Struggling for Students’ Readiness
By MORGAN SMITH /NYTimes
The majority of Texas students do not leave public schools prepared for college.
Fewer than one in two students met the state’s “college readiness”
standards in math and verbal skills on ACT, SAT and TAKS scores in 2010.
Though average SAT scores in both verbal and math dropped between 2007
and 2010 — a trend that state education officials have attributed to an
increase in students taking the test — more students in the same period
of time have met the state’s standards for college-ready graduates,
largely because of improvements on their state standardized tests and
the ACT.
But that increase is only a slim silver lining in what appears to be a large storm cloud.
“It’s still pathetic,” Dominic Chavez, a Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board spokesman, said of the ACT scores. “It’s still a very
low number, and nobody is satisfied with it.”
Getting to a number that is satisfying is a task that policy makers,
educators and the business community have grappled with for years. And
although the current data show that something is not going right,
pinpointing why is difficult. Part of the trouble is that while it is
easy to define what skills students need to be successful in college, so
far the measures used to assess the ways they lack those skills have
returned an incomplete picture.
Debates over lagging performance at community colleges and four-year institutions can devolve into finger-pointing between the higher education and K-12 camps, each blaming the other for students’ poor performance at the postsecondary level.
Because colleges are not good at gauging which remedial courses students
need, some experts say, students fall through the cracks or give up
because they are not progressing toward a degree. They cite the number
who are “underplaced” in remediation — because they did not take the
placement exam seriously when they got to campus or they have spent time
out of school — and quit out of frustration or boredom.
Others point out that deficiencies in students’ secondary education are often the reason they are in remedial courses.
In an effort to provide better data for the discussion, the state in
June approved a contract with the College Board to develop a statewide
placement assessment, which all institutions would be required to
administer to incoming students who did not meet the benchmark scores on
state standardized exams or college admissions tests. The new
assessment is intended to provide a uniform view — different colleges
offer exams from different vendors — and detailed diagnostics to give a
better idea of what postsecondary students are missing. That in turn
would allow colleges, if needed, to offer a three-week review of
trigonometry instead of a yearlong review of introductory math. And for
high schools, the diagnostics could offer a closer analysis of where
they are coming up short.
“I don’t think we have a good identified gauge over the past because
we’ve been using a test that has no diagnostics,” Richard Rhodes, the
president of Austin Community College, said of measuring college
readiness. “We also haven’t across the board done a good job in
preparation to take the test.”
A growing body of research questions whether the measures that students
must pass to avoid taking the placement test — the state standardized
and college admissions exams — can accurately predict how well a student
is prepared for college. Studies support the theory that high school
grades, not placement or admissions exams, give a better picture of
whether students are ready for college, said Pamela Burdman, an
education policy analyst who recently wrote a report on the role of
placement exams in assessing college readiness for Jobs for the Future, a
Boston-based nonprofit. And the best measures, she said, use some
combination of high school grade-point averages and standardized test
scores.
The move toward the single statewide placement assessments puts Texas at
the forefront of states that are tackling how best to evaluate students
as they enter college, Ms. Burdman said. Although it should be
considered an advance, she said, the state is still several years away
from determining whether the method does a better job in predicting
ability to succeed.
If the state can do a better job of assessing what students need once
they get to college, it also has implications for the help they receive
in high school. Some community colleges across the country, including El
Paso Community College, have provided students the option to take a
college placement exam their junior year of high school. Once they
receive their scores, they can use them to guide their course work in
their remaining year. Ms. Burdman said it could serve as an early
intervention to increase students’ chances at success before they
reached the point at which they needed remedial work.
A few school districts across the state have collaborated with local
community colleges in another way to increase graduates’ likelihood of
success in higher education. At early-college high schools, students can
take a higher number of dual-credit courses earlier than their peers at
traditional high schools, allowing them at times to leave school with
an associate degree.
Such programs can also give the school officials who institute them a
window into the challenges of increasing the number of students prepared
for college.
West of Abilene, the Roscoe school district has invested money earned
from area wind-energy development into becoming a state-of-the-art
early-college school, with a goal of 90 percent of its students
graduating with an associate degree by 2015 — at a time when
Superintendent Kim Alexander projects that about the same percentage
will be from low-income and English-language-learning backgrounds.
Roscoe’s example helps illustrate the difficulties of measuring students’ college readiness. In 2010 the district still lagged behind
the state average with just more than one in three students graduating
ready for college in both English and math. But 55 percent of its
students were already taking college courses through the dual-credit
program, compared with the state average of about 25 percent.
Mr. Alexander said that although he believed they were on their way to
meeting the 2015 objective, the disconnect between the skills students
needed for college course work and those that the standardized tests
measured made it more difficult.
“Everybody is starting to see the issue, and everybody is trying to
raise their standards, whether it is higher ed or public ed,” said Mr.
Alexander, whose district has just under 400 students. “It’s just not in
sync at this point in time.”
That may improve with the continuing transition to the Staar exams, the
state’s new standardized assessments, which are supposed to be better
aligned to course work. But Mr. Alexander said some of the issues in the
current system would probably remain. For instance, he said that if
students were taking a dual-credit course, they had to take both a
standardized exam and a college final — something that he said was a
deterrent for both schools and students who want to take that step.
“You’ve got that ever-present pressure on the high-stakes testing that
really hogties your creativity to do some things,” he said. “There’s
just some really tough issues that if you are wanting to be innovative
and you are wanting to produce a student who is really college- and
work-force-ready, these students are almost being penalized for choosing
that path.”
No comments:
Post a Comment