Want More College Students to Graduate? Fix the High Schools

Christophe Vorlet for The Chronicle

When Antwan Wilson, who resigned as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools in February, skirted the local school-lottery system in an ill-fated effort to get his daughter into a top D.C. high school instead of a “low performing” neighborhood school, he exposed a painful truth: Too many public high schools are failing, especially those serving low-income students of color. The chancellor lost his job, but the students in such schools are losing much more. These are the very students who, if they enroll in college, are most likely to drop out before completing degrees.

If we really want to fix the college-completion problem, we need to fix high schools.

Higher education is facing intense pressure to improve completion rates. College leaders got an earful on that topic at the recent American Council on Education annual meeting, where Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor emerita of the State University of New York, recited the dismal statistics: a 59 percent six-year completion rate overall for baccalaureate students, 49 percent for Pell Grantees, and 39 percent for black students.

So-called solutions to the completion problem abound. Some universities like Georgia State can boast noteworthy improvements, but in general completion rates remain mediocre. Amid all the talk, high school gets scant attention.

Even before the school-lottery debacle, the District of Columbia Public Schools were coping with the revelation that nearly one-third of all 2017 graduates should not have graduated because of pervasive absenteeism or failure to meet learning standards. Pressure on teachers and principals to raise graduation rates, a feature of school reform, stoked the scandal. Now, in the backlash, nearly 60 percent of the district’s public-high-school seniors might not graduate this year. A similar graduation scandal has rocked schools in Prince George’s County, in Maryland.

When high schools fail to prepare students for even the most minimal expectations of college work — active class attendance, the ability to read and summarize a paragraph, to write cogently, and perform basic arithmetic functions — the students are set up for failure from the start. Add to academic deficiencies the intractable hurdles of poverty, like being hungry and sometimes homeless, and by midterm in the first year, too many freshmen are already failing. Colleges devote substantial resources to remediation and support services just to get students across the first-semester finish line. But over time, many underprepared and impoverished students simply stop attending, stop answering the persistent phone calls and texts from advisers, and disappear into the diaspora of the more than 30 million Americans who have attended college but have no degree.

What can colleges do to fix high schools? At Trinity Washington University, where more than half of our undergraduate students are low-income women of color from the D.C. and Prince Georges school systems, we have deep experience with the challenges posed by low-performing high schools. Along with extensive advising and support services, Trinity’s faculty members have developed a strong first-year program to remedy the most acute preparatory deficiencies in critical reading, communication skills both oral and written, and math. Beyond addressing the challenges faced by our current students, higher-education leaders across the country must engage their local schools on many fronts, including:

1. Communicating expectations and performance: High schools and colleges need more routine communication about curricular alignment and expectations for collegiate preparation, including both academics and behavioral norms like attendance and class participation. Colleges should share students’ first-year grades with the high schools that they came from. At Trinity, we are reviewing grades in first-year courses, and we will provide the aggregate class-performance data back to the schools. With this information, we can pursue more focused discussions with school leaders and teachers about specific preparatory problems and strategies for improvement.

2. Dual enrollment with majors focused on career pathways: Dual enrollment, widely recognized as an effective engagement strategy, could be a stronger tool to prepare students, especially for the very specific academic demands of professional majors. For example, Trinity is developing plans with the D.C. public schools for a dual-enrollment pathway for nursing because our experience shows that students who enter college with their hearts set on nursing quickly become discouraged and at risk of dropping out when they realize the deficiencies in their math and science preparation.

3. Faculty collaboration: Stronger collaborative relationships among school and college teachers across all disciplines can strengthen college readiness. The Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools is one model that pairs faculty members in the sciences, arts, and humanities with high-school teachers for a sustained partnership in curriculum and pedagogical development. Successful teacher institutes are already flourishing in New Haven, Conn.; Philadelphia; New Castle County, in Delaware; and Tulsa, Okla.; and Trinity is working with the Yale National Initiative to establish a similar program in Washington, D.C.

4. Advocating for teachers. When Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of the D.C. public schools, posed on a 2008 cover of Time magazine with a broom signifying her intent to make a “clean sweep” of our troubled school system, she started a war on teachers that has taken a toll on the teaching profession nationwide, resulting in high teacher turnover and disruption in many schools. Those of us in college leadership need to reclaim our central role in the preparation of teachers by improving our schools of education to produce better results while being much stronger advocates for teachers. We should encourage our very best students to consider teaching as a lifelong career, not simply a short-term postgraduate adventure.

5. Sharing intellectual capital: School-reform leaders have often obtusely dismissed the effect of poverty on students’ learning as “just an excuse.” Colleges should devote more intellectual capital to informing and shaping school-reform projects, including research that reveals the real and devastating impact of poverty, violence, racism, and trauma on the ability of children to learn effectively. We should propose specific reform strategies across disciplinary areas, from health-care policy to nutrition and food security, criminal-justice reform, housing and child care, and other social services that support improving educational outcomes in marginalized neighborhoods. School reformers brandishing high-stakes tests must receive the kind of thoughtful response that higher education can provide to ensure that learning-improvement plans respond to the needs of the whole child, not just the one taking a battery of tests on any given day.

College leaders certainly don’t have all the answers to solve the challenges of elementary, middle, and high schools, but we must take a more robust part in improvement efforts, with more-urgent focus on high schools. Our goal should be clear: Ensure that more students can complete high school and college successfully and on time, enhancing their economic security and empowering their participation as effective citizen leaders in their communities and nation.

Patricia McGuire is president of Trinity Washington University.