Dive Brief:
- The college admissions process is difficult, and has started to require more of students than before. In California, where even public school admission requires 15 semesters of advanced college preparatory classes, students feel the pressures of applying for college even in middle school, reports EdSurge.
- Arati Nagaraj, a school board member for California’s Saratoga Union School District, says the pressure to give students the classes they need to get into college makes it difficult to focus on mastery of a subject. Instead, students advance quickly through academic milestones like perfect test scores and multiple AP classes without actually gaining the skills or knowledge necessary to be ready for college.
- Some teachers have moved toward hands-on and individualistic teaching strategies, like project-based learning, but many educators are still skeptical as to whether implementing such techniques is worthwhile, as they feel the system of higher education does not reflect such an open structure.
Dive Insight:
In April last year, the U.S. Department of Education, as a part of a conversation on Obama's Testing Action Plan, explained schools ought to be implementing "innovative assessment item types and design approaches, [improving] assessment scoring and score reporting, and [conducting] an inventory of state and local assessment systems to eliminate unnecessary, redundant or low-quality tests." The emphasis on testing standards has become embedded within K-12 education, and instructors often have to grapple with the idea of teaching for content mastery vs. teaching for test scoring, as in the case of California schools.
While educators are delivering on a higher demand for testing in the curriculum, many worry a focus on just high-level AP classes and standardized tests will shortchange students who would like to enroll in more creative classes, language curriculum, and flexible courses that meet their individual learning goals. Further, other education experts point to statistics which show that not standardized tests, but rather pre-college factors are more important in determining student success at different higher education institutions. In fact, more than 60% of the college completion gap is attributed to pre-college factors, according to data from the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
The debate over college and career readiness has long affected the way educators do their jobs, but one idea on collaborative leadership is gaining steam as a potential solution for filling gaps between content mastery and test performance. Institutions can partner with K-12 districts on creating college-and-career ready standards, while also ensuring that students are actually learning concepts. One way of doing this is to expand communication efforts between schools and public officials, so each party understands the link between recommended standards and student achievement data, while also focusing on the needs of individual learners in institutional decision-making.
Still, the pressure of even getting students to college often supersedes educators' desires to implement strategies like project-based learning in the classroom, a reality which reflects an overall need for higher ed and K-12 administrators to reconsider the education system in its entirety — particularly as low-income, minority students are often not exposed to resources, like AP classes, in their high schools and can be unfairly excluded from the good intentions of testing standards due to pre-college factors.