Higher Education Scrambles To Prepare for Common Core
Bridging Gaps Between Education Sectors Proving To Be Tough Task
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In sterile, air-conditioned conference rooms across the state, educators will be gathering this summer to prepare for the new standards soon to be in place in most of the nation’s kindergartens through high schools called Common Core.
But the people at these meetings won’t be primary- or secondary-school teachers. They’ll be college and university professors, planning changes to accommodate the imminent arrival of students being taught in dramatically new ways.
Even though the Common Core has been promoted as a means of better preparing America’s children for college and careers, the people who run higher education have, for the most part, gotten involved only late in the process, they and others say.
Many academics helped design the standards for kindergarten through 12th grade. But colleges and universities have been slower when it comes to bringing their own programs into synch with this massive overhaul of U.S. primary and secondary education.
Higher education types “sit in their ivory tower assuming that Common Core is a K-through-12 issue. It is not,” said Pamela Clute, assistant vice chancellor of educational and community engagement at the University of California, Riverside, who is spearheading an effort among university professors and administrators to collaborate on the Common Core with public school districts in two surrounding counties. “It’s a pipeline issue.”
Universities like hers, Clute said, are at the end of that pipeline. Yet despite years of blaming each other for precisely the lack of preparation among students that the Common Core is supposed to address, she said, educators at the various levels of the education system have proven tough to bring together.
“It took a lot of politicking,” Clute said. “Everybody at the table is thinking, ‘Why should I spend my resources? Why should I spend my time? Am I going to get an award for my work? What’s in it for me?’” What’s in the Common Core for higher education, its advocates say, is the chance to reduce the frustrating and expensive need to teach students what they already should have learned in elementary, middle, and high school.
Only a quarter of high school students who took the ACT test last year were judged ready for college in English, reading, math, and science, according to the company that administers the test. Another national study found that more than half of recent highschool graduates entering community colleges needed remedial courses, a process so demoralizing that only about a quarter of them ever manage to earn degrees. Providing all of that remedial education costs universities and colleges $7 billion a year, the National Bureau of Economic Research reports.
Collaborations in Tennessee, California and elsewhere are trying to figure out where in the lower grades students fall behind, and piggyback on the Common Core to patch those holes.
UC-Riverside and its partners in the Inland Empire College Success and Career Readiness Collaborative, for instance, traced math deficiencies in arriving college students back to the fourth grade, where they found that there was too much emphasis on pure multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division, without a sense of how in real life those computations might be used. Giving students that kind of context helps them stay on track, Clute said, and get to Algebra II by the time they’re in the 10th grade — essential if they hope to major in science, engineering, or math.
“It doesn’t sound like a huge thing, but to get the academic heads of all the districts, all the community colleges, all the universities to agree on that took me six months,” she said.
That’s because longstanding rifts remain between education levels. While nine out of 10 school superintendents and eight out of 10 university heads surveyed said they think working together is very or extremely important, for example, only a third of each think they’re doing a very good job of it — and even fewer than that said they think their counterparts in the other system value collaboration as much as they do.
In another survey, nearly 90 percent of high-school teachers said students left their classrooms ready for college-level work, but only 26 percent of university professors said those same students arrived on their campuses prepared to succeed.
And of the 45 states and the District of Columbia that have signed onto the Common Core, education commissions in 35 of them report major or minor challenges in working with higher education institutions on the transition to the new standards, according to the Center on Education Policy at George Washington University.
“It’s probably fair to say that, out of all the players involved in the development of the Common Core, higher education was the one that was less involved than it probably should have been,” said Maria Ferguson, the center’s executive director.
More than 200 college and university leaders announced in June a new group to support the Common Core, called Higher Ed for Higher Standards.
But their comparative absence until now was not a big surprise to Anand Vaishnav, a senior consultant at Education First and project manager of the Core to College initiative, a network of 11 states — Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington — that are trying to align their primary and secondary schools with higher education.
“These sectors are completely different, with completely different cultures and leaders and governing structures and incentives, and the lines aren’t always clear,” said Vaishnav.
Core to College is one of several programs pushing to narrow this rift. “The Common Core is a great way to put an end to” it, Vaishnav said. “Then that blame game can stop.”
Rather than simply memorizing facts, the new standards call for students in primary and secondary schools to master critical and analytical thinking and problem-solving — college-level skills.
“The hope is that the students will come not with a new set of information they didn’t have before, but with different types of thinking that really are required for success in higher education,” said Elizabeth Hinde, director of teacher preparation at Arizona State University, who is working to coordinate the Common Core among educators across that state.
That means changing some of the curriculum in college, particularly at the introductory stages.
Those summer workshops in Tennessee are to train university faculty who teach entry-level courses in English and math, which are being redesigned to account for what students now will be expected to learn in the 11th and 12th grades — and to synch up with the Common Core by emphasizing interdisciplinary reading and writing, for example, rather than solely reading literature and doing narrative writing.
Getting teachers and professors to confront this major change in how they do their jobs is hard, said Melissa Stugart, who coordinates the work going on in Tennessee for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
In kindergarten through 12th grade, “it’s a paradigm shift to think about reviewing what everybody missed and thinking, ‘What other ways could I teach those things?’” she said. And in higher education, “it’s just always been, ‘This is my little world. I don’t have to worry about it. They’ll come to us.’” (When a draft of the grade-by-grade Common Core standards was released for public comment, people who identified themselves as university professors accounted for only 5 percent of the 10,000 respondents, according to Student Achievement Partners, an organization founded by the standards’ leading writers.)
Also as part of the Common Core, new standardized tests will be given in the 11th grade, starting this coming academic year in many states, meaning that if students fall short, they will have their senior year in high school to catch up. That could have another major impact on colleges and universities, 800 of which have agreed to use the tests as at least one factor in deciding which students can bypass those exasperating and costly remedial courses.
In Kentucky, which was one of the first states to adopt the Common Core — and whose legislature allocated $6 million to pay for collaboration among primary, secondary and higher education — there are already fewer students arriving in college needing remedial education, the state’s Council on Postsecondary Education reports. The proportion of high-school graduates who are judged college-ready, based on ACT test scores, it says, has increased to 47 percent from 34 percent in four years, though that’s still short of the goal of 66 percent.
In other states, the work is only getting started, said Vaishnav of Core to College. And there are reasons for that, he said, beside longstanding divisions between the people who run kindergarten-through-12th grade programs and their counterparts in higher education. The Common Core is also controversial, after all — and still new.
“Now that we’re moving into the implementation stage, lots of people are saying, ‘Well, did K- 12 and higher education actually discuss whether a student coming out of 12th grade needs to know such and such to go into entry level courses?’” he said. “But it’s quite possible that that conversation didn’t happen because it couldn’t. There was a need to get these standards under way.”
The walls, he said, “have hopefully begun to break down. But the next step is, well, if these are the graduates who are coming out of your K-12 classrooms, what do we need to do in our higher education classrooms to push them further?”