In my last entry, I commented that Defending the Community College Equity Agenda (Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest (eds.) Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2006) addresses several key threats to the community college equity agenda. The last entry’s comments were generally favorably disposed toward the book. This entry is a bit more critical.

The book’s coverage of weak secondary school academic preparation is my only disappointment. There is no chapter or deep analysis that looks back to secondary schools as a cause and solution for excessive remediation (Kirst, Michael and Venezia, Andrea (eds.). From High School to College (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004). The book does not have a K-14 focus, and is essentially a horizontal treatment of the community college rather than a vertical perspective. The authors mention the college preparation issue several times, but do not push much beyond that.

For example, hundreds, if not thousands, of different placement tests are used to evaluate entering students, so it can be difficult for students to understand what is expected of them. California community colleges, for example, use more than 100 different tests. Texas has a required statewide placement exam, but many colleges in Texas also use their own exam for placement. The most widely used placement tests are constructed by ETS and ACT, but many others are designed by higher education departments or faculty at individual community college campuses.

There is a wide range of acceptable student-performance levels on placement tests, and tracking the proportion of students who need remedial education is virtually impossible. Indeed, estimates of the number and percent of remedial students are all over the place. None of the experts are comfortable with the current definitions.

The most widely cited remedial rates from the U.S. Department of Education, Condition of Education, 2001, are among the lowest: 42 percent of students in two-year institutions, and 20 percent in four-year institutions. Other indicators are much higher. The Academic Senate for the 109 California Community Colleges found far more than half of their entering students were placed at a "level below college readiness." The U.S. Education Department's "Principal Indicators of Student Academic Histories in Postsecondary Education, 1972-2000" reports that 12th graders in 1992 had a remediation rate of 61.1 percent for community colleges and 25.3 percent at four-year colleges.

What does "remedial" mean? While a term that is used so frequently, and so freely, might seem to call for a clear definition, when applied to postsecondary education, its meaning is murky at best.

Once remedial students reach community college the book provides impressive and novel insights about developmental education. The use of case studies works well for these topics. The authors conclude with two major points:

…there is no general agreement as to the specific reading, writing, and math skills needed to learn from the postsecondary curriculum. The lack of a common benchmark creates problems for deciding what should be taught in developmental education courses.

…there is a serious shortage of controlled evaluation research to support them, which is troubling in view of claims that postsecondary remedial course work is ineffective [page 257}.

Teachers College is the site for a multi million dollar U.S. Department of Education randomized clinical trial of community college interventions such as dual enrollment. We can look forward to more major publications by Bailey and Morest.

Book review of Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest (eds.) Defending the Community College Equity Agenda (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2006) pages 299, ISBN 0-8018-8447-0.

Labels: College Completion

America’s 1,200 community colleges enroll nearly half of credit-earning undergraduates, and first time students. However, scholarly attention to this growing postsecondary sector is dwarfed by research and publications concerning 4-year institutions. Furthermore, community colleges serve a disproportionate share of low income students including 79% of California’s Latino students. And, public four-year institutions grew by 3.5% from 1990 to 2000, but public two-year enrollments grew by 14%.

Defending the Community College Equity Agenda (Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest (eds.) Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2006) addresses several key threats to the community college equity agenda. The co-authors have long and deep backgrounds through their leadership roles in the Community College Research Center at Teachers College.

Community colleges enroll almost anyone who wants to come regardless of academic preparation. Community college budgets are fiscally constrained, and their resources often lag enrollment growth. Moreover, need based student financial aid has not kept up with the changing student bodies. Many students, however, do succeed in community colleges despite long odds.

The book begins with the historic dilemma of how community colleges can balance their multiple missions – four-year college transfer, vocational education, continuing education for businesses, basic adult education such as learning English, and recreational courses. This multiple-mission analysis is highlighted by the authors’ concern for a recent trend of shifting college attention and policy away from low income and disadvantaged students. Moreover, community colleges aspire to move up the academic ladder by emulating practices and policies at four-year institutions. Along these lines, the book emphasizes that a larger and growing proportion of community college students are recent high school graduates, so college mission needs to shift more to the 17-20 age range.

The multiple mission concern is heightened by the chapter on lack of accountability. The authors conclude that “accountability, especially performance-based funding, so far has been a paper tiger. It has not threatened college funding or enrollments” (p. 249).

The authors summarize their conclusions this way: It is fair to say that community colleges have made a crucial contribution to opening college access, but their role in providing overall equity in higher education outcomes is less clear. The majority of students who start community college do not earn a degree or certificate (p. 247). The good intentions and hard work of community college faculty in promoting the college success of their students are not reinforced by institutional incentives and information systems (p. 248).

The chapter about increasing competition and growth of the for-profit community colleges is fascinating. It includes some criticisms of for-profits, but also stresses for-profit community colleges focused more effort on job placement than the public community college case study institutions that the authors studied (p. 96).

The edited volume includes a significant focus on the community college role in preparing students for work. An entire chapter is devoted to industry certification programs with an emphasis upon industry technology certification. This chapter analyzes the rapid rise and fall of industry certification during the technology boom and bust from 1995 to 2005. Workforce issues also are featured in an excellent chapter by Norton Grubb of the University of California at Berkeley on the inadequate community college resources devoted to counseling.

There are two chapters on the remediation issue and another chapter on dual enrollment that helps high school students understand academic challenges at community colleges.

The book provides a balanced picture of the challenges facing community colleges and the resulting inadequate outcomes for students. The book is filled with current statistics, trends, and citations that will be a bonanza for future scholars. It also analyzes how a small sample of 15 colleges in six states have responded to various challenges.

The final chapter is a powerful indictment of many components of community colleges including their inadequate : college completion rates, developmental education operations, information systems, transfer of credits to four-year institutions, advising, and quality of online instruction. The book ends with an excellent summary of the equity outcomes and recommendations to improve institutional practices and policies.

Some more critical comments about the book in my next blog entry.

Labels: academic preparation, College Completion

More than 70% of high school graduates now go on to postsecondary education. Yet, a new study of high school student engagement reveals some major concerns about the level of college preparation of those students.

See “Voices of Students on Engagement: A Report on the 2006 Survey of Student Engagement”.

Using a national sample of grades 9-12, the survey found that:

· Fewer than half of the students go to high school because of what happens within the classroom environment
· A great majority of students are bored every day, if not in every class

· 43% spend 0-1 hour doing written homework, 83% spend 5 hours or less

· 55% spend 0 or 1 hour per week reading and studying for class, 90% spend 5 hours or fewer

· Students want more active learning such as peer working groups and presentations

· Girls report being more engaged across all dimensions of high school engagement than boys. (Girls were 58% of 4 year college graduates in 2006).

Engagement within a high school context is about a student’s relationship with the school community (adults, peers, curriculum, facilities, etc). Importantly, however, I believe that this study should raise concerns that many of these high school students will become at-risk college students who will not experience college success for the very reason that they were not sufficiently engaged in high school.

Labels: College Completion, College Preparation

The University of California eight-campus system has increased its efforts to better align secondary school courses with the expectations of their collegiate system. We believe the efforts have the potential to dramatically increase college completion and college success rates.

UC has created several initiatives in order to specify necessary content and skills within high school courses as well as to provide clearer signals to high school teachers and students.

One initiative is to influence content in specific high school A-G courses . The term A-G means that UC requires a minimum of:

four years of English,
three years of mathematics,
two years of lab science,
two years of history social science, and
two years of languages and electives

UC is concerned with the content of these required A-G high school courses. UC content/skills specifications for high school courses are a de facto norm for high schools to meet in their course syllabi and class schedules. A-G is a pattern of study that assures the UC faculty that high school students attain a general level of knowledge that will provide breadth and perspective at a new, more advanced level of the university. These UC course expectation statements provide a specific direction and framework for what needs to be included within a specific A-G course, but not how to teach the course in high school. Before discussing A-G in depth, I will describe a second UC initiative for k-16 alignment.

Six universities within the UC system participated in “Standards for Success,” (S4S) a project by the nation’s leading research universities {www.S4s.org]. Standards for Success is not a formal part of A-G, but it demonstrates critical thinking and study skills essential for success at UC. I was the major subcontractor for this study conducted by the University of Oregon’s Center for Educational Policy Research.

The study took two years in which over 400 faculty and staff from 20 research universities participated. UC system played a major role in S4S, and hosted the California statewide meeting in Berkeley. The major question each professor in each disciplinary area was asked concerned what students must know and do to succeed in entry level undergraduate courses. National academic content standards were used for comparison (e.g. Science for All Americans by the American Association for the Advancement of Science). The standards were peer reviewed in several cycles in order to ensure their validity.

Success in university is different from high school because universities facilitate greater specialization. So even an A grade in a high school course may not be sufficient. S4S Science and Society standards include knowledge and skills that students should have to succeed in any science course. High school courses that do not include Standards for Success standards probably will not prepare their students sufficiently for college success.

The A-G Course Approval Process

The A-G course approval process has improved dramatically over the past six years . For example, the UC did not provide sufficient feedback for schools about why courses were not approved, and the entire process was not seen as user-friendly for high schools. Negative comments from high schools and concerns about the A-G review process led the UC Office of the President to make major changes. There is now a team of reviewers headed by an articulation coordinator, and includes many part-time participants from other UC departments, such as admissions. High schools agree that the development of a team is a step in the right direction. A-G does not constrain how a course is taught or prescribe specific pedagogy, but it does focus on specific standards outlined below.

The UC provides online checklists that indicate to schools the criteria against which submitted courses will be evaluated. Moreover, UC includes specific examples of courses that have been approved including:
Course goals and major student outcomes
Course objectives
Texts and materials
Key assignments
Instructional methods (see attachment D for a specific example)
Assuming a school provides the necessary course information, the reasons a course could be rejected include:
Insufficient academic/theoretical content;
Focus is too narrow/too specialized;
Attempt to address too many topics/lack of depth;
Too much focus on career-related skills (application), rather than academics (concepts/theory);
Too much focus on technology tools, rather than content knowledge; and/or
A lack of prerequisites.[1]

High school teachers are usually responsible for seeking course approval, which is done on a first-come-first-serve basis. The deadline for submission is every February and the reviews are complete by April or May so that schools have enough time to inform students of any changes. At UC Office of the President, individual reviewers review the submissions, bringing any questionable applications to the full committee for discussion. The UC asks principals for their high school’s course list every year and the vast majority of high schools throughout California comply with that request every year.

In 2007, reviewed UC disapproval of A-G courses in career and technical education (CTE). Some CTE courses are approved but overwhelmingly as electives, and not for core subjects like science and math. CTE high school educators have asserted that A-G approval is often too strict and not flexible enough to accommodate courses with vocational purposes that deserve A-G approval. I examined some of the CTE courses that were turned down for A-G in the sciences. In each case I concurred that these CTE courses lacked the scientific content to merit approval using the UC criteria for A-G approval.

[1] Visual and Performing arts criteria are different than the other six subject areas. See http://www.ucop.edu/a-gGuide/ag/course_submissions/eval_checklist.html for the checklists.

Labels: College Completion, College Success

There are deep and harmful chasms between K-12 and postsecondary education that inhibit college completion and college success for college students at risk. Nevertheless, those chasms could be spanned with governance mechanisms that include elaborate structural reorganizations of state decision-making.

Usually, governance is the wrong place to start thinking about the problem. Governance reform often ends up directing too much energy toward an organizational or structural fix. Moreover, most higher education policy approaches that focus primarily on governance end up to be more about politics and who controls education, than they are about instrumental goals.

A better prescription is to deduce the governance structure from that which will facilitate positive outcomes, that which each system cannot possibly deliver alone. For example, reducing remediation, improving teacher preparation, and dual enrollment. These approaches utilize accountability and state/federal stimulant grants for K-16 activities to get started.

Governance mechanisms that enable, sustain, and enhance successful K-16 activities then should be designed. Some of these governance mechanisms will be structural like Florida’s K-20 department, or even joint K-16 voluntary organizations used in Georgia and Indiana.

I was a co-author of the attached paper from The National Center on Higher Education and Public Policy that examines the K-16 governance issue through analyzing four states- Florida, Georgia, New York, and Oregon. It ends with recommendations on how to utilize governance changes to improve academic readiness for college and college student persistence.

http://www.highereducation.org/reports/governance_divide/governance_divide.pdf

Labels: College Completion, College Success

More than 70% of high school graduates now go on to postsecondary education. Yet, a new study of high school student engagement reveals some major concerns about the level of college preparedness of those students.
See “Voices of Students on Engagement: A Report on the 2006 Survey of Student Engagement”.

Using a national sample of grades 9-12, the survey found that:

· Fewer than half of the students go to high school because of what happens within the classroom environment
· A great majority of students are bored every day, if not in every class
· 43% spend 0-1 hour doing written homework, 83% spend 5 hours or less
· 55% spend 0 or 1 hour per week reading and studying for class, 90% spend 5 hours or fewer
· Students want more active learning such as peer working groups and presentations
· Girls report being more engaged across all dimensions of high school engagement than boys. (Girls were 58% of 4 year college graduates in 2006).

Engagement within a high school context is about a student’s relationship with the school community (adults, peers, curriculum, facilities, etc). Importantly, however, I believe that this study should raise concerns that many of these high school students will become at-risk college students who will not experience college success for the very reason that they were not sufficiently engaged in high school.