Closing the gap: the Education Trust's recipe for meeting new federal standards on student achievement

School Administrator, August, 2002 by Craig Jerald, Kati Haycock

While this is often done with the best of intentions, it has disastrous results. While three out of four high school graduates are going on to postsecondary education, fewer than half have completed a college preparatory curriculum. Too many young people end up in remedial classes when they get to college. The more remedial classes they have to take, the more likely they are to drop out.

The new federal law can present a watershed opportunity for sweeping away the remaining barriers to offering a challenging curriculum for all students. We encourage district and school leaders to carefully align their elementary curriculum with state standards and assessments. But please don't stop there. Rather, we hope more join the growing number of districts, indeed whole states, that are making the college prep curriculum the "default" curriculum for all middle and high school students.

Several years ago, the San Jose, Calif., Unified School District did just that with great results in both college eligibility and test performance. You can challenge the antiquated belief that a rigorous high school curriculum is a reward for previous academic performance, rather than a necessary foundation for future learning in college or on the job.

* Time: Find ways to provide extra instruction for students who need it.

Ample evidence now supports the idea that almost all children can achieve at high levels if they are taught at high levels. But it is equally clear that some require more time and more instruction. It won't do, in other words, just to throw students into a high-level course if they can t even read the textbook.

One of the most frequent questions we are asked by stressed middle and high school teachers is, "How am I supposed to get my students ready to pass the (fill-in-the blank) grade test when they enter with 3rd-grade reading skills and I have only my 35-minute period a day?"

The answer, of course, is "You can't." Rather, especially when they're behind in foundational skills like reading and mathematics, we need to double or even triple the amount (and quality) of instruction that they get. In other words, if the standards for learning are fixed and firm, time and instructional strategies can t remain a constant.

District leaders must make aggressive use of test score data and teacher evaluations to identify students who are in danger of failing to meet academic standards, then provide intensive help and extra time to get them back on track. Two of our colleagues, Eleanor Dougherty and Carlton Jordan, are working with teachers in several cities to design a "rapid transit" system that allows students who are behind to get caught up and enrolled in regular and rigorous curriculum as quickly as possible.

* Teachers: Find ways to assign the strongest teachers to the students who need them most; get serious about spending professional development dollars more wisely.

There's no one best way to do this. Some states, such as Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, are providing high-poverty schools extra funds every year to be used to extend instruction in whatever way works best in their community: before school, after school, weekends or summers. In other cases, individual school districts, such as San Diego, are creating more time without additional resources and within the regular school day by doubling or even tripling for low-performing students the amount of instructional time devoted to literacy and mathematics and by training all of their teachers.