The EdVocate West

If 22 States Can Do It – Why Can’t We?

June 22, 2010 at 1:45 am arunramanathan Leave a comment

Well, I’ve been very bad about posting lately mostly because I was out-of-town at an Achieve meeting in Washington D.C. That’s not really a good excuse given that people blog from Washington D.C. all the time. So, I’ll give up that excuse in the future (along with whining).

In D.C., we presented our updated Education Opportunity Audit and Blueprint process to representatives from 22 states. We focused on the recent work we’ve been doing to take this work to scale through the analysis of large district high school transcript databases. This work allows us to look at all transcripts at a district level and identify the course taking patterns of students by race, class, geography, etc. We can see trends at the district or cluster level and then use that information to promote deeper explorations and make the necessary fixes. 

What was particularly interesting about this meeting was the reaction of the participants to our presentation and the questions they asked. Most of these twenty-two states had committed to implementing or were implementing college and career ready standards. They had made their version of the A-G default, their state’s default curriculum because they believed that they had a responsibility to ensure that all of their students could make a real choice between college and career. What a concept!

We’re accustomed in California to getting some pretty typical feedback about our work and confronting the belief of some “that not all students should have the opportunity to attend college.” Here, we were presenting to 22 states who had already made the right decision. So their questions were not about doing the work but about “how can we take it further?” by linking our analyses to other data sets.

It reminded me of recent Common Standards meeting in Sacramento. Linda was sitting on a panel with an academic with a history of advising a certain gubernatorial candidate and this academic was throwing out the old thinking about kids needing to train to be auto mechanics. I’m thinking we have millions of poor kids, millions of immigrant kids in this state and the best you can throw out to their parents is old school thinking on career tech education. Is this what you’re going to advise your gubernatorial candidate? Or are you going to advise him to talk about the possibilities that a quality education opens up for your kids? How about the opportunity to ensure that your children have a better life than you had? That sounds like a pretty good message to me. Isn’t that the American dream?

By the way, Mr. Professor, I had a chance to listen to industry folks from the local auto sector explain to me once why they didn’t hire our high school graduates. It was because they were insufficiently prepared in the high level mathematics and critical thinking they have receieved from college and career-ready work. That’s what they wanted us to fix.

Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: .