If legislatures want to get involved in the process, they should legislate that graduating high school students actually have mastered high school skills. While there may be a small number of high school students who are capable of handling college material, there are far too many who are the product of watered-down curriculum and social promotion. That leaves it to us to teach them algebra and other high school skills.

Here’s a novel idea—let’s teach high school material in high school and college material in college.

SJZ, at 8:00 am EDT on May 25, 2007

Matching (Some) International Standards

Let’s say you are a U.S. high school senior

whose Italian language skills are pretty good and you want to take your bachelor’s degree in Italy. You will not be accepted with a standard U.S. high school diploma. You will find out that you must present either an IB diploma (granted by a high school on a list of schools whose IB programs have been recognized by Italian higher education authorities), 4 AP courses/exams (though it’s tough to tell what they regard as acceptable scores on the exams) or 2 years of college in the U.S. Granted, this is a pastiche of options that are not really comparable, but you get the idea. The Italian first cycle degree is a 3-year proposition, and these rules basically say that you get the equivalent of a U.S. year of credit for any one of the options.

The chancellor is right about the ill-advice of legislating such rules for the “get it over with and get it over with fast crowd,” but consortia of U.S. colleges could establish similar rules, shaped their own way, as incentives—and along the way demonstrate/document how many U.S. high school students could meet the demands of entering bachelor’s degree programs in other countries. Think about it!

Cliff Adelman, Senior Associate at Institute for Higher Education Policy, at 8:00 am EDT on May 25, 2007

SJZ:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Judith, at 9:45 am EDT on May 25, 2007

Wall under attack

A few comments.

The accelerated degree programs the states are pushing at the high school level are attacks on the wall of separation between secondary and postsecondary eduation — a wall that took over one hundred years to put in place.

What is most frightening to me is that the consequences of these are largely unknown — and buried in the rhetoric of saving the taxpayers money in the long run (since the cost of college credits earned now are cheaper than those earned the next year or the year after).

The historical parallel to be borne in mind is the example of the normal schools, those nineteenth century intermediate institutions that catered to the public clamor for HE, but also learned how to produce a steady cheap supply of primary and secondary teachers, mostly women, that would teach a few years and then marry out of their positions, and have to be replaced.

We have never recovered from the loss of status to the teaching (semi-)profession resulting from these market driven decisions. See David Labaree 2004 Yale.

Accreditation is not a visible issue with this, and that is part of its attraction:

The accountability measures are masked by the standardized testing and articulation mechanisms for AP and IB. I am aware of instances of poor AP exam results in the classroom being addressed by changing the teacher for one supposedly more qualified.

But this is cold comfort for students trapped in a system without faculty credential requirements. Just now, the state of Florida is moving to bring its dual enrollment courses back under higher education accrediting guidelines. The difference between DE and AP/IB are the exams, which serve as quality control gatekeeping mechanisms.

DE courses now lack these QA/QC protections, but this is being addressed through unprecedented bridge building between the awarding institutions and the school districts. I am somewhat skeptical, however, that the DE horses can be herded back into the QA/QC barn. Again, these were largely legislative decisions, poorly thought out, resulting in unforeseen problems that must be now addressed.

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 9:45 am EDT on May 25, 2007

I find Mr. Keul’s comments to be arrogant to say the least. If anything, it is more logical to assume that the AP classes were a more valuable experience than their equivalent college classes. High school classes are typically small, so it is likely that the students were assigned real work that was graded by a teacher— a teacher the students had real interaction with.

Even at a top school like Duke, intro classes are typically large and impersonal. I was lucky enough to pass out of most of them, but the ones I took were not the kind of experience I want to pay for in college. I never wrote an essay or interacted with the professor in any of those classes.

The exception would be small liberal arts colleges with coherent core curricula that provide even freshman with small classes taught by real professors. Unless that can be provided, I don’t see why students should have to pay for things they already took being taught in factory-format.

I’m sorry, but colleges like Duke don’t have a monopoly on the “highly educated instructor.” If they did, people would simply not be able to receive top AP and IB scores. These aren’t easy tests!

I would also surmise the resistance to providing students credits is a result of some ulterior motives. After all, people like me are essentially paying less for more. I got top-notch AP instruction in high school, which was free, and then finished a duel degree in three years, which was a bargain. It lets me start grad school debt-free, but it doesn’t help the greedy money-mongers in charge of certain colleges.

Grace, Student at UIUC, at 9:05 am EDT on May 29, 2007

IB Credit

I would voice my opinion on what classes should be worth what amount of credit... but the bottom line for high school IB students like myself is:

There is no incentive to stay in Georgia.

If we can get some (even partial) scholarship outside of the state, our plans are to leave.

With this bill, which the Governor did not sign, we would have a greater incentive, in addition to hope, to stay here in Georgia.

Logan, at 5:45 pm EDT on May 30, 2007