Closing Another Education Gap: High Schooler Access to College-Prep Courses

There are many education access gaps that derail students on their path to post-secondary success. Most of the barriers that we focus on in education include important topics like attendance, grades, test scores, and the critical leading indicator of success, high school graduation rates. However, one subtle gap that tends to get overlooked is course access for students. ExcelinEd highlighted this key topic in one of their recent policy Q&As by posing a simple question: “What role does course access play in preparing students for college and career?” By pondering this question for a few seconds, we can all visualize classmates or current day students who made it through high school but were ultimately unprepared for college. Thanks to the evolution of digital education services, we can imagine a world where the course access gap might be significantly narrowed across America’s high schools so that students are set up for success when they proceed to their post-secondary education path.

Today, the picture is pretty bleak for many students. A quick summary of data cited in the ExcelinEd piece explains why so many students don’t make it out of their first year (or term) as college frosh:

• Only half of high schools nationwide offer calculus, and just under two-thirds offer physics;
• Among high schools with the highest percentages of black and Hispanic students, one quarter do not offer Algebra II and one third do not offer chemistry;
• Just 5 percent of schools offered AP Computer Science in 2016, despite that for every one graduate from a computer science program, there are three jobs available.

Imagine showing up at any four-year college in the U.S. — or any community college for that matter — without the foundational work needed in math, science, or reading and writing. There are other confounding reasons why, according to U.S. News & World Report “as many as 1 in 3 first-year students won’t make it back for sophomore year.” For sure, family finances, loneliness, and other personal reasons might force a student to drop out somewhere between the day they move into their dorm room and the end of that first academic year. But when the reason for dropping out is related to college readiness, we should strive to find ways to offer the core courses kids need to succeed after high school.

ExcelinEd proposes four ways to address this access challenge (and I’d bet there are many other ways to approach this problem). I’ve outlined each of the four ExcelinEd ideas below and have added a few thoughts to make them more specific and actionable:

ExcelinEd: “Conducting an evaluation of existing course offerings in state districts and schools. It is critical that all states know where gaps in coursework exist, how wide they may be, and who is being disadvantaged by them.”

• Absolutely this needs to happen, but it needs to be done in close consultation with higher education institutions so that the alignment is precise. In order to really amplify the connection between which classes should be offered in high school to long-term student success, higher education institutions need to deepen their relationships with business and government entities who will be hiring college graduates in the years ahead. Ultimately, we should be able to draw straight lines from high school coursework, to higher education success, and post-higher education achievement.

ExcelinEd: “Establishing a clear set of criteria for course quality and expected outcomes. Rigor and quality are just as important as access. States also need to develop a transparent process that course providers can navigate to meet these criteria and expand the pool of offerings to schools and students.”

• Here ExcelinEd wades into the realm of online learning services and the ability of these digital-based classes to help fill access gaps. Indeed, many districts simply don’t have the budget or available teacher expertise to offer key courses to their students. So long as everyone in the community understands and agrees that these barriers must be overcome, tapping into online learning options to provide such classes is the logical way to fill the gap. Create a straight forward “Certified Course” process so that online providers are able to meet standards set by districts and/or schools. Again, per the first point above, this should also be done in sync with higher education institutions so that “Certified Course” meets the standards that they believe will set a student up for success in their first year of college.

ExcelinEd: “Identifying and removing barriers to schools and districts seeking to offer these courses to students. For online course offerings, this may include expanding broadband connectivity and supporting broadband network development in rural schools. It may also mean providing performance funding to under-served schools for courses successfully completed by students.”

• Broadband connectivity represents a barrier to online learning access for many students. If there is a single area where AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Google Fiber could help students, it would be in reaching 100% penetration of wi-fi enabled schools. At the same time, we need to support teachers and students with tools that enhance communication and collaboration to ensure completion of these online courses. Attrition rates in online learning is high, and even when several students from the same high school are taking the same courses, the distributed and asynchronous nature of these classes requires more support. Using a communication platform like Remind.com (yes, I’m the CEO) enables real-time communication to be wrapped around online courses in a way that supports students in their effort to successfully complete these crucial college-prep classes.

ExcelinEd: “Creating or designating a centralized hub that can serve as a delivery system for high-needs courses from a range of providers. Many states have existing virtual schools, but these should be augmented by content from a range of high-quality providers (from within and outside the existing state system).”

• The good news here is we don’t need to recreate the wheel. A sufficient amount of high quality, “certification ready” (see the points above) classes exist online across a number of providers such as Coursera, Khan Academy, Udemy, (to name just a few) and via K12.com’s list of high school level online courses. Like any market opportunity, the more active districts and schools become in their efforts to make college-readiness classes available to high school students, the more the edtech ecosystem will work to make these courses “certified” by district and school leaders, and then easy for students to find, enroll, and excel in. Again, at Remind.com we see a world where our communication platform that connects students, teachers, and parents might also become a channel through which classes like these are discovered and consumed in a context that students are already familiar.

As districts and schools work to provide access to the courses students need to succeed post-high school, we ultimately need to keep student success as the ultimate long-range goal. Let’s not misconstrue course and class access as opening a Pandora’s box to an unfettered and polarizing broad-based school choice debate. This is about closing gaps by providing access for all students. If digital learning services and tools can be deployed strategically on behalf of all high school students we’ll improve one of the many variables that impact college success and we’ll help improve lifetime achievement potential for millions of students.