Dr. Michael W. Kirst is Professor of Education, Business Administration, and Political Science at Stanford University. Dr. Kirst is a former vice-president of the American Educational Research Association and former president of the California State Board of Education. He is the principle investigator on three major research projects: The Bridge K-16 Project, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. As part of The Bridge K-16 Project, Dr. Kirst has led an investigation of higher education admissions policies, freshman placement/advising policies in colleges and universities, and curriculum content and assessment standards in K-12 systems. The project's findings have recently been published in a book (edited by Dr. Kirst and Andrea Venezia) entitled From High School to College - Improving Opportunities for Success in Postsecondary Education.

Encouraged in part by No Child Left Behind, every state in America (except for Iowa) has adopted academic content standards and statewide K-12 achievement tests. Some educators and politicians have hailed this movement as a step toward progressive educational reform. Indeed, there is progress in clarifying: 1) what students must be able to know and to do in the K-12 grades, and 2) how to align standards, assessments, textbook selection, and accountability measures at the K-12 level. A gaping hole in this state reform strategy, however, is the lack of coherence in content and assessment standards between K-12 and higher education. Unless we close this standards gap and better integrate K-16 policies, students and secondary schools will continue to receive a confusing array of signals and will not be able to prepare adequately for higher education.

The current scene is a quagmire of standards, rather than a coherent strategy across levels of education. In fact, the only nationally aligned K-16 standards effort is the Advanced Placement Program - a model that extends from universities, utilizing a common syllabus and exam formulated by both levels of education. Unclear signals, such as the lack of congruence between K-12 assessments and higher education placement exams, result in the need for high levels of postsecondary remediation, and discourage completion of postsecondary degrees. Improving the policy signaling process and aligning K-16 policies will benefit all students, but particularly those who go to open enrollment or non-selective institutions. Students at broad access postsecondary schools, approximately 80% high school graduates who enter postsecondary education (Kirst & Venezia, 25), have the least information about what they need to know and be able to do for college success. For most of these students, placement standards are more important than admissions standards.

Unfortunately for these students, higher education placement tests are not aligned with the K-12 curriculum. In the southeast United States, for example, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) found in 1992 that there were nearly 125 combinations of 75 different placement tests devised by universities with scant regard to secondary school standards.

For students who take the popular college entrance exams, the ACT and SAT, the situation is not much better. Though many US institutions rely on the ACT and SAT tests to provide some uniformity, these admissions assessments were not designed to be linked with new state K-12 content or assessment standards. For example, Massachusetts' state-wide K-12 assessment contains performance items that are dissimilar to the closed-end multiple choice format of SAT and ACT. California's Standards Test (CST) includes math that is considerably more advanced and difficult than the math included in SAT I and ACT.

Statewide high school tests do not generally assess the same material, or in the same manner, as college admissions or placement exams. In mathematics, for example, high school statewide exams typically assess statistics and geometry while college admissions tests rely mostly on algebra and functions (American Diploma Project, 2004). Many statewide high school tests do not assess material from beyond tenth grade, making their articulation with postsecondary placement exams unlikely. Illinois, however, has a state test given in the 11th grade to every student, and it combines ACT items with others that match Illinois content standards. California, New York, and Pennsylvania all utilize rigorous 11th grade exams, and many states have end-of-course exams in subjects such as biology, chemistry, and world history that provide useful admissions and placement data.

Universities and colleges offer some good reasons for paying little attention to K-12 standards or assessments. They emphasize that higher education was not involved in the process of creating or refining K-12 standards. Moreover, state K-12 standards keep changing because of political or technical problems. The K-12 assessments are not evaluated to see how well they predict student's first-semester college grades (although this is not difficult to do). Universities hope that the SAT and ACT will make adjustments to accommodate these new K-12 standards, and feel comfortable with the two assessments they know and can influence.

Freshman Placement Examinations - Suggested Policy Changes

• Colleges should examine the relationship between their first-year placement exams and K-12 state assessments and standards. This would include whether these assessments are similar or different with respect to structural and procedural features, content, and cognitive demands. The possible consequences for students that arise from assessment discrepancies need to be understood by college placement officials. Moreover, placement exams designed by colleges and universities should be reviewed for reliability, validity, and authenticity.
  
  
• Colleges should inform high school students of the content, standards, and consequences of the placement exams.
  
  
• Public colleges and universities should allow students to take placement exams in grades 11 and 12 and allow them to substitute suitable statewide K-12 assessments for university-devised placement exams. In states that have different placement exams for each university or tier of postsecondary education, content differences should be analyzed to determine whether a common exam is feasible.
  
  
• More fundamental reform could be stimulated by reconceptualizing general education as a project spanning the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. Courses could be sequenced for college-bound students during these four years creating content articulation as a basis for assessment that flows from high school to college.
  
  
• The misalignment of k-16 assessments is a troubling issue faced by millions of high school and college students every year. Regardless of the current circumstances that impede collaboration between K-12 and postsecondary education, to help ensure the success of first-year college students, college faculty and administrators must first become cognizant of, and then seek to change, the misalignment of K-16 assessments.

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For sources to statements above, see Michael Kirst and Andrea Venezia, From High School to College: Improving Opportunities for Success in Postsecondary Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

Additional suggestions for K-16 policy changes are available at http://www.stanford.edu/group/ncpi/documents/pdfs/2-06_kirstk16.pdf

The K-16 Bridge Project, the research effort from which the information presented in this essay is drawn, can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/bridgeproject/

The author retains all rights to this essay. However, FYA-List subscribers may distribute the essay for non-commercial purposes.