Why do students who have succeeded in high school and who seem well prepared for college life struggle and sometimes fail when they arrive on campus? Perhaps the most common explanation casts the American high school as the culprit. Students are not challenged. They do not write. They do not read. They take their senior year off. All of these observations (and more) have been used, alone or in combination, to account for why the student who never got lower than a B and who did well on the SAT is not succeeding in philosophy or physics or psychology. Although the criticism of the American high school (or more properly, the institution of the American high school) on which these explanations turn cannot be easily dismissed, we think the finger-pointing many of us in higher education engage in is both counterproductive and just this side of smug.
The high school in the United States faces an array of challenges that make those confronted by higher education (particularly at fouryear institutions) seem significantly less daunting. Moreover, new national standards that require all students to be prepared for postsecondary education without remediation (Reich, 2003) have dramatically raised the stakes, adding political pressure to the already complex educational tasks assigned to American secondary schools. Some may see the movement to impose new standards and new means of assessment—exit exams, portfolios, certificates of mastery, senior projects, and the like—on high schools and their graduates as proof that the difficulties first-year students encounter stem primarily from lack of preparation.
The American Diploma Project (2004), for example, argues bluntly that “the preparation students receive in high school is the greatest predictor of bachelor’s degree attainment” (p. 2). The merit of the argument cannot be dismissed out of hand: better-prepared students do succeed more often. But at the same time, we need to remind ourselves that one of the strongest arguments that successful students are better prepared is that they do succeed. If preparation predicts student success, student success acts as the sign and seal of preparation.
All of this tends to deflect attention from what happens in the classrooms and laboratories at colleges and universities. If students succeed, they were, against the odds, well prepared. If they fail, well, perhaps when the high schools get straightened out that will not happen so often. Such a passive stance is neither accurate—what happens in college instruction does matter—nor viable in the long run. After all, the same forces that have begun to demand more accountability and more assessment from secondary schools are also arrayed around the wall of academe. In the words of the American Diploma Project (2004), the states backed by the clout of the federal Higher Education Act should “hold postsecondary institutions accountable for the academic success of the students they admit–—including learning, persistence and degree completion–—rather than allowing them to continue to place ill-prepared students in remedial, noncredit- bearing courses and then replace dropouts with new students the following year”.
Our point here is not that the preparation of students is of no concern to faculty teaching first-year students. Nor is it that American high schools are functioning adequately or that they are beyond our capacity to improve or even transform. Rather, what we think makes most sense is for those who teach first-year students to try to devise some means to meet them where they are, academically, intellectually, and emotionally, without abandoning reasonable rigor and appropriately high standards. This is a difficult task. To accomplish it, we first need to acknowledge more clearly than most of us have just how “foreign” the land we inhabit is. If we can get a sense of how alien things must seem to first-year students, we can perhaps begin to see their preparation (or lack of it) in a different and perhaps more illuminating light.
The high school in the United States faces an array of challenges that make those confronted by higher education (particularly at fouryear institutions) seem significantly less daunting. Moreover, new national standards that require all students to be prepared for postsecondary education without remediation (Reich, 2003) have dramatically raised the stakes, adding political pressure to the already complex educational tasks assigned to American secondary schools. Some may see the movement to impose new standards and new means of assessment—exit exams, portfolios, certificates of mastery, senior projects, and the like—on high schools and their graduates as proof that the difficulties first-year students encounter stem primarily from lack of preparation.
The American Diploma Project (2004), for example, argues bluntly that “the preparation students receive in high school is the greatest predictor of bachelor’s degree attainment” (p. 2). The merit of the argument cannot be dismissed out of hand: better-prepared students do succeed more often. But at the same time, we need to remind ourselves that one of the strongest arguments that successful students are better prepared is that they do succeed. If preparation predicts student success, student success acts as the sign and seal of preparation.
All of this tends to deflect attention from what happens in the classrooms and laboratories at colleges and universities. If students succeed, they were, against the odds, well prepared. If they fail, well, perhaps when the high schools get straightened out that will not happen so often. Such a passive stance is neither accurate—what happens in college instruction does matter—nor viable in the long run. After all, the same forces that have begun to demand more accountability and more assessment from secondary schools are also arrayed around the wall of academe. In the words of the American Diploma Project (2004), the states backed by the clout of the federal Higher Education Act should “hold postsecondary institutions accountable for the academic success of the students they admit–—including learning, persistence and degree completion–—rather than allowing them to continue to place ill-prepared students in remedial, noncredit- bearing courses and then replace dropouts with new students the following year”.
Our point here is not that the preparation of students is of no concern to faculty teaching first-year students. Nor is it that American high schools are functioning adequately or that they are beyond our capacity to improve or even transform. Rather, what we think makes most sense is for those who teach first-year students to try to devise some means to meet them where they are, academically, intellectually, and emotionally, without abandoning reasonable rigor and appropriately high standards. This is a difficult task. To accomplish it, we first need to acknowledge more clearly than most of us have just how “foreign” the land we inhabit is. If we can get a sense of how alien things must seem to first-year students, we can perhaps begin to see their preparation (or lack of it) in a different and perhaps more illuminating light.
