The New College Try

By Jodie Morse/Baltimore

At the Rosemont Elementary School in Baltimore, college prep begins early. How early? Starting in prekindergarten, students take some of their lessons from tenured university faculty. Undergraduates serve as teachers' aides, and kids spend their summer vacations studying on the campus of a nearby college. When students graduate from the fifth grade, they get a handshake and a diploma from a university president. So it was understandable that when a visitor recently toured the school, a bespectacled third-grader asked, "Excuse me, Miss? Are you a professor?"

Not long ago, few Rosemont students were considered college material. Reared in downtown Baltimore's roughest ZIP code, almost all of them live in poverty. The lucky ones could expect to take classes someday at a community college, but nearly two-thirds of students in this troubled district don't make it through high school. On standardized tests conducted three years ago, not a single Rosemont student read at grade level.

But after a poor showing on a state exam landed Rosemont on Maryland's list of failing schools, a neighbor volunteered to help. Though Rosemont is still part of Baltimore's public school system, the school is now managed by Coppin State College, a public institution situated just down the street. The college does everything from hiring Rosemont's principal to wiring its classrooms to giving its students their annual immunizations. Result: last year more than 90% of Rosemont first-graders read at grade level or above. Says Frank Kober, a professor of education at Coppin State: "We had to ask ourselves, 'If we didn't help, who would?'"

That question drives what may be the next big thing in education reform: so-called K-16 partnerships, in which colleges work to improve K-12 schools. More than a century ago, universities and their local public schools talked at every turn. In those days before the SAT, many colleges designed their entrance exams, down to which passages from Homer students ought to be able to translate, and high schools tailored their lessons accordingly. But as the nation's public schools swelled and colleges started recruiting applicants from farther afield, universities lost touch with their neighborhood schools. Over time, the relations became icier, with schoolteachers carping that all they got from colleges were airy theories of school reform, spun from on high.

But in more and more places today, the connections are palpable and practical. Colleges are once again helping neighborhood schools by designing curriculums and training teachers, helping write academic standards, and mounting capital campaigns. Some universities are starting charter schools from scratch on their campuses. Five years ago, just two states ran K-16 programs. Today 24 do, according to the Education Commission of the States. That's on top of scores of partnerships involving private colleges.

Universities are using more than conscience as their guide. When students show up for freshman year ill prepared, colleges pay the price. Today half of all college students must take at least one remedial course, at an annual cost of $1 billion to the nation's public universities. And with the recent ban on affirmative-action programs in Texas and California, outreach is no longer optional. Universities in those states now go door to door not only to recruit minorities but also to ensure that they complete all the necessary course work and paperwork to get admitted. And with many public schools complaining that their new teachers are poorly trained, K-16 partnerships give universities a proving ground for their education students.

In Maryland's university system, educators credit K-16 outreach for a drop in remediation rates and a rise in SAT scores and minority enrollment. In a pilot program in Oregon, high school and state-college educators are redesigning college-entrance requirements so that admission will hinge on a portfolio of student work graded on a uniform scale. In the California State University system, 54% of freshmen had to take remedial math courses in 1998; the following year only 48% did so.

The payoffs have been even greater on the local level. Consider El Paso, Texas, where one-third of the adult residents cannot read English and last year only 75% graduated from high school. Ten years ago, the University of Texas at El Paso joined with that city's community leaders and three of its largest and lowest-performing school districts. Today UTEP's mark is apparent everywhere, from the schools' cheery hallways (the once drab corridors are papered over with student artwork) to test scores.

University and local officials secured more than $30 million in grants and helped overhaul the district's curriculum and teaching methods. Some schools wiped out uninspired drills and work sheets in the younger grades, and high schools began pushing students to take three years each of rigorous college preparatory math and science. Before UTEP stepped in, just a small percentage of students took Algebra II and Chemistry; now more than half do. Compared with 1994, when just one school in the university-aided districts netted an exemplary rating on state exams, last year 18 did. Most important, the university ascribes this year's 3% increase in student enrollment to the partnership's efforts.

The university has benefited in other ways. Teachers in training, who used to crowd into cavernous auditoriums for class, can spend their days on-site at the K-12 public schools. Several mornings a week, a professor lectures in a borrowed room and then the education students fan out to classrooms to perfect their new skills. Says Sally Blake, an associate professor of education at UTEP: "Now I can see what actually works in the classroom with real students and teachers." Henry Levin, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, says that "universities like to cop the attitude that they can make public schools better overnight." But after working hands-on in those schools, "they become a lot less brash rather quickly."

Coppin State in Maryland devoted much of the first year of its partnership with Rosemont to mundane matters like making sure the school had working telephones and a fresh coat of paint. The college also took on the more daunting task of educating the school's parents. Coppin offered child-rearing classes to Rosemont parents, but the instructor soon realized some of the parents had trouble reading the handouts. After surveying school parents about their educational needs, Coppin began helping some work toward high school diplomas.

In other cases, it's the teachers who need tutoring. Working with a Los Angeles-area high school, a math professor from California State University, Dominguez Hills, spent weeks fashioning an algebra unit in which students would operate a fictive bakery. But half the teachers fell back on their familiar lesson plan. Why? They reportedly felt their algebra skills weren't sharp enough to let them field student questions.

Even more jarring, especially to those in academe who enjoy the permanence of tenure, is the dizzying rate of turnover in struggling public schools. Take the partnership between a high school in California's central valley and a neighboring community college, which won a five-year, $300,000 grant from the state. By the second year, 85% of those involved with the project had left. Says Dave Jolly, who administered the grant for the state: "The principal, the vice principal and most of the best teachers were all gone." The partnership fizzled.

Improving public schools without affronting those who run them is a delicate enterprise. And the K-16 movement has spawned more than its share of bruised egos and snubbed feelings on both sides. After a committee chaired by Georgia State University Provost Ron Henry spent months drafting a list of academic-content standards, not a single school district adopted it. Instead, the Atlanta school district drew up its own, albeit similar, guidelines. Says Peyton Williams, the deputy state superintendent of schools: "There's a quiet kind of resistance."

And sometimes there's a noisy kind. At Marian Manor Elementary, one of the participating El Paso schools, a fifth of the teachers quit rather than follow the new plan, which required them to attend meetings in their free time and spend their weekends at workshops. But more often the tensions are subtler tussles over turf and authority. "Now I answer to two bosses, the college and the school district," says Russell Perkins, Rosemont's principal. "And sometimes I just have to tell them not to look over my shoulder."

But Perkins, his bosses and his teachers think it's worth enduring a little friction to hear stories of students like Rosemont fourth-grader Briana Hopkins. Though her mother dropped out of college after two years and her elder brother forsook higher education for a job as a maintenance worker, Briana spent last summer taking enrichment classes at Coppin State and tells her mom how she wants to go off to college one day. Says Briana's mother JoAnn: "If going to college had been stressed earlier, it could have been totally different for me and my son." And now it may be for her daughter.

--With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Anne Berryman/Athens and Deborah Fowler/El Paso

See time.com/Education for additional coverage and a regular column by Jodie Morse

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Anne Berryman/Athens and Deborah Fowler/El Paso