Richard Kazis, Joel Vargas, and Nancy Hoffman, editors, Harvard Educational Press2004
"Double the numbers" is the phrase this book coins to express the editors' goal: that schools, systems, and policies be changed to increase the number of poor and minority students who attend and complete college. This is no trivial problem (only 25 percent of high school students earn a B.A., and for minorities the figures are much lower), and this book deserves credit for avoiding the usual prescriptions of affirmative action, economic and racial. (A Matter of Degrees, reviewed below, also addresses the graduation rate crisis.) Instead, this book gets to the root of the issue-increasing the college-readiness of our high school students and improving their experiences when they arrive at college. The book contains 26 distinct essays from a range of authors on an eclectic mix of reforms. Not all of their ideas are in agreement, but this variety makes it an interesting read. You will already be familiar with many of the ideas-the America Diploma Project, California's Bridge Project, pleas for better curricula, more forms of choice, and better coordination between high schools and colleges. Still, many of these chapters feel fresh, and there are a handful of gems: an overview of existing "performance funding" strategies; an explanation of the "student engagement" index used by some states to assess their colleges (as a compromise between the challenge of measuring outputs in higher education and the irrelevance of simply measuring inputs); a discussion of the nation's first two "charter" colleges, which earned freedom in exchange for accountability; and a wonderful essay on the tension school choice creates between self interest and the public interest. Though these topics are only tangentially related to minority enrollments, each chapter links its thesis to the book's goal. We might quibble with the primary assumption of the book-that fixing high schools (and the first years of college) is the best way to solve this problem. We also need to ensure that students enter high school well educated in the first place. But to follow that logic would be to endlessly expand the scope of this already diverse volume. The ISBN is 1891792229 and you can find more information here.
