Steve Peha
When it comes to “college-readiness,†few people agree on what it is, but everyone seems to agree our high schoolers don’t have it. New work by the Common Core State Standards Initiative is supposed to bring us together on this. But standards have to be implemented by states, which have to develop benchmarks, which have to be measured by tests. This means 50 different definitions, all of which are likely to be compromised by political posturing and the perverse incentive states have under No Child Left Behind to set their standards as low as they can get away with.
But things don’t have to be so muddled. College-readiness simply means you’re ready to go to college, and being ready to go to college simply means you’ve been accepted. Furthermore, since our district has the best schools in the state, let’s agree that when we say that our kids are college-ready, we mean they’ve been accepted to four-year institutions.
Many elite private high schools probably have near-100 percent college acceptance rates for their students. Few public schools can match this record. However, I have discovered some that seem to be sending all of their kids to four-year schools. There aren’t many of these schools, and they’re all small, but they do exist. What do they have in common? Not a lot. But what interests me most is that some serve primarily poor and minority students.
Now that doesn’t sound right, does it? How in the world can a school with a high percentage of poor and minority students send all its kids to college when right here in Chapel Hill, with the best schools in the state and a relatively small percentage of poor and minority students to serve, we don’t even come close?
Not surprisingly, schools that send large percentages of poor and minority kids to college are dedicated to that goal. In an odd rebuke to schools that guarantee their students nothing more than a desk to sit at, these schools promise to get every kid ready for a four-year college education and to see that they get in.
I don’t think these schools have better teachers or better curriculum or better anything than we do. But they do have a deeper sense of commitment to their kids. This commitment is more than just a catchy slogan or a school board candidate’s rallying cry. These folks mean business. They say 100 percent college-readiness is their goal and they do what needs to be done to reach it. They may not succeed every year with every kid, but who would fault a school that only sent 80 percent or 90 percent of its kids to four-year institutions?
One could argue that guaranteeing “college-readiness†is foolish and naive. But at least the schools that do it stand for something rock solid that their students, teachers and families can get behind. What do our schools stand for? What rock do we stand solidly upon? Perhaps it’s the rock of privilege, a vantage point that allows us to look down on our less-fortunate neighbors, or look up so as not to notice them at all.
Then again, our results speak for themselves, don’t they? Large numbers of our kids head off to prestigious schools each year. But many don’t. Some don’t even make it out of high school. And even before kids enter high school in our district, it’s pretty easy to make predictions about who’s going where, isn’t it? How often have we heard around here, when we think no one is listening, that so-and-so just isn’t “college material�
Kids who grow up poor in our country tend to get off to a slow start in school and tend to finish far behind their more advantaged peers. But some schools are proving that demographics do not determine destiny. With a strong commitment to a simple goal, they find it easier to rally their students, teachers and families toward a common result. It’s quite an achievement, one made possible, I think, more by the commitment than by anything else.
What are we committed to in our schools? I have no idea. But our commitment to preserve the status quo seems as strong as any other I have found. This is less of an indictment than it might seem. Virtually every school and district in our nation shares this same unspoken resolve.
After years of working in schools across the country, I have come to believe that commitment to a simple, meaningful goal is what separates good schools and districts from their less-effective counterparts. School leaders with the guts to make promises and the grit to keep them are not just on the leading edge of education reform, they are education reform. Everyone else is playing the same old game by the same old rules.
And we all know who wins that game, don’t we?
Steve Peha is founder and president of Carrboro-based Teaching That Makes Sense Inc.