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February 17, 2012

My role in education: CPE’s newest intern

Filed under: college,High school — Tags: — Joyti @ 10:10 am

As a current graduate student at The George Washington University who is working towards a degree in Bilingual Special Education, I am forced each day to re-evaluate the role I could potentially play in education.

As a product of a New York City Title I high school, I remember sitting in my high school classroom being told that out of a 1,000 or so seniors, only a handful of us would graduate. I couldn’t help but often ask myself, would I be one of those students?

Walking into a school faced with challenges, from the security guards to the metal detectors to the fights that broke out each day, I wondered if I would ever get out. What other kinds of thoughts could such a school environment provoke? However, I was lucky that I was raised in a household where dropping out of school wasn’t an option. With siblings whose specific circumstances prevented them from graduating high school, I was surely lucky.

Yet today I think about the idea of being lucky and laugh.  As though some of us are lucky enough to gain a college education while others aren’t lucky enough. Unfortunately, it’s a mentality that plagues high school students everywhere. Who will have their cards line up just right, so that they can walk in brightly colored gowns on graduation day? In a high school where my day-to-day presence didn’t seem valued, luck seemed like the only thing that might get me through.

Consequently, my own focus in recent years has been on how to recognize and appreciate the role of different races and cultures in education. Honestly, to me these differences often seem ignored. I say this from experience working with students within New York State’s opportunity programs, which focused on helping students from underrepresented minority groups to attend college. In working with extremely talented groups of students year after year, I saw first-hand the lack of college preparation afforded to them by their high schools. It also appeared as though not many felt like their own cultural experiences were valued, because they hadn’t yet learned to value them themselves.

I believe that this is one of the reasons why predominately white higher education institutions have lower African, Latino, Asian and Native American (ALANA) student retention rates compared to their white counterparts. Most of the time valuing your own cultural experience comes in college, and often times that’s too late for many.  How are high school students from these cultures viewing public education, which is supposedly built around their needs? Are different experiences valued and reflected in education policy on local and federal levels?

In reflecting on my own experience and understanding the experience of others, I can begin to untangle my role in sharing a counter narrative. I hope to gain a better understanding of education in general by widening my lens and looking at other aspects of education. I’m exploring my role more and more, understanding that at this point, I would like to keep focusing on the idea that there are people’s lives on the line rather than just percentages, statistics and figures. – Joyti Jiandani





November 16, 2011

Revamping the GED

Filed under: 21st century education,college,Course taking,High school — Tags: , , , — rstandrie @ 8:29 am

The Common Core standards have, in part, prompted yet another reform: that of the GED. Ed Week reports that the American Council on Education (which created the GED) and education publisher Pearson are redesigning the high school equivalency test.

According to the article, part of the revamping will be to create two different passing points: one that signals high school equivalency, and one that signals college and career readiness. The new exam is due out in 2014. 

I think this is an interesting reform. The Center’s Better Late Than Never report showed that students who received a GED had only slightly better outcomes than dropouts — students who stayed in school and graduated, even late, received a regular diploma experienced much better outcomes in all areas. Improving the GED could improve these outcomes.

I would, however, like to understand what they feel the difference is between a high school education and readiness for college and career. Exactly what would they do other than college or a job? Our report on 21st century education shows that more and more jobs will require post-secondary training. The article doesn’t say much about what is the difference between the rigor of the two passing points, and I’d like to know. I applaud what they’re doing, and hope that both passing points will properly prepare students for college and the workforce. –Rebecca St. Andrie





September 28, 2011

Wandering around academia

Filed under: college,Course taking,High school — Tags: , — rstandrie @ 10:29 am

How long did it take you to decide what you wanted to do in life? Or at least to study? A new report by a California task force encourages community colleges to have policies that give priority to students who pick a course of study and progress toward a degree.

The study found that after six years, 70 percent of degree-seeking students had not either earned a certificate or a degree, or transferred to a four-year university. The thought is that such students wander around the academic curriculum, withdrawing and taking courses multiple times, or not pursuing any specific degree plan.

I’ve seen this happen, and I look forward to seeing if policy changes have a measurable impact on the completion rate. And while high school requirements are much more prescribed, the report also made me think about high schools. How many high schools, or middle schools, explain to students what courses they will need if they want to go to college or enter a particular field? How many explain the same to families? Is it just a sheet of requirements and recommendations, or a more interactive process? What does your district do? –Rebecca St. Andrie





September 20, 2011

Relevance, rigor, and real-world consequences

Filed under: college,Course taking,High school — Tags: , , — rstandrie @ 3:51 pm

The Houston Chronicle reports that Georgia is considering “making its high schools more like college.” Students would choose what kind of career they wanted to pursue, and then take a cluster of courses that would prepare them to either enter a job or go to a two- or four-year college. Juniors and seniors would complete an internship in the field they chose, and all students would be able to switch clusters if they decided to change direction.

The proposal leaves me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I applaud its focus on what high school graduates want to do: that the purpose is not just to get kids to graduate from high school, but to leave them prepared for whatever they want to pursue next. We encourage schools and school boards to track how well high school students are prepared for the real world in questions like this at Data First.

On the other hand, the stated assumption that this would replace the “that every student wanted to go to college” bothers me. While I don’t think every job needs college, so much of our research shows that whether a student enters a good job or a good college after high school, they need the same preparation. (You can watch this short video to get an overview. ) While the article states that all students will graduate eligible for college, is there a possibility of this degenerating into a tracking system?

Finally, the question of whether students could, or should, choose a career path that early remains. I agree with Mike Buck, chief academic officer at the Georgia Department of Education, about the strong draw of relevance. “The kids hanging in there until they turn 16 where school may not have always been a lot of fun for them, we get them on a job site where they see how they’re going to apply this,” says Buck. At the same time, Donnie Malone, a Georgia high school senior, pointed out that two years ago he would have picked pre-med but now wants to go into political science or international affairs. Changing majors in college can significantly delay a students’ graduation; would changing career clusters do the same thing?

How would you balance all of these concerns? How would you combine relevance with rigor? And, right now, how do you make sure your students are prepared for a real-world career? –Rebecca St. Andrie





September 16, 2011

It depends on how you define college

Filed under: 21st century education,college — Tags: , , , — rstandrie @ 9:56 am

You’ll probably see some headlines today about the U.S. falling in yet another global ranking: this one about how many young adults finish college. Before you sigh over a declining country, or roll your eyes at an “education-bashing” story, though, take a look at the statistics. They raise a more interesting question than the usual global horse race.

First, it’s true: The U.S. is falling behind. South Korea, Canada, and Japan lead the nations in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds who attained an associate-level, bachelors, or advanced degree. (They had rates of 63, 56 and 56 percent, respectively.) The U.S. is somewhere in the middle of the pack of developed nations with a rate of 41 percent, falling from 12th to 16th place.

So here’s the interesting piece: According to an article examining the results in The Washington Post, this is happening in part because the leading countries are focusing on one- or two-year associate-level degrees, whereas the U.S. is focused on the four-year bachelor’s degree. (The other is a rapid expansion of college attendance in Asia and Europe — a significant factor to consider.)

Combine that with the recent recommendations for measuring and defining community college success rates, and the question comes up again: what should community colleges be doing? Should our focus, too, be on increasing associate-level degrees? Does the workplace currently accept that? How would you define college?

And, most importantly, what about those who start college — any type of college — but don’t finish?

Read our pieces on 21st century education and college and career readiness to get the background for your answers. But how to define — and then attain — a helpful college degree is still a question that needs to be examined. –Rebecca St. Andrie





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