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What Does It Mean to Be College Ready?
By Bob Lenz
6/13/07What does it mean to be college ready? How do you design schools, and the systems to support them, to reach the goal of preparing all students to graduate from college? These are two vital questions that drive our work at Envision Schools, a nonprofit organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area that manages charter schools. It has started and supports four new high schools serving a diverse population of students, and plans to add twenty-four more schools in the next five years.
Too often, “college ready” means a student has passed a selection of college-preparatory courses that might or might not be rigorous; in California, these classes are approved by the University of California. However, only about 35 percent of all high school students in California take the courses that make them eligible to apply for the University of California and California State University systems. At Envision Schools, though, students graduate having taken coursework to be eligible for admission to these systems. There is only one track: college. However, we do not think that being eligible and being prepared for college success are one and the same thing.
We believe that for students to be truly college ready, they need to demonstrate that they can apply the knowledge they have learned in their academic courses through performances that exhibit the foundational skills of the academic discipline -- for example, expository writing, literary, historical and scientific analysis, and research papers. Furthermore, we believe that students need to have mastered twenty-first-century leadership skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, creative expression, effective written and oral communication, and project management to be well prepared for their first year of college and for their careers.
In order for students to meet our goals of college readiness, we need to design a balanced assessment system that drives instruction, informs learning for both students and teachers, and serves as a form of accountability. Our assessment system, consequently, drives teacher practice, student learning, our school structures, and our learning-support interventions. Over the coming weeks, we will highlight the key aspects of our system and discuss the triumphs we have experienced and challenges we have faced. In the meantime, if you would like to see what some of what this work looks like in action, you can explore our project library, the Envision Schools Project Exchange. Please let us know what you think.
Students also need to be "job ready"
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on May 22, 2008 - 15:42.
I agree that college-bound students need to be more prepared, but every student is not meant to go to college. While they do need the communication and basic skills, they lack the skills needed to have a career without going to college. I teach in a high school where we are gradually incorporating our former tech prep students into classes with college prep students. They are being held to the same standards, and teaching a class with such a wide range of abilities and goals is very difficult. We cannot expect all students to have the same learning abilities. Students often see no purpose in the higher level classes, and as a result, drop out of school. I think we need to offer more courses that are relevant to the real world.
Dumbing down
Submitted by Ken Jensen (not verified) on April 12, 2008 - 11:40.
Brenda Sageng said, "A tremendous amount of teaching and learning time is taken up with "babysitting" issues which should not be part of a college class environment. What happened in the last 30 years since I earned my undergraduate degree? Why are the expectations so drastically minimized? How can a society progress if its institutions of higher learning accept 'dumbing down?' "
I hear this quite often. I hear it from middle school and high school math teachers lamenting over the lack of basic calculating skills that should have been learned in elementary school. I hear it from science and social studies teachers distraught over students lack of knowledge of the world around them. I hear it from literacy teachers as they try to teach higher order think skills to students who cannot write a sentence. I hear it from teachers across the schools as they complain about students inability to focus on a task and finish.
What I rarly hear is how to address and work through the issues. I would suggest that we as educators first take a critical look at our own experiences in public school. As a 12, 13 or even 18 year old kids we were not able to objectivly look around our classroom and see what we can now see as teachers. As adolescents we were too focused on our selves and our work to see clearly what others in the room were doing and thinking- we enjoyed school which is why we became educators. What we cannot percieve well is how our peers 10, 20, or 30 years ago understood their multiplication facts, current or historical events, or how to write a correct and/or cohesive sentence. We feel like we are dumbing down the curriculum, but educators have been dealing with these issues for centuries and in reality the education of humans has drastically increased. Secondly, we need to quit looking to what should have already happened in our student's previous educational experiences and begin to look at what we can do with them today. The students who walk into my room each day deserve a teacher who can assess what they know and don't know, and create a learning experience so that every one leaves having learned something both new and critical.
There is so much more to
Submitted by Anita Avila (not verified) on October 3, 2007 - 21:40.
There is so much more to teaching these days than the basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. With the way our society is changing, including the students, our education system needs to do the same. I am part of the Generation Y there are more and more men AND women going to college and diving into their careers. We have lived through the wave of technology and demographic change and have high expectation of ourselves and others. It is widely agreed that teachers today have much more responsibility than teachers 25 years ago, and Generation Y teachers are willing to live up to those expectation. In today's world, one needs to know much more than basic academic skills. I agree 100% with the statements in the posting. Students need to use the knowledge that they have learned and apply it through written and oral communication. It is one thing to be eligible for college, meaning you took all the required classes and passed all the required test; but it is more important to be prepared. A students can know anything and everything there is to know about World War II, but can he write a proper persuasive essay one the topic or present a factual speech? These are things that students today need, to be prepared for college and the real world. With the new generation coming into the "real world" society is going to become much more competitive, and we need to prepare our students to win.
Being college ready is not important
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on July 9, 2007 - 17:37.
I agree, helping students become ready for the "real world" is important but in our society students don't seem to join the real world until their mid to late twenties. College, for most students, is just another four years of high school. Parental dependence is so high and higher level institutions are so plentiful that students are going to college anyway whether they are ready or not. Most people change careers four or five times throughout their lives today. What motivation do they have to be prepared for anything once they are done with high school? There are many things that need to be addressed in children's lives before they are career-focused by 18.
Forget College Ready, How About Able to Read , Write and Think
Submitted by Cynthia Alvarado (not verified) on July 5, 2007 - 13:20.
I have taught students from pre-school through graduate school for over 30 years. I am afraid we are misidentifying the problem. It isn't a matter of developing people who are able to to progress from one level of the education machine to the next. We need a populace who can read, write, think, create and invent. While I heartily agree with the comment above, I don't think our current system, especially with the addition of high-stakes testing, really works at all in a knowledge-based economy. We need to revamp the secondary system to encourage students to address real problems creatively by researching and synthesizing information across disciplines in collaborative teams, both within and across school and national boundaries. Success in the 21st century demands excellent communication skills and the ability to synthesize and create knowledge. Our brains are all we really have to market these days. We need to stop "teaching subjects" and develop the creators and innovators of the future.
College Ready?
Submitted by Brenda Sageng (not verified) on June 15, 2007 - 12:26.
I have been teaching at a small mid-western state university as a graduate student and as an adjunct for the past 3 years, and college readiness is an area that really needs serious consideration. Many of the students have no idea how to write formally, and complete sentences are rare occurances in their vernacular, text-message constructed papers. If they can construct a somewhat readable paragraph or two, it is usually a recitation of readily available factoids, or a very broad generality with lots of "always" and "never" ascribed to what people think in their estimation, with little critical consideration of the reading or activity assigned. Beyond the writing difficulties, personal responsibility for completing and turning in work at a specified time is a constant battle. The occasional difficulty due to unforeseen emergencies is understandable, but constant whining about how much work is expected and wanting extra time to do it is epidemic!
These immature approaches to learning (and life in general) should be addressed in high school, not university, particularly in an upper division class. A tremendous amount of teaching and learning time is taken up with "babysitting" issues which should not be part of a college class environment. What happened in the last 30 years since I earned my undergraduate degree? Why are the expectations so drastically minimized? How can a society progress if its institutions of higher learning accept "dumbing down?"
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