B2 eZ re the washington post.monday, february 24 , 2020
education
instruction that is challenging
has been shown to work.
It usually takes an order from
above to change practices at high
schools that keep average
students out of AP and IB classes.
The Fairfax County School
Board’s decision to open AP and
IB classes to all students in 1998
brought much change and
spread through the rest of
Northern Virginia. Sadly, few
other states and districts have
made that move.
Kesselheim said he thinks
schools can fix this on their own.
They can launch course reviews,
seek community engagement
and get isolated teachers and
counselors to talk to one another.
Average students often have
much potential, but how can
they show it if they are always
assigned to the slowest and
dullest courses?
[email protected]statements promising common
goals, but hardly anyone pays
attention. “One department,
maybe social studies, provides an
open door to any student wishing
to embrace the challenge
embedded in an honors-level
class,” Kesselheim said. “The
department down the hall or in
another wing, perhaps English,
requires an application essay.”
Unguided grading practices
pave the way for mindless
sorting. “School systems do a far
better job of codifying dress
codes, class-rank procedures and
disciplinary ladders than they do
in guiding and unifying teachers’
grading practices,” he said.
Grades influence how students
think about themselves and their
futures, yet teachers often give
grades as they like without much
thought about the effect. There is
little evidence that bad grades
inspire improvement, while16 years, he has been helping
schools and districts ease
themselves out of traditional
course hierarchies that don’t
make sense. “Highly engaged
parents use the system to ensure
their students rise to the top.
America’s DNA for public
education seems to be a zero-
sum game: In order to have
winners, we must have losers,” he
said.
I asked why so many schools,
usually run by intelligent people
who want the best for their
students, let this go on. He
blamed professional isolation,
something I have seen often in
the schools but never thought
about much. Te achers must
make their own decisions on a
variety of matters, including
grading. The same isolation is
imposed on department heads,
counselors and administrators.
Schools might have missionplacement of entering ninth-
graders,” Kesselheim said. “A
frequent result of this deadline
pressure is a hastily cobbled-
together collection of
paragraphs, submitted by
teachers and department heads,
comprised largely of last year’s
text, and edited by no one.”
Middle school teachers are
pressed into recommending
which students going into high
school should take honors
courses and which should not. In
many schools, “there is no
science to these acts of judgment
and no uniformity across
teachers or across content areas,”
Kesselheim said. “Placement
recommendations are highly
subject to departmental whims,
teachers’ beliefs about ability
and implicit bias.”
Kesselheim was once a middle
school science teacher and
administrator. For the pastcourse. Still, the majority of
average students are told to stick
with easy stuff. I figured that
must be because school leaders
weren’t taking into account the
needs of students to be ready for
college or a job.
Craig Kesselheim is changing
my mind about this. He is a
senior associate at the Great
Schools Partnership, a nonprofit
school-support organization
based in Portland, Maine. He
said the tendency to sort rather
than teach is rooted in a specific
high school administrative
routine — producing the
Program of Study, otherwise
known as the course catalogue. It
describes every subject at every
level available at the school.
“Logistically, Program of Study
documents are most often
published midyear or early
spring in order to assist school
counselors with the courseI became an
education
reporter because I
wanted to know
why so few high
schools were
giving their
average students
challenging
assignments. The best students
were often allowed into
Advanced Placement or
International Baccalaureate
courses. But college-level work
for the rest of the students was a
no-no.
Putting “C” s tudents into AP
felt on those campuses like a
cultural gaffe, the equivalent of
holding the senior prom in
March.
The situation has improved
somewhat. About 12 percent of
high schools have at least half of
their 11th- and 12th-graders
taking a least one AP or IB
Why are t he majority of average students stuck in the dullest high school courses?
Jay
Mathews
BY CHARLOTTE WESTJURUPA VALLEY, CALif. — Felici-
da Barajas’s office at Jurupa Val-
ley High School was strangely
silent. The only sounds were the
clacking of computer keys and
the occasional joke to break the
tension as 12th-graders hunched
over laptops trying to finish their
essays ahead of a looming college
application deadline. Six stu-
dents perched on chairs
crammed into the office, and
other students sat on the floor
beneath a rainbow of college
pennants.
Melissa To rres was among the
high school seniors who spent
the day camped out with Barajas.
The 17-year-old had put off her
applications to California’s pub-
lic universities until the last min-
ute because “it didn’t seem real,”
she recalled. But having Barajas
sit down w ith her and explain the
process made things easier.
“She helped me figure out
what to do next, step by step,
because it was overwhelming to
do it all at once,” Torres said.
Barajas is a new school coun-
selor at Jurupa High. Counselors
can make the difference between
a student heading to college with
a robust financial aid package
and a plan of study — or not
applying to college at all. For
first-generation students and
those from low-income families,
a counselor might be the only
person who can help them sign
up for standardized tests, com-
pile a list of prospective colleges,
write admissions essays and fill
out dizzyingly complicated f inan-
cial aid forms.
Ye t many counselors receive
little or no training in college
counseling. Although most coun-
selors are required to hold a
master’s degree, many graduate
programs in counseling don’t of-
fer any classes on college admis-
sions. Instead, training focuses
on helping students cope with
social and emotional problems.
That in part reflects how coun-
selors’ jobs have changed during
the past few decades. As more
students show up to class hungry,
tired, anxious or depressed,
schools have shifted resources
toward helping them cope with
these basic needs. Counselors
also contend with test adminis-
tration and other administrative
tasks. Still, the need for help with
increasingly complicated college
planning has expanded, especial-
ly as tuition has soared, raising
the stakes for decisions about
college and financial aid.
Recognizing that the pendu-
lum has swung far from college
and career counseling, a few
states, including California, have
started requiring more training
in these areas. S ome counties and
school districts are adding pro-
fessional development opportu-
nities for counselors amid a push
to boost graduation and college
enrollment rates. Barajas bene-
fited from the New School Coun-
selor Academy, run by Califor-
nia’s Riverside County Office of
Education. It offers professional
development in college counsel-
ing and career planning to cur-
rent and incoming school coun-
selors.
“That totally opened up my
entire world because in my grad-
uate school, it was more about
mental health,” said Barajas, a
first-generation college student
who recently graduated from a
master’s program in school coun-
seling at California State Univer-
sity at San Bernardino. She
sought out the New School Coun-
selor Academy while still in grad-
uate school to fill gaps in her
knowledge. “I knew that what I
learned in my p rogram is going t o
be so different compared to when
I actually got to the field,” she
said.
Experts who have studied the
issue said the dearth of graduate
training in college admissions
results, in part, from many facul-
ty coming from clinical counsel-
ing backgrounds and lacking ex-
perience working in schools.
Four years ago, the main ac-
creditor of counseling programs
added standards related to col-
lege and career readiness. But
programs h ave until 2023 to com-
ply, and change has been slow.
Laura Owen, a former school
counselor who directs American
University’s Center for Postsec-
ondary Readiness and Success,
said many counseling programs
argue that they infuse college and
career training throughout the
curriculum. “That’s not going to
do what we need to have done to
really prepare our students,”
Owen said. “We need stand-alone
coursework that is providing this
training.”
Representatives of graduate
programs argue that their stu-
dents gain exposure to college
counseling through internships.
Many states require a minimum
of 600 hours of field experienceto earn licensure in school coun-
seling. But internships vary w ide-
ly in the hands-on experiences
they offer.
Leslie Nelson, a counselor in
her second year at Milwaukie
High School near Portland, Ore.,
said she took a single class on
college and career readiness in
her counseling program at Lewis
& Clark College. The course fo-
cused on using assessments to
help students identify possible
careers, she said, but did not
cover strategies for helping stu-
dents identify colleges or apply
for financial aid. “It didn’t feel
like a lot of preparation,” s he said.
Although she’s learning on the
job, she didn’t know where to
start when it came to helping
students select colleges that
might be a fit. “A ll colleges have
their niches. I just don’t know
what those niches are,” s he said.Some jurisdictions are trying
to help. On a recent weekday, a
dozen school counselors gath-
ered at the Riverside County Of-
fice of Education for the New
School Counselor Academy. Pe-
dro Caro, the county’s college and
career readiness coordinator,
projected California’s dashboard
of school data on a screen and
showed participants how to dig
into the numbers for their
schools. The dashboard, which
presents data on attendance, sus-
pension rates and graduation
rates, can help counselors tailor
their advising for students, Caro
said.
Barajas, the first-year counsel-
or at Jurupa Valley, said the
academy gave her skills to track
students’ academic progress to
help ensure they are meeting
college admissions require-
ments. She can step in as soon asshe sees a student is falling be-
hind academically.
The counselor academy was
started under the leadership of
Catalina Cifuentes, who worked
as a counselor for eight years
before becoming executive direc-
tor of college and career readi-
ness at the Riverside County Of-
fice of Education. She founded
the academy with Caro after en-
countering difficulty finding
qualified counselors to hire. On
one occasion, she said, none of
the eight finalists for a high
school counseling job could read
a high school transcript well
enough to assess whether that
student was college-ready.
“That’s how bad it is,” she said.
“So then they’re having to play
catch-up.”
Along with the New School
Counselor Academy, Riverside
brings together counselors fromacross the county for day-long
training twice a year. This invest-
ment in counseling has paid off.
Five years ago, Riverside County
had one of the lowest high school
graduation rates in California. In
2018, it had the second-highest
rate among California’s 10 largest
counties.
Cifuentes has also been in-
volved in rolling out new stan-
dards for school counseling pro-
grams in California. Under the
update, the first in 20 years, the
state standards will for the first
time include performance crite-
ria for college and career readi-
ness. In addition, prospective
school counselors have to spend
at least 100 of the 800 hours of
required fieldwork on career and
college readiness. Other states,
including Michigan and Te xas,
are taking similar steps.
While counseling is a data-
heavy profession, for Barajas, it’s
also personal. On a recent week-
day, she and a colleague told
ninth-graders about options after
high school.
At Jurupa Valley, more than
70 percent of students are eligible
for free and reduced-price lunch,
a federal measure of poverty, and
62 percent come from house-
holds with no college experience.
Barajas can identify w ith many of
her students.
“I was raised by a single mom,
and my mom was low-income,
and for a time there I really
struggled academically,” she told
the class of ninth-graders. “I had
straight F’s my first year in high
school, and I knew I wanted to go
to college, but I didn’t k now how.”
Barajas explained how she
started at a community college
and continued on to graduate
school at California State Univer-
sity at San Bernardino.
At Jurupa Valley, 17-year-old
Yaire Romero will be the first in
her family to attend college. The
aspiring criminal justice major
said her parents haven’t been
able to attend college nights be-
cause they work a lot.
Unlike many of her classmates
who were camped out with Bara-
jas on deadline day, Romero sub-
mitted her applications well in
advance. She attributes that fore-
sight to her relationship with the
counselors, whom she visits a
couple of times a week.
“If I wouldn’t h ave gotten close
with [my counselors], I would’ve
been like everybody else who had
been all stressed about the whole
college application process,”
Romero said.
Barajas said she never worried
about Romero because of those
frequent check-ins. But she is
concerned about the students
who don’t drop by her office. She
has made it her goal to meet with
all 415 students in her caseload,
starting with the seniors.
If she found a way to attend
college, so can her students, she
tells them. “It’s just opening a
new world for my kids to things
they didn’t know were possible,”
Barajas said.
[email protected]this story about college counseling
was produced by the hechinger
report, a nonprofit, independent
news organization focused on
inequality and innovation in
education.Guidance to c ounselors: Brush up on your college advising
photos by yunuen bonaparte/hechinger reportTOP: High school counselors such as Felicida Barajas, left, can make the difference between students
heading to college with financial aid or not applying at all. ABOVE: S chool counselor Lisa Contreras,
right, makes regular presentations on college and career readiness at Jurupa Valley High School.Training o ften focuses
on helping students with
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