July-August 2010

by Kati HaycocK

Many people in higher education were caught by surprise when the nation's governors and chief state school officers announced their intention to adopt common standards for American high schools that aim at college readiness. After so many years of complaining that high schools don't prepare their students for the rigors of college, are we finally seeing schools step up to that plate?

Certainly, there is reason to be skeptical. After all, aren't these the very same K-12 leaders who have insisted for years that it is not their job to prepare all of their students for college—that if we didn't like the skill levels of some of our entering students, we shouldn't admit them?

Why this sudden change of heart?

Actually, this is a tide that has been rising for years.

Some History

It was in 1983 when the National Commission on Excellence in Education—chaired by the University of Utah's then-President David P. Gardner—decried declining standards in American high schools and called on all students to take stronger academic programs.

Every year since then, more students have completed the advanced high-school courses that used to be reserved for the chosen few. For example:

• About two-thirds of high school students now take at least Algebra II, with about a quarter also completing a pre-calculus, trigonometry, statistics, or calculus course.
• More than half of high-school graduates now complete at least two laboratory sciences.
• Some 20 states have adopted the “college-preparatory curriculum” as the default or mandatory curriculum for all of their students.
• Over the past decade, the fastest-growing part of the high-school curriculum has been college-level courses (Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and concurrent-enrollment courses).

Some of these changes were fueled by more aggressive counselors and, especially in urban areas, strong district-level policy encouragement. But a lot more were driven by students and parents who had absorbed the many messages in their environment about college becoming a necessity for anybody who wants a secure place in the new economy.

In survey after survey, students are making their intentions clear: They intend to go to college. College aspirations are up for all groups, but the growth in college orientation among low-income students and students of color has been nothing short of stunning. Perhaps more than any others, these students know that a college education is the best, if not the only, chance they have to enter the American mainstream.

Caption: Figure 1. Percentage of Graduating High School Seniors Who Earned Credits in Algebra II, 2005

If all this is happening, though, why are remediation rates in college so high? Why do so many faculty feel that the preparation of incoming students is getting worse, not better?

Some of that discontent merely reflects the fact that colleges are accepting students from deeper in the pool. High-school achievement, in other words, isn't going down. But it isn't going up very much, either—or at least not nearly as much as either recent improvement in elementary-level performance or increases in high-level course-taking might have led us to expect.

And those increases haven't been reflected in American schoolchildren's performance on international examinations, either. On the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exam, our 15-year-olds ranked significantly below the OECD averages in both math and science. And with respect to college-student success, our long-held lead is fast slipping away. While we still rank third internationally in the proportion of adults with at least an associate's degree, that ranking has dropped to tenth for young adults.

That, in a nutshell, is what this latest “common standards” movement is actually about: trying to clarify what successful college students actually need to know and be able to do, so that we can get serious about teaching and measuring those things rather than simply calculating course credits or pass-rates on low-level state tests. This clarity would provide a much more solid foundation for regaining our lead in the granting of high-quality postsecondary degrees.

The American Diploma Project

The origins of the current standards movement go back to 2002, when four organizations—Achieve, the Fordham Foundation, the National Alliance of Business, and the Education Trust—came together to launch the American Diploma Project, an effort to support state-level K-12 and higher-education leaders who wanted to collaborate in developing standards at the juncture of high school and college.

Initially, five states—Massachusetts, Texas, Indiana, Kentucky and Nevada—volunteered to participate. Leaders in those states knew that there was a gap between learning expectations at the end of high school and those at the beginning of college. And they knew that large numbers of students were falling into that chasm. Students who followed all the rules in high school—taking all the courses they were required to take and earning decent grades—often ended up in remedial courses in college, at a substantial cost to both them and the taxpayers.

Nobody was sure that the gap could be closed. But when four organizations from very different points on the political spectrum—Fordham and the National Alliance of Business are generally considered to be right-leaning, the Education Trust is thought to lean left, and Achieve is deliberately bipartisan—invited state leaders to participate in an effort to develop “college- and career-ready” standards, whatever those were, they generally concluded that anything with such an improbable group of bedfellows must have some merit.

With strong staff support from Achieve, what started out simply as an interesting idea gradually grew more concrete. In each participating jurisdiction, statewide committees composed primarily of K-12 and higher education faculty set out to compare the official content and performance standards in K-12 for high school mathematics and English/language arts, as well as the standards implicit in definitions of “proficient” on state tests for high-school students, with the standards in the placement tests used by the colleges. The committees identified where these standards were close and where they were far apart. Achieve helped by providing independent analyses of the K-12 and higher education exams, by convening cross-state conversations, and by providing expert facilitators who could help the groups negotiate the occasional political landmines.

These state-level committees also drew extensively upon Achieve's work in analyzing major national examinations (for example, the SAT, the ACT, Accuplacer, Compass, and Work Keys), as well as a series of workplace studies about the skills and knowledge that are critical for various careers. Together, the products from these analyses form the foundation for Achieve's American Diploma Project “Benchmarks,” one of the foundational documents for the later common-standards effort.

Some of the states in this initial group moved rather quickly, modifying their high-school standards to more closely resemble the requirements of college and work. Some also adopted new course requirements that would align with the standards.

As these states were moving forward, others began expressing interest in the concept. So in 2005, Achieve launched the American Diploma Project Network to provide state leaders with the support they needed to make a go of this effort. By 2009, 35 states had joined the network and were at various stages in the process of aligning standards, coursework, and assessments.

One important byproduct of the individual state efforts to define the skills and knowledge that make a student “college and career ready” was the emergence of a core set of standards that were common to all the states. In the end, the staff at Achieve found, the demands of college and careers don't vary from state to state.

Throughout this time, however, nobody said the words “national” or even “common” out loud, and the project did not have nationwide consensus as its goal. The most anybody thought was politically feasible (remember, Bill Clinton couldn't even get a voluntary national eighth-grade mathematics assessment off the ground) was commonality within a state—that is, an agreement across the high schools and colleges within each state on what students should know in order to graduate “college ready.”

Enter No Child Left Behind

While this work was moving forward, increasingly aggressive federal education policy was putting unprecedented pressure on states, districts, and schools to improve achievement, especially among low-income students and students of color. Loose state accountability policies were replaced by more demanding federal policies, which set forth bold stretch goals for schools and imposed serious consequences on those that failed to make progress in consecutive years.

In some states, education leaders embraced those goals, incorporating them into their own accountability policies and supporting school- and district-level efforts to meet them. In many others, however, leaders resistant to change—or at least to federally mandated change—fostered the notion that the new federal law was unfair, first of all in its expectation that states could get all of their children to state standards, and second, unfair to states that had adopted more rigorous standards than others.

But the initial bar below which schools would be identified as “needing improvement” was set at the performance level of the school at the 20th percentile within each state—meaning that roughly the same proportion of schools were likely to be identified for improvement in each state, regardless of how tough or how easy the state test was. Nevertheless, the idea that the law was unfair—that your school might not have been labeled as “needing improvement” if it were located one state over—spread like wildfire around the country, creating an ever-growing appetite for “fairness” in the only form that could alleviate this pain: common standards and assessments.

And so what was politically unthinkable even in a single grade and subject became thinkable, at the very least. And real leadership contributed to this shift. First, Achieve, under the direction of Mike Cohen, provided strong support for state-level efforts to close the gaps between high school and college. While the organization's staff coaxed and coached states, its board of prominent CEOs and governors gave the issue political support and prominence. No one deserves more credit for getting the effort this far.

Second, the Council of Chief State Schools Officers (CCSSO) helped develop consensus on common standards among state chiefs. Council President Gene Wilhoit reminded them ever so gently—if persistently—how hard it is to get agreement within a state on raising standards, not to mention how expensive and difficult it is to develop good assessments. Common standards could establish the ambitious definition of “proficient” to which most of these education leaders believed they needed to ratchet up their systems and do so with less controversy and at smaller expense to the taxpayers in their states.

Third, the National Governors Association joined CCSSO and Achieve in developing a common, voluntary set of standards for what constitutes “college and career-ready.” Their unifying theme was, “Better us than the federal government.”

Fourth and finally, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested generously in helping all three organizations actually get the work done. Late in the process, the federal government also stepped in with a very big boost. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, has been a longtime critic of the nation's patchwork system of assessments in K-12. Indeed, the Council of Great City Schools—the organization to which Duncan and his big-city counterparts belonged—was the first K-12 membership organization to call for common standards and tests.

Once Duncan took the helm of the Education Department in 2009, one of his first big moves was to tie stimulus dollars, especially those in the coveted “Race to the Top” competition, to participation in the common-standards effort. Race to the Top funding—and probably funding from even larger federal programs such as Title I—will not be available to states that do not adopt “college-ready” standards and assessments, defined as either the common standards or standards certified as “college ready” by the colleges in that state.

Drafting the Standards

While the standards-development process was hosted by the chief state school officers and the governors, content-area experts from Achieve, the College Board, and ACT—with assistance from a less well-known organization, Student Achievement Partners—drafted the standards. Once that draft was done, this group was disbanded and replaced by a group of lead writers and a much broader one of national experts, including key math and English/language arts people from about a dozen states.

The drafters used a process that differed significantly from past standards-development initiatives. Instead of asking the content experts what students “should” know, which inevitably led to long lists of everything the drafters thought would be desirable to know about their disciplines, the question became: What did students need to know in order to be successful in college? Moreover, the process itself was disciplined by a standard of evidence that was wholly unprecedented in previous standards processes. It wasn't good enough to argue, for example, that students “should” master a particular concept in mathematics because it felt important to college success. Instead, evidence of its importance to college success had to be produced.

But there was another significant difference from previous standards-writing processes: a commitment to develop standards that wouldn't just be higher than our current ones, but also fewer and clearer. In fact, “fewer, clearer, higher” became almost a mantra for the entire effort. Virtually all the participants were determined to avoid developing yet another mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum, with teachers never teaching—and students never learning—anything deeply enough to achieve true mastery.

The Draft Standards

“So far, so good,” responds the typical college faculty member. “If students really entered college with a deep mastery of the fundamentals of mathematics, reading, and writing, I'd be ecstatic!”

The devil, of course, is in the details. Because definitions of what is fundamental can differ radically, the higher education community as a whole needs to look carefully at the standards being put forth (available at www.corestandards.org). But here is a quick overview of the core for mathematics and literacy, the two areas that are already complete.

Literacy (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking) College-ready students are able to:

• Read complex texts independently and with confidence;
• Convey complex information clearly and accurately and write effective arguments with substantive claims, sound reasoning, and relevant and sufficient evidence;
• Listen attentively and critically, present formally, and share information informally;
• Work productively with people from diverse backgrounds in one-on-one, small-group, and large-group situations;
• Use technology and digital media capably and strategically when reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Mathematics College-ready students:

• Have a strong grounding in arithmetic, including operations on fractions, decimals, and signed numbers;
• Take a thinking approach to algebra and are fluent with algebraic manipulation;
• Are comfortable using coordinates in algebraic and geometric settings;
• Can break down a complex problem into parts and apply the math they know to problems outside of mathematics;
• Use terms precisely and make logical arguments.
• Have the prerequisite knowledge to learn advanced mathematics in college if they so choose.

Obviously, standards like these are just a starting place, and in only two domains—math and literacy—at that. In literacy, for example, what exactly is a “complex” text? And what are the qualities of an argument that is “effective”? How will teachers discriminate between an argument that “approaches” from one that “meets” this standard? The drafts contain samples but more work is necessary to provide the tools that teachers will need to understand these standards deeply themselves.

Teachers will also need robust curricula, along with high-quality lessons, units, and assignments from which they can draw instead of making it up as they go along. And teachers will need high-quality examinations that probe student mastery at the end of a course of study, as well as diagnostic instruments they can use.

Some of these tools have been available to teachers in higher-performing countries for years. But because of the proliferation of standards and the differences among the states, teachers in America have never had similar tools. We have left that to commercial publishers, who in turn have had to chase business in 50 states and 15,000 school districts with very different standards.

Common standards across all states give us a chance to do it right this time.

What “Right” Might Look Like

Last month, I spent two wonderful days in London with head teachers and deputy head teachers—the equivalent of our principals and assistant principals. For hours, I listened while they debated whether a particular student was performing at “Level 3-A” or whether “inference had clicked in,” bringing the student to a level 3-B. They discussed their standards of evidence and how their teachers learn to assess the evidence for themselves. And they talked about what they do with conflicting evidence or, when the evidence points away from mastery, how they help teachers improve student performance.

In all my years of working with principals in the United States, I have never heard a conversation like this. The standards in most of our states are so vague that it would be impossible to know how to approach such a conversation.

Consider the following ninth-grade social studies standard: “Students understand how science, technology, and economic activity have developed, changed, and affected societies throughout history.” If you were a ninth-grade history teacher, how in the world would you know whether a student met that standard? How, indeed, would you teach to it? You could make a credible argument that virtually anything you might do in a classroom could reasonably be said to be related to that standard. And when that is true, you have no clarity, no focus, and thus no traction.

With these “fewer, clearer, higher standards,” there's at least the prospect that we might finally get all three.

What's Next?

When this article went to press, the common core standards had been sent out for public comment and had been revised based on that comment. The final version was released in early June at a press event in Georgia.

Now the action moves to the states. And here the politics can get complicated. In some states, the process is fairly straightforward: There is a clear procedure for reviewing standards and adopting new ones, generally by the state board of education. In other states, the legislature must act.

To date, the effort has been deliberately bipartisan, and many Republican governors are very vocal in support, as are many Democrats. But this is an election year, and the two parties aren't agreeing on much of anything. Especially since the President called for a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act to require states to set college- and career-ready standards (again, either the common core or standards certified by state colleges), the common standards could yet become a flash point for political attacks from those who don't want the federal government to require much of anything.

If cool heads prevail, though, by next year we should be well along the journey toward widely accepted standards for what high-school graduates should know and be able to do. But even if so, it will be a while before we will see immediate changes in the academic performance of entering college students. Standards are just a starting point. They'll need to be accompanied by curricula, the redesign of high-school courses, and the development of other teaching tools. And, of course, we'll need common assessments to go with those common standards.

The best estimate for all of this? 2017.

What Can Interested Higher Education Faculty Do to Assist in This Work?

Though the standards-development process has been national—or, to honor current sensibilities, cross-state—it can't stay at that level. Teachers around the country will need not only to be introduced to the standards but be given an opportunity to explore in depth what those standards mean for both them and their students.

Because of their credibility, higher education faculty can play an important role in this exploration. They can host conversations about the new standards with teachers and principals in their local school districts and explore what it means for a student to meet each standard, what evidence would demonstrate mastery, and how such evidence should be weighed. Schoolteachers and college faculty can look together at real work from real students and determine how many measure up.

Best of all, faculty members can work with some spectacularly good teachers—teachers who know how to engage their students in rigorous intellectual work—to create robust curricular materials. Leaders at the American Federation of Teachers tell us that their members are tired of going home every night and making up for themselves what they are going to do the next day. And they tell us that most teachers aren't very good at lesson design anyway. This is a place where faculty from two-year and four-year colleges alike could make a contribution for which teachers all over America would be grateful.

Kati Haycock is president of the Washington D.C.-based Education Trust. Originally a part of the American Association for Higher Education, the Trust works with educators and policymakers to improve achievement, especially among lowincome students and students of color.

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