Texas: Dropout intervention results promising

At its January meeting, the Texas P-16 council heard a presentation on the Texas Education Agency (TEA)'s Dropout Recovery Pilot Program. The short summary of the presentation on the Texas P-16 Council Web site provides more details about some of these key features, including:

• Recruiting--actively seeking out recent dropouts rather than waiting for them to find the program
• Flexible scheduling--providing a flexible school day and year, which is so necessary for dropouts juggling work and family obligations. This ECS brief provides more details about these elements of the Texas initiative
• Accelerated academics--including credit recovery and self-paced, online credit attainment
• Social supports to address other barriers to coming to school, such as "case management; childcare ...; transportation or bus tickets, bikes; clothing; food assistance"
• Transitions to postsecondary--returning dropouts may have college as their goal, but no direction on how to get there. The summary doc provides several examples of approaches to help returning dropouts get a foot in the door in postsecondary programs.
  

According to the presentation, in the first two cycles of the pilot, more than twice the # of students as proposed in the funded target (4,141 vs. 2,042) enrolled in the program, and of those, nearly 1 in 3 (1,286) had completed the program with a high school diploma or college readiness, and 33% (1,370) were still enrolled in the program.

The hallmarks of this program should be considered by other states as they seek to improve their dropout prevention/recovery offerings.

Florida: Students often retake math, science courses they've earned acceleration credit for

Policymakers and other education stakeholders sometimes wonder aloud about the relative advantages and disadvantages of dual enrollment, Advanced Placement (AP), and other mechanisms to allow high school students to earn college credit. I just recently revisited a very good 2009 report providing one state's experience on this issue.

Published by OPPAGA, the Florida legislature's research arm, the study surveyed 8,769 Florida college students who had earned college credit through AP, dual enrollment, International Baccalaureate, and AICE (the Advanced International Certificate of Education, offered in 14 districts in the state at the time of the study). Ninety-two percent of these students reported that they were able to apply these so-called "acceleration credits" toward general education requirements, as well as prerequisite and elective requirements. Students also indicated these credits helped them prepare for the demands of college-level coursework, and helped them stand out in the college admissions process. Students who earned acceleration credits in high school also tended to graduate college "with fewer excess credit hours."

However, nearly one in four (23.5%) of the survey respondents indicated that they retook a course for which they could have applied an acceleration credit. Of these students, 78% retook a science or math course. Fifty-six percent of these students did so of their own accord, and had various reasons for doing so, including "to help boost their college GPA and to better prepare themselves for upper division coursework." The other 46% of students retook courses because the university or their advisors strongly advised to do so.

Due to class size limits, lab equipment and materials, and safety precaution costs, science courses in particular--both at the high school and college level--can be more costly than courses in other core disciplines. The report does not estimate a dollar amount the state lost by students' retaking courses for which they had earned acceleration credit, but it may be substantial. The report offers three recommendations to stem the number of students retaking courses for which they had already earned credit, including: "[reviewing] the math and science course equivalencies for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams and [validating] these equivalencies with all universities, state colleges, and community colleges. In addition, universities that recommend students retake math and science acceleration courses should provide input about whether the exams are equivalent to the college level courses."

Illinois: P-20 council's Year 1 report released

The Illinois P-20 council recently released its year 1 report, which includes broad recommendations and specific actions for state leaders to take. The areas of recommended activity are in line with issues that other councils have focused their efforts on, such as state data systems, teacher quality, transitions from high school to postsecondary. An executive summary of the council's report is also available.

ECS recommends that states (including P-20 councils) establish numerical goals for P-20 attainment and establish markers indicating progress toward those goals. The year 1 report sets forth the Illinois P-20 council's goal “to increase the proportion of Illinoisans with high-quality
degrees and credentials to 60 percent by the year 2025.”

P-20 finance in Oregon

The Governance Divide, a must-read for anyone serious about P-20 reform, called for state funding systems to become K-16 if education systems were to be truly aligned.

This past week, Governor Kitzhaber of Oregon took a first step toward this level of alignment, creating an Oregon Education Investment Team whose charges include "designing a new model for early childhood and family investment" and, perhaps most importantly, "designing a unified, performance based 0-20 budget model for consideration by the 2012 legislative session."

While a small number of states have created a single board/agency to oversee early learning through postsecondary, none of these states appears to have created a performance-based system.

Kansas: Bill on P-20 consolidation of education governance

According to an article posted today on LJWorld.com, a bill has been drafted to do away with the board of regents and state board of education, and have a gubernatorally-appointed secretary of education, but the measure "isn't getting much traction."

This echoes a trend ECS has been seeing this legislative session in other states, of seeking to unify K-12 and postsecondary education oversight in a single agency or gubernatorial appointee. It will be interesting to see how these proposals play out during this session--whether legislators will be driven by a sense that the current system isn't working, or swayed by the dearth of research on the impact of education governance structures on cost savings or student outcomes.

AP Report to the Nation: What states are not talking about

A scan of headlines from the past week makes clear that the 7th annual AP Report to the Nation, released Wednesday, has garnered a great deal of attention. Across the nation, states are either crowing that more of their graduates are earning a "3" or above on the exam, or lamenting that their status has fallen from previous years.

But while providing high school students with a taste of college-level expectations through AP coursework (and hopefully inching them closer to a college degree via credit earned through an AP exam), what seems to have been lost in the headlines is this: Many students do not complete their degree at the institution their postsecondary education started at, and many states lack consistent policies across institutions in the number and type of credits students earn for a passing score on an AP exam. So when a student who received AP credit from the institution s/he started out at is forced to retake a course (or receives only "elective" credit) at the institution s/he transfers to, the value of AP as a means to reduce families' tuition costs and students' time-to-degree is diminished.

As college completion gains momentum through various initiatives nationwide, let's hope more states adopt policies standardizing credit by exam equivalencies and common passing scores for such exams as AP, as Kentucky did in landmark legislation in 2010.

Vermont's P-16 Council: First Annual Report

Last week, the Vermont PreK-16 Council issued its first annual report to the house and senate education committee, as required in the enabling legislation. The report identifies the themes chosen to guide the council's work in 2011:
1. career awareness and exploration
2. outcomes needed for success at transition points, (defined as early childhood education to early elementary education, middle school to high school, high school to college or career, and teacher training), and
3. educator development and support.

According to the report, "The Council will be divided into working groups to study these themes and transition points over the next six months with the goal of designing specific initiatives, including pilot and full-scale innovative projects and new frameworks and policies."

College readiness in New York

An article in Monday's New York Times reports that "less than half of students in the state are leaving high school prepared for college and well-paying careers." These figures may lend support to a proposal last December to the New York State Board of Regents' College and Career Readiness Working Group, regarding a potential revision of high school graduation requirements to enhance student readiness for post-high school expectations.

The proposal, in fact, identifies several policy options that have been weighed in other states:
"A. Increase graduation requirements
B. Allow increased flexibility in the ways students can meet requirements
C. Offer alternative or supplemental credentials
D. Rethink the “safety net” for students with disabilities"

It will be interesting to see what the board of regents ultimately decides, and if their actions will influence policy thinking in other states.

West Virginia to join states with longitudinal data systems

According to an article on the MetroNews Web site, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed today by the West Virginia Department of Education and the Higher Education Policy Commission to join their separate student databases.

However, the MOU signed today does not mean that the longitudinal data system is operational today. As the state community and technical college system, James Skidmore, states in the article: "There's no time line on when the two systems will merge, but [Governor] Tomblin is urging the agencies to do so as quickly as possible."

College and career readiness pilot extended in Illinois

A pilot program launched in Illinois several years ago was extended through legislation signed by Governor Pat Quinn last July. The goals of the program are to (1) diagnose college readiness by developing a system to align ACT scores to specific community college courses in developmental and freshman curricula, and (2) provide resources and academic support to high school students to enrich the senior year through remedial or advanced coursework, and other interventions.

A brief published last June summarizes the efforts of pilot sites to date and provides some lessons learned from the project.

The program appears to be a very good example of optimizing the results of college-readiness test results to help more students enter postsecondary education without need for remediation.

Virtual high school part of P-16 initiative in Nebraska

As stated by Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman in his state of the state address last month, one of the goals of his state's P-16 council is to eliminate student achievement gaps.

And perhaps as one way to eliminate those gaps, the Nebraska P-16 Initiative, the state department of education and the University of Nebraska are working together to develop a virtual high school, to allow rural students to take a broader array of courses and allow students, regardless of location, to study at their own pace and at hours outside the regular school day and year.

Although I have not seen many other P-16 or P-20 coordinating entities working across education silos to develop or expand virtual high schools in their state, this may be an approach to improve college-readiness--provided that bandwidth and other technical issues in small and underresourced schools does not limit access to such courses for the very students who would benefit most from them.