If school boards want to better prepare high school students for college and career, their policy decisions cannot be limited to what’s happening in the high school.
“We have to start [college readiness] as soon as possible,” Efrain Mercado Jr., director of outreach for the National Center for Educational Achievement (NCEA), told attendees of this morning’s conference session, “What School Board Members Should Know About the Academic Performance Gap: Policy Implications for Students of Color.”
”By the end of eighth grade, if students are not ready for high school college-prep courses,” they won’t be successful, he said.
Improving the academic performance of minority students ideally should begin even earlier than middle school, added Wesley Boykin, NCEA’s director of research.
“It’s all about a systemic approach, from birth and early childhood to kindergarten ready,” he said. “And once students are in kindergarten, are they on pace or do they need help? How are we tracking them and making sure what they’re doing?”
That students of color need more support in school is obvious, both panelists said. Their academic performance gap, by any measure, hasn’t significantly narrowed despite years of school reform.
A good start for school boards is to revisit their goalsand measure their success on the readiness of students to leave high school ready for college or a career, Boykin and Mercado suggested.
The academic courses that students study is, of course, relevant. Academic rigor is essential, but board members also need to take a closer look at whether that rigor really exists.
Some educators might suggest, for example, that students who take only algebra I and II and geometry lack sufficient instruction in math to be successful in college, Boykin said. Statistics suggest that only 16 percent of those with such limited math instruction are college ready.
Does that mean that students should be pushed into calculus? According to Boykin, students’ lack of college readiness could have another explanation: Some of your schools simply might not be doing a good enough job in teaching students.
“Just because students took the course and completed it, it doesn’t mean they know the material and have a good foundation in it,” he said. “It’s not the name of the course, it’s the knowledge they gain form the course.”
School boards also need to make better use of disaggregated data to refocus their strategic goals, Boykin said. That data also should be used to convince the public that a big push to help low-performing students is essential.
And if that means yearly improvement for top achievers flattens for a time, so be it, he added. School boards need to send a message: “We will not cheapen their education or the integrity of their education, but by golly, we have to say we have [to divert resources] for the other children. They deserve a quality education like your children.”
That may, of course, cost school board members a few votes, he admitted. “But you’ll sleep well.”
