Supporting the Dream

High School-College Partnerships for College and Career Readiness

Charis McGaughy, Andrea Venezia

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781483316819
• eBook ISBN: 9781483392578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Educational partnerships for postsecondary readiness – your resource guide is here!

High school graduates want to be prepared to succeed in life after high school; for most that includes completing some form of postsecondary education. This thoroughly researched guide to building and sustaining effective, cross-system partnerships between high schools, colleges, and regional and local communities will help educators support students' college and career readiness. College and career readiness experts, McGaughy and Venezia lead education stakeholders through a step-by-step process that improves postsecondary outcomes for all students.

This book stresses the need to build effective working relationships and offers practical, actionable, information and straightforward strategies to help you:

• Identify needs
• Leverage existing relationships, programs and resources
• Build and sustain regional and local partnerships
• Implement a plan to measure key outcomes and provide comprehensive supports to ensure postsecondary readiness
• Connect policies and practices across partnerships to benefit student learning
• Communicate and work across partnerships to support successful student transitions

Includes key research findings, real-world examples and reflections, and templates to guide your work to support improved student learning.

"As high schools strive to partner with post-secondary institutions to improve their students' college readiness, they will find the how-to answers here."
Dave Daniels, Principal
Susquehanna Valley Senior High School

"I found the material interesting, engaging, and important. This book provides a solid rationale for partnership, provides a blueprint that is detailed enough to be helpful and loose enough to make clear that there is no one way approach but rather than their partnership must reflect their context."
Natalie B. Schonfeld, Director
Student Transition Services, University of California, Irvine

1 Understanding College and Career Readiness

To improve college and career readiness, the concept itself must be clearly understood. This book uses the terms “college” and “postsecondary education” interchangeably, but there is a critically important difference. “College” connotes a four-year liberal arts education to many people, even though community colleges provide a great deal of career and technical training. Most of the resistance against providing a larger proportion of students with readiness for postsecondary education comes from people who are concerned that these efforts will shoehorn all students into a traditional four-year degree path. “Some form of postsecondary education” is the focus of this book; it connotes some kind of additional education or training after high school, including degrees, certificates, the military, and additional training that is neither a degree nor a certificate. To have a family-sustaining wage with the ability to move up a career ladder, most people need some kind of additional postsecondary education and/or applied training. The focus of this book is that every high school graduate should be prepared to succeed in the postsecondary environment to which they aspire. The phrase “postsecondary readiness” is somewhat clumsy and thus this book interchanges terms, but we wish to make the meaning and intent clear from the onset.

With the emergence of the concept of college and career readiness in states, regions, localities, and at the national level, many states and organizations are developing definitions of college readiness, career readiness, or both. This book utilizes the definition developed at the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), based on research on this topic over the past two decades. EPIC’s definition of college and career readiness follows:

Students who are ready for college and career can qualify for and succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing college courses leading to a baccalaureate degree, a certificate, or career pathway-oriented training programs, without the need for remedial or developmental course work. They can complete such entry-level, credit-bearing courses at a level that enables them to continue in the major or program of study they have chosen. (Conley, 2013, p. 51)

A student is college and career ready if he or she has the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully transition to the next step in his or her desired career or educational pathway. Such readiness includes both academic and nonacademic knowledge and skills (discussed in Chapter 2).

Another important distinction is the difference between college versus career readiness. Every distinct career pathway and college degree require knowledge, skills, and abilities that are unique to that area. According to research, however, college readiness and career readiness share many important elements, including study skills, time-management skills, persistence, ownership of learning, problem solving, collecting and analyzing information, and communicating in a variety of ways (Conley & McGaughy, 2012). Think of a Venn diagram. The first circle represents the college readiness knowledge and skills and student needs. The second circle represents the career readiness knowledge and skills. The intersection and overlap between the two circles represent the knowledge and skills all students need when they graduate high school. The outlying areas represent the knowledge and skills that are unique to their specific postsecondary and career fields. College and career readiness, then, represent the intersection: the knowledge, skills, and abilities that all students need to make the next step, without remediation, along their desired career pathway.

A student is college and career ready if he or she has the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully transition to the next step in his or her desired career or educational pathway.

History

The focus on systemic reforms to connect K–12 and postsecondary education started in the last decade of the 20th century. Prior to that, most of the efforts in the field were focused on programmatic responses, such as the development of precollege outreach programs, to support traditionally underserved students. Those efforts had their origins in the Great Society reforms of the 1960s and were critically important, but awareness grew that (a) getting students into, but not through, postsecondary education was insufficient, and (b) disconnected education systems cause problems for many students.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, research in this field focused on informing educators, policymakers, and the public about how the students who need the most supports in K–12 and postsecondary education often get the least (Venezia, Kirst, & Antonio, 2003) and that the sense of belonging and belief in oneself as “college material” is often lacking in first-generation college goers (McDonough, 1997). Research at that time also pointed to the tiers or tracks of educational offerings in middle schools, high schools, and broad access postsecondary institutions that reinforce inequalities and make it impossible for a large proportion of students to reach the American Dream through educational means (Oakes, 2005). The United States has set up systems that act as though they support educational and economic mobility, but to fulfill those aspirations across our disconnected educational systems, students need that special person who helps them navigate. The systems themselves are not set up to catch and hold the students who need help the most and provide them with the educational, motivational, psychological, and behavioral supports to lay the groundwork for successful adulthood. Each system has its own ways of helping students, but there is little that spans systems, and for students who attend more than one postsecondary institution—the vast majority of students in college—they are usually on their own to navigate, often by reaching out to extremely understaffed student services offices.

Fast forward to today and “college and career readiness” are mantras in states across the country and in the nation’s capital. The Common Core State Standards (Common Core) were adopted in most states. The rhetoric of today often risks masking the core reasons for the efforts and the difficulties in making success after high school a reality for traditionally underserved students. Backlashes against the Common Core are growing, and the original hope of the “K–16 reform movement” could be lost if educational reform efforts shift focus to another issue.

In response to research about disconnected systems and to political pressure and many grant opportunities that require the development of cross-system governance entities, regional and local P–16 councils have sprouted up across the country. P–16 councils are collaborative teams that are formed to create a unified educational system from preschool through postsecondary education or to focus on a key issue or issues related to high school-to-college transitions. These councils usually focus on issues related to college and career readiness, such as counseling and supports, curricular alignment, and workforce preparation” (Moore, Venezia, & Lewis, 2015).

Ensuring that the local partnerships spur reforms that affect students’ lives and are not just forums for people to update each other about their respective systems’ efforts is the focus of this book. A key issue here is that the experiences and expectations in K–12 must education be directly connected—or scaffolded, to use the language of educators—to expectations in postsecondary education and in the workforce.

Connecting to workforce needs is not meant to imply that students should get educated just to become workers or that students should be in different curricular tracks that relegate some students to lucrative and flexible careers and others to minimum wage for life. We are strong supporters of (and have each benefitted from) excellent liberal arts education in high school and college. If liberal arts training—the abilities to think critically, analyze information, question assumptions, synthesize ideas, and so forth—is lost in a race to provide technical training too early, we believe that we will be left intellectually poorer, and the risks regarding tracking traditionally underserved students into old forms of vocational education are large. At the same time, it is clear that many students are not engaged by traditional approaches and that promising hybrids that infuse technical knowledge and experiences with strong abilities to think, analyze, synthesize, and so forth are being developed to create high-level, applied, learning opportunities for all students. Those experiences must be personalized; they are dependent on students’ interests and educational strengths and weaknesses. Such efforts can be seen in California’s Linked Learning and Career Pathways Trust initiatives, in Chicago’s and New York’s P-TECH schools, in Jobs for the Future’s Pathways to Prosperity initiative, and many others across the country.

So what does this all mean in the context of this book? This book sits squarely in the center of these tough conversations that focus on some of the hardest educational issues in our country—issues around the meaning of public education, about access and equity, and about relationships between K–12 and postsecondary education.

While those efforts can help send clear signals and create coherent policy environments, this is about doing good work collaboratively and collectively across systems locally and regionally. This book is for the individuals that work directly with students on a daily basis—the people who have the power to transform individual students’ lives. The work to connect systems is often more challenging than it seems like it should be, with different terminology, incentive structures, funding streams, politics, and so forth. Few people are paid to wake up in the morning and think about how to connect educational systems, and most of us are not explicitly rewarded, professionally, for doing so.

If readers take nothing else from this book, we hope that educators at all levels understand that working together across systems is not merely a technical issue that can be completed successfully by using specific tools and strategies or by meeting around a table together once or twice a month. This is also not simply about aligning policies at the state level or all getting on the same page about expectations at the national level.

What is the research base behind this definition? The significance of this definition is that it is both measurable and actionable. Research, policy, and practice can all be informed by answering a critical question: What are the knowledge and skills students need to be successful in entry-level training programs, the military, or credit-bearing college courses? Staff at EPIC has spent the past decade researching these critical questions and has established a considerable research base documenting these knowledge and skills. EPIC has collected and analyzed thousands of course documents and instructor ratings about the importance and applicability of knowledge and skills necessary for success in entry-level college courses in general education and in career and technical education (CTE) areas in both two- and four-year institutions of higher education (please refer to www.epiconline.org/ publications for a complete listing of the research).

College readiness and career readiness share many important elements, including study skills, time-management skills, persistence, ownership of learning, problem solving, collecting and analyzing information, and communicating in a variety of ways.

The rhetoric of today often risks masking the core reasons for the efforts and the difficulties in making success after high school a reality for traditionally underserved students.

Ensuring that the local partnerships spur reforms that affect students’ lives and are not just forums for people to update each other about their respective systems’ efforts is the focus of this book.

College “versus” Career Readiness

As a predictable part of a healthy policy cycle, issues related to college and career readiness are currently receiving increased scrutiny and, in some quarters, strong pushback. One of the largest critiques of the issue is the concern that not everyone should or needs to go to college (such as Owen & Sawhill, 2013; Rosenbaum, Stephan, & Rosenbaum, 2010; Samuelson, 2012). As mentioned earlier, the concern is that focusing on “college readiness” equates to a singular focus on obtaining four-year bachelor’s degrees and not the plethora of pathways available for success beyond high school. Some careers require a college degree; others do not, but they do require training (and some of that is highly technical). What all of the commentators seem to agree on, and is consistent with the messaging of this book, is that everyone needs some kind of education and/or training after high school to have a successful and productive life. This is why throughout this book, the terms “college and career readiness” and “postsecondary readiness” are used interchangeably. The goal of this book is not to prepare all students to incur massive debt attending a selective university to obtain a four-year degree, but to enable communities to work together to prepare students to be successful in whichever post-high school setting to which the students aspire.

This book supports the conclusion of Harvard’s Pathways to Prosperity report, “The message is clear: in 21st Century America, education beyond high school is the passport to the American Dream” (Symonds, Schwartz, & Ferguson, 2011, p. 2). Students need to be able to learn well and succeed in whatever setting they choose beyond high school. What is emerging from research is that college and career readiness share many important elements, but they are not exactly the same. There is a foundational set of knowledge and skills that all high school graduates need for success beyond high school, but the precise set of knowledge and skills students need is influenced significantly by the next step they intend to take, with various career areas, institutions, and certificate or degree programs requiring proficiency in different content knowledge (Conley & McGaughy, 2012). College and career readiness represent the shared knowledge, skills, and abilities everyone needs, and the additional knowledge and skills individual students need are dependent on the specific career area, admissions, degree, certificate, and/or training requirements. Communities should work together to provide the following:

A program of instruction at the secondary school level should therefore be designed to equip all students with the full range of necessary foundational knowledge and skills and help them set high aspirations and identify future interests.... Readiness is a function of the ability to continue to learn beyond high school, and particularly in postsecondary courses relevant to students’ goals and interests, as represented by their choice of major or certificate program. (Conley, 2013, p. 51)

The very process of obtaining a high school diploma should keep the doors open for students, not close the ability for students’ to access some career pathways.

The goal of this book is not to prepare all students to incur massive debt attending a selective university to obtain a four-year degree but to enable communities to work together to prepare students to be successful in whichever post-high school setting to which the students aspire.

Rationale

During a college readiness workshop sponsored by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office in 2011, a group of community college admissions counselors gathered to discuss college and career readiness issues. One counselor from a Northern California community college shared a story that resonated with the participants. She described a recent meeting she had with a new student and the student’s parents. The parents started the meeting by describing how proud they were of their daughter. She was the first person in their family to attend college. They had requested the meeting with the college admissions counselor because they were confused by the placement test score information the daughter had received. They had many questions, such as the following: What are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Understanding College and Career Readiness
• 2 Creating a Framework
• 3 Organizing the Partnership
• 4 Determining Your Partnership’s Effectiveness: Measuring Progress
• 5 Taking Action
• 6 Aligning Curricula Across Educational Systems
• 7 Supporting and Sustaining Partnerships
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note