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Making Sense of the P-16 Push

THERE ARE two ways to contemplate P-16 reform. One approach would ask why we have configured early childhood services, K-12 schooling, and higher education as we have. We would ask why we originally embraced the public and private designs that we regard as familiar, whether those arrangements have grown unwieldy with time, whether they continue to serve the purposes for which they were established, and how we might rethink and rearrange teaching and learning. In doing so, we would avoid paying undue deference to arbitrary, synthetic divisions like those that separate pre-K and K-12 or high school from postsecondary education. The usual way to justify such an expansive rethinking is to cite a litany of statistics documenting the shortcomings of schooling today. In this case, however, it's enough simply to note that no one should be surprised that arrangements which have haphazardly taken shape over two centuries are ill equipped to address the challenges or fully exploit the opportunities of the 21st century. That first approach has not been the tack we have generally adopted, however. Instead, as with so much in schooling, we have approached P-16 in a less-constructive fashion--one given to faddism and quick fixes. Colloquiums on P-16 reform have often served as forums to convene stakeholders and devise new policies that are not too unsettling for any particular interest. In many locales, these deliberations have had the happy result of promoting the introduction or expansion of longitudinal data systems as well as earnest efforts to align curricula and standards. Often, however, they have simply enabled advocacy groups to push pet proposals for new graduation standards, pre-K programs, or assessment systems. Whatever their merits, these measures share a crucial, unhappy condition: they start from a premise that leaves nearly all the aged machinery of education in place; we seem to be afraid to tinker with its hard-wired assumptions. To some extent, this is all to be expected. Public officials have incentives to get problems fixed now, today (before the next election). The role of advocates is to push for favored policy changes. Moreover, the innate reluctance to alter existing arrangements is a generally virtuous element of the American psyche--especially in education, where polling consistently suggests that the American people are quite comfortable with the status quo. THE LIMITS OF THE P-16 MINDSET Let me be clear. The trouble is not that policy makers and advocates are trying to find sensible ways to make the familiar machinery work better. In fact, Florida's K-20 Education Data Warehouse, Indiana's Core 40 high school curriculum, and California's Academic Partnership Program are all constructive developments deserving of support. The trouble is that reformers, far-sighted practitioners, funders, and scholars--in other words, those with the opportunity to venture further from the status quo--have allowed these proposals and familiar boxes to constrain the way they think about, write about, and research these issues. Consider some of the more widely touted efforts to pursue P-16 reform. Early college high school is prompted by the recognition that the high school/postsecondary divide is artificial and the transition has proven in-timidating and difficult to negotiate for many at-risk and low-income students. Backers of early college efforts like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation have promoted schools that adopt a grade 9-14 framework in which students can launch their collegiate studies in the comfortable environment of their high school. Another favored proposal is the push to "vertically align" K-16 standards. Thoughtful organizations including Achieve, Inc. and the American Diploma Project have pointed out that the disjuncture between state standards for high school graduates and professors' expectations for college freshmen is sometimes enormous. …