David T. Conley, Standards for Success
2003
The Association of American Universities and the Pew Charitable Trusts have a project called "Standards for Success" that is trying to spell out the skills and knowledge that high school graduates need to possess in order to have a reasonably good chance of succeeding in college-level academic work. This 80-page report endeavors to spell out standards of achievement that high school seniors ought to attain in six core academic areas: the big four (English, math, science, social science) plus the arts and foreign languages. It's clear, ambitious and mostly sensible, yet one must wonder if it's pie in the sky - even as the authors dispatch copies to every high school in the land. The central problem is that it's purely hortatory. It's hard to picture any of the sponsoring universities actually turning down applicants on grounds that they don't know or cannot do some of these things. (It's also hard to know how they would determine this, as college entrance tests are nowhere near this specific or revealing, nor are high school course syllabi, grading standards and transcripts.) Bottom line: it'd be fantastic if U.S. high school produced such graduates, but if all the universities are prepared to do is recommend it, the requisite changes in institutional and individual behavior at the K-12 level are not likely to occur. You can find it for yourself at http://www.s4s.org/03_viewproducts/ksus/index.php. Note, too, that the ongoing American Diploma Project is making solid progress in developing a set of recommended high school exit standards (in English and math only) that are the joint product of college faculty AND employers, the point being that a state's high-school exit test (if any) is not legitimately applied only to those young people headed straight for academic higher education. For more information on the American Diploma Project's work, go to http://www.achieve.org/achieve.nsf/DiplomaProject?openform.
