes of this sort wouldn't succeed without comparable changes in higher education practices. Critical Areas for Joint Work
College and university leaders who join this effort will find plenty of challenges. The following tasks beg for priority attention:
- Task #1: Public Information and Engagement
For decades, students have been promoted to the next grade level and graduated from high school without having to demonstrate much actual learning. Grade-level promotion and graduation have come to be viewed -- by parents and students -- as virtual rights. The standards-based reform effort aims to change all that by promoting and graduating students based solely on their ability to demonstrate knowledge and skills. A change of this magnitude will require considerable effort on the part of teachers and administrators as well as support and cooperation from students and parents. Task #2: Developing -- and Aligning -- Standards for High School Graduation, College Admission, and Placement There is a growing mismatch between measures used in higher education -- Carnegie units, grades, and scores on standardized aptitude tests -- and the direction of assessment in K-12. Indeed, to most school reformers, the measures colleges use are nearly devoid of useful information about student learning and often prove counterproductive in terms of student motivation. Unchecked, this mismatch will have a chilling effect on the movement toward standards and performance-based assessment in K-12. Many of the most active parents judge proposed changes in their children's schools primarily by how those changes will affect admission to college, and they resist changes not blessed by colleges. It's time for higher educators to translate those frustrations into tangible support for the movement toward high standards. The best route may be the one taken in Maryland, where the K-12 system and the two- and four-year colleges have collaborated almost from the beginning of the high school assessment development process. Content area faculty who sit on the various Maryland standards committees do so only after having clarified the University of Maryland system's expectations for entering freshmen. Knowing that the final standards they develop -- and the assessment built around them -- will inform graduation, admission, and placement, they have been able to participate in the K-12 process in a wholly different manner than faculty who have participated on standards committees in other states. This process should lead to fewer mixed signals and a much higher quality assessment because it truly will be owned by both K-12 and higher education. It also should save a lot of money, because students will not have to be reassessed only a few months after leaving high school. Task #3: Teacher Development Current teachers say they will need help getting their students to meet the new standards. Some teachers will need help learning the broad range of instructional strategies that are necessary to succeed with the variety of learners in today's classrooms. But some teachers have an even more basic problem: insufficient mastery of the content areas they teach. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, colleges and universities have created a host of programs that help teachers deepen their knowledge and improve instruction. But these vehicles don't serve nearly the number of teachers who need them and, typically, they are neither intense enough nor sufficiently connected to the school setting to result in enduring changes. In too many communities, school district staff development dollars are spent on one-time workshops rather than on intensive, ongoing professional development. Teachers are more likely to earn extra college credits -- and extra pay -- for courses outside their disciplines than for advanced study in the disciplines they are teaching, despite research that suggests advanced study courses can have a positive impact on student learning. Colleges and universities need to cooperate with K-12 schools, school districts, teacher associations, and others in rethinking how to organize and pay for professional development and how to build an infrastructure that is capable of supporting the efforts of all teachers to enable their students to reach high standards. El Paso, Texas, is one community that has begun to put that infrastructure into place. Leaders at the University of Texas El Paso and the three area school districts have been working together for several years to develop articulated standards and to create a support structure for teachers as they seek to help their students meet the standards. University faculty and specially selected mentor teachers work together to provide teachers with intensive summer institutes and ongoing support. College and universities also need to ensure that the teachers they produce are deeply knowledgeable in content areas and are prepared to teach in a standards-based system. This will require much closer cooperation between colleges of education and departments of arts and sciences. It also will require a concerted effort to attract the best and the brightest into teaching careers. Task #4: Improving the Availability and Use of Information Many colleges and universities provide detailed information to high schools on their graduates' experience in postsecondary education. Schools also receive considerable information on their students' performance from their districts and from state education agencies. Although much of this could be very useful in planning for improvement, the data often languish on a shelf in the counselor's office. Why? Because schools rarely have a mechanism to examine or study the reams of data they receive in a typical year, or because the printouts are dense and the data are old or incomplete. Because data, done right, can be very powerful tools in the reform effort, they are an important arena for higher education and K-12 collaboration. Attention needs to be directed to integrating data systems and improving quality, completeness, and timeliness. But attention also needs to be paid to issues of use: Educators need to be taught how to use data they get from outside their schools and how to collect their own data. They also need to create regular opportunities to come together to analyze patterns in the data and decide what to do about them. Doing it all
Each of these tasks is large by itself. The truth is, however, that real change will require progress on them all -- a seemingly overwhelming challenge. But it's hard to imagine a better use for that unique bundle of intellectual energy, curiosity, and passion that we call "higher education".
This country's future depends more than ever before on the quality of its public schools. Yet, there is hardly a community in the nation where parents are satisfied with the education their children are receiving.
Colleges and universities that stand on the sidelines as efforts are made to implement higher standards and improve public schools risk incurring increasing disapprobation from policymakers and the public. But there is another risk to such negligence that is even more serious: that, in their neglect, they will doom to failure the current improvement effort and, in so doing, will further undermine the already fragile future of U.S. public elementary and secondary education.
Note: This article was adapted from "Working Together to Improve Student Achievement, Kindergarten Through College", from The Educational Record with the permission of the American Council on Education, copyright 1997.
The above article was originally published in the Sept/Oct 1997 issue of The Psychology Teacher Network. The article is reprinted here with the permission of the Education Directorate of the APA. Further publication of the article is not permitted without the express written consent of the Education Directorate.
For information on subscribing to The Psychology Teacher Network, write to:
- Psychology Teacher Network
Education Directorate
APA
750 First Street, NE,
Washington, DC 20002-4242.
