Eija Ayravainen doesn’t have time to waste on educational reforms that are headed nowhere, and two years ago, when College Now came across her desk, it seemed to fit that description. The leaders of New York City’s Board of Education and the City University of New York (CUNY) had just announced plans to dramatically expand the program, which gives high-school students the opportunity to take college-credit courses for free. As assistant provost for undergraduate studies at Hunter College in Manhattan, one of CUNY’s senior (four-year) colleges, Ayravainen was responsible for establishing College Now on her campus. She took up the task, even if she wasn’t thrilled about it.
“I did so reluctantly in the sense that you’ll never meet an administrator who says they don’t have enough to do,” Ayravainen says wryly from behind a desk littered with phone messages and file folders. “And I knew that our faculty, who also feel overwhelmed, probably would not be keen on going to high schools in Brooklyn, Queens, or anywhere else to give another course.” She also foresaw a rough relationship between CUNY’s 17 notoriously independent colleges and the city’s 213 public high schools.
“But I saw [that College Now] wasn’t going away,” she continues. “So I decided I was going to be Tom Sawyer and start painting the fence white.” Now Hunter College lures New York City high-school students to campus to take courses as part of a systemwide program that connected 13,000 students in 161 high schools to the city’s public colleges last year.
Educators have come to realize that this connection is sorely needed. The National Commission on the Senior Year, a group charged with finding ways to beef up the last year of high school, concluded that a lack of communication with institutions of higher education is one of the greatest problems plaguing the nation’s secondary schools. “Many leaders on each side feel they have little in common,” the commission wrote in a January 2001 report. “They receive little encouragement to collaborate and may even have incentives not to because their interests, in such matters as public funding, often conflict.”
But College Now has put New York City at the forefront of a growing trend toward seeing education not as a K-12 sequence that ends with high school, but as a K-16 continuum that continues through college. Similarly ambitious efforts to smooth the transition from high school to college are underway in Georgia, Oregon, and Texas. According to the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based nonprofit focused on policy exchange, 24 states are currently involved in efforts to improve coordination between high-school standards and college entrance and placement requirements.
“New York City is one of the first out of the box” to make the K-16 connection systematic, says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University professor of education who is studying higher education’s reaction to K-12 education reform. “The CUNY system has been willing to accept the state Regents test as a placement exam, so they have a much more aligned system. They also have a structure there that allows dialogue. In most [other] places, the two systems don’t even talk to each other.”
In Massachusetts, as in many states, the two systems are starting to talk as a result of attempts to raise academic standards in high school. This year’s junior class is the first to have to pass the 10th-grade MCAS test in English and math in order to graduate. While scores rose significantly last year, when test-takers faced the graduation requirement for the first time, failure rates were still disproportionately high among urban and minority students.
The Governor’s Committee on Education Policy–an ad hoc group consisting of top officials from the public education and public higher-education systems–has recommended the creation of a remedial “13th grade” at community colleges to contend with the fallout from the MCAS graduation exam.
“Community colleges and high schools need to develop a curriculum specifically targeted for those students who didn’t pass the MCAS,” says James Peyser, chairman of the state Board of Education. “One of the proposals is to create a transition year during which students are being intensively prepared to earn their high school diploma. I hesitate to call it a ’13th year,’ because some students might need only a few months of training, not a whole year.”
In addition, the Massachusetts Higher Education Coordinating Council is working to establish a half-dozen alternative “pathways” to college for students who have failed or are at risk of failing the MCAS.
“The concept is to look at what types of young people are going to fall in what categories–like, for example, those who have an English deficiency, or those who fail the test by just a few points,” explains Stephen Tocco, chairman of the state board of higher education. “Then we will create defined pathways to help them, rather than just throw them out the door and say, ‘you figure out how to pass it.'”
But even as state policymakers are trying to draw higher education into the school-reform loop, the Legislature has undone the state’s one small effort to ease high-school students into higher education. In the much-belated state budget approved last year, lawmakers eliminated the $1.8 million funding for “dual enrollment,” which enabled qualified high-school students to take college-credit courses for free. The program was aimed at students whose parents had not attended college and who could benefit from early exposure to college work.
“Given the opportunity it gave to these kids, the cost of the program was small,” says Marlene Seltzer, president of Jobs For the Future, a Boston-based organization that tracks school-to-higher-ed transitions nationally. “In a state that’s rich in economic resources and has an economy that’s strongly weighted toward high-tech industries and financial services, you’d think this would be something that we’d be advocating for strongly.”
Failure to communicate
But if Massachusetts is now starting to look toward higher education for help with public-school failures, New York City turned to K-16 collaboration in response to what was perceived as a failure in higher education. In 1999, the city’s university system, which educates an estimated 60 percent of New York City high-school graduates and 40 percent of the city’s schoolteachers, suffered considerable embarrassment when a mayoral task force headed by former Yale University president Benno Schmidt Jr. slammed CUNY as a rudderless institution in a downward spiral.
“There is tragic personal loss and institutional waste implicit in CUNY’s high dropout and low graduation rates,” the task force wrote in its report.
This was not all CUNY’s fault, the task force noted. Students were arriving so unprepared that, in 1997, only 13 percent of community-college entrants and 28 percent of senior-college freshmen could show basic proficiency in English, writing, and math.
High dropout rates at CUNY can have serious repercussions in the labor market, where there are fewer and fewer jobs for those without college degrees.
“You look at all these office buildings around us here in midtown Manhattan [and] you would never know that New York City is predominantly black and Latino,” says Herman Badillo, who was chairman of CUNY’s board of trustees when the Schmidt report was released and is an outspoken critic of the city’s K-12 school system. “What happens is, kids get out of the schools here with a phony diploma, and then nobody hires them.”
The task force recommended that CUNY try to close this gap–and get out of the remediation business–by forging a new relationship with the public schools. The new CUNY chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, took the Schmidt report to heart and set about cultivating a friendly relationship with the new schools chancellor, Harold O. Levy. A product of the CUNY system himself, Goldstein decided to raise standards and eliminate remediation at CUNY’s 11 senior colleges. But that controversial move could succeed only if there were steps to help kids reach the new goals.
That’s where College Now came in. The program had its start in 1984 at Kingsborough Community College, located in the Manhattan Beach area of Brooklyn, under the leadership of then-president Leon Goldstein. College Now aimed to give kids in the “vast middle range” of achievement a “taste of college,” says Dr. Rachelle Goldsmith, KCC’s College Now director. “These were good kids, they came to school, they weren’t excessively absent, but they weren’t necessarily the ones who raised their hands.”
At KCC, the program works this way: College Now tests high-school juniors to find out whether they’re prepared for college. Students who pass the placement exams are allowed to take college-credit courses, taught by high-school teachers who have qualified as KCC adjunct faculty, in their senior year. Course offerings cover the range of the humanities, business, and applied science. Those students who do not qualify for college-level work are offered remedial courses, also taught by KCC faculty, the explicit goal of which is to get them prepared for college.
Within five years, College Now became so popular that “people were actually begging to get the program into their schools,” Goldsmith recalls. The KCC program alone currently serves about 5,000 students. One study of the program, cited in a recent report by the New York City-based Center for an Urban Future, found that CUNY freshmen who participated in College Now graduated college on time at twice the rate of freshmen who did not participate in the program.
“You start to teach them responsibility,” says Susan Miller, a KCC adjunct and teacher at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. “There’s a big push at Madison for kids to go to college. But this gives them a leg up. Some of these students are first generation going to college.”
Fixing the pipeline
Now that College Now has been expanded throughout the CUNY system, it has become an umbrella for a host of high-school outreach efforts, many of which bear little resemblance to the original KCC model. Each CUNY college gets a great deal of leeway in setting up their own program, says John Garvey, the systemwide director of College Now.
Hunter, for example, chooses to bring high-school students on campus to attend classes, in order to keep the education process “more pure,” says Ayravainen. The college also offers seminars to help high-school teachers find new ways to motivate their students. But the focus is on mutual collaboration, not directives.
“We have to nurture these teachers. They need our respect,” says Dr. Steven Greenbaum, a professor of physics at Hunter. “If we work with them, they can be a wonderful pipeline for us.”
At Brooklyn College, the Theater and Education Initiative sends graduate students into seven partner high schools to help teachers integrate theater arts into their curriculum. Brooklyn College’s dance department also stages matinee performances throughout the school year for ninth-to-12th-graders, and provides teachers with study guides for each concert.
“I’d like to let these students know that theater is something people do study in college,” says Donna Linderman, an assistant professor of theater and education, and the coordinator of the initiative.
At the College of Staten Island, the College Now program is structured around the Discovery Institute, which works with public-school teachers on curriculum development. Discovery recently started a College Skills Institute that loosely resembles the “13th Grade” proposal in Massachusetts. The new program is working with about three dozen students who weren’t able to meet high-school graduation requirements in four years, says Leonard Ciaccio, the Discovery Institute’s co-director and a professor of biology. Every morning, the students work on improving their academic deficiencies. Then, two afternoons a week, they take part in hands-on, college-level activities built around the skills they need to finish their high-school requirements.
“We’re committed to the idea of helping kids learn through exploring,” Ciaccio says. “At the end of two semesters, we expect that these kids will be able to pass the CUNY assessment and have their high-school diploma.” New York’s College Now program is not without its problems. Matching up CUNY colleges with high schools gets to be a messy business, since some schools are more of a challenge than others. For example, as the originator of the program, Kingsborough has already formed relationships with some of the best high schools in its vicinity, leaving tougher challenges for other CUNY campuses in Brooklyn and Staten Island.
Ensuring that teaching conducted under the College Now name is of a high quality can also be an issue, particularly when the courses are off campus. Because each CUNY institution has a great deal of autonomy, each is individually responsible for monitoring the quality of its College Now program and teaching staff, Garvey says. The university system has tried to ensure a certain level of credibility for the program by requiring each college to place College Now within its academic affairs division, not to relegate it to student programming. Still, Garvey acknowledges, he is concerned “about the quality of the curriculum in settings where high-school teachers are teaching high-school students, and whether that’s credit-worthy.”
But the value of bringing college to high-school students, instead of waiting for the students to come to college, is becoming apparent. For Georgia Mamounas, 17, exposure to a college-level introductory business course at Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton High School convinced her to alter her college plans. Though she expected to yawn her way through the course, Mamounas instead found the subject so engaging that she now plans to add a business minor to her education major in college.
“I’ve already recommended College Now to my cousin, who’s a junior,” Mamounas says. “Then she can find out that college is not just a joke. It’s serious stuff.”
And not just for students. “These are kids from New York City. For the most part, they’re not leaving New York City,” Ayravainen says. “We’re going to be living with them, and we want them to be as educated as we are.”
Lisa Prevost is a Connecticut-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Boston Globe.