Crossing the Chasm to the Clovers of College Completion

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