Public-school officials nationwide have been working for years to develop standards to ensure that high-school graduates are prepared for college-level work or to enter the work force. One problem has been, however, that until recently, people in higher education have taken a limited role in deciding what it means to be college ready.
Now, with 44 states and the District of Columbia signing on to a common set of learning goals for schoolchildren, called the Common Core State Standards, members of the State Higher Education Executive Officers are joining in efforts to put the new benchmarks in place.
Association members are holding a special meeting Monday and Tuesday in North Carolina to discuss how colleges can advance the new standards by reforming teacher education and professional-development programs, aligning the General Educational Development test to the new standards, and forming regional partnerships, among other actions.
“I think it’s fair to say that the higher-education community and K-12 have not had a systematic and ongoing connection that both worlds would benefit from,” said Mitchell D. Chester, commissioner of elementary and secondary education in Massachusetts.
“When we launched the Common Core State Standards, we made a conscious decision to avoid that split,” said Mr. Chester, who is one of the speakers at the forum, which is being held by the James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, an agency of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The prospect of having a national set of standards for college readiness, in fact, has already spurred higher-education leaders to be more involved in setting those standards than past efforts of individual states, said Paul E. Lingenfelter, president of the executive officers group. “It’s almost self-evident that when we had 50 different varieties, we couldn’t have a coherent higher-education response,” Mr. Lingenfelter said.
Mr. Chester and others caution that setting common standards for what children should learn in elementary and secondary school is just one small step in the process. The next and equally challenging process will be to design assessments that adequately measure student knowledge over time, so that students and teachers have a clear idea of where they are succeeding and where they are failing, he said.
For colleges, the challenge will be to accept the standards and the assessments, and to overhaul teacher-training programs to reflect them, said Judith A. Rizzo, executive director of the Hunt Institute. One state that is at the cutting edge of this process is Indiana, Ms. Rizzo said, where teacher-education programs must use the Common Core State Standards as a part of the curriculum.
Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said even with the standards and assessments in place, there will not be widespread acceptance from higher education until the academic abilities of incoming students increase and far fewer of them require remedial education.
“What is so compelling about this, it is both a moral and economic imperative,” she said. “But there is no quick fix here, this is a very heavy lift for a long period of time.”
