A Special Report from the Chronicle of Higher Education
March 10, 2006
This might be the most important treatise on high school reform in years-no small thing for a field clouded with reports and bursting at the seams with Gates Foundation largesse. Yet it's gone mostly unnoticed by education bloggers and reporters. That's a shame. In 56 broadsheet pages, this compilation makes the case that "the revolution in the nation's elementary and secondary schools has finally reached academe's ivory towers." Throughout its eight articles and ten opinion pieces (including Chester E. Finn, Jr.'s, featured last week in Gadfly), you can hear the steady drumbeat of a simple message: we need to align our high school graduation expectations with college entrance requirements. Making K-12 educators and the professoriate agree on what "college ready" means, however, isn't getting any easier. According to a fascinating Chronicle survey presented in the report, high school teachers' assessments of their students' abilities are consistently more positive than those of college professors. For instance, only 6 percent of professors say their students are very well prepared in writing, compared to 36 percent of teachers; the numbers for math are 4 percent and 37 percent respectively. Overall, 84 percent of professors say that high school graduates are unprepared or only somewhat prepared for college, compared to 65 percent of teachers. The Chronicle reports on a number of initiatives underway to close this expectations gap, especially the growth of P-16 councils and the like. But if you want to understand how we got to this point, two commentaries are worth reading. First, Diane Ravitch's "The Fall of the Standard-Bearers," which traces the College Board's "abdication" of its role in setting curriculum standards, and second, Stanley Katz's "The Liberal Arts in School and College," which decries our nation's habit of postponing challenging curriculum and content until higher education. One conclusion jumps out from both essays: we desperately need to find the Charles Elliot of our day-a college president with national prestige willing to demand excellence from the nation's high schools. In the meantime you can read the full report, and order a free copy, here.
