Project Directors:
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The explosion of education reforms in the past decade is now resurrecting
historical tensions between the public university and the public school.
Vocationally and academically inspired reformers now share a common
problem--both experience reluctance by the university to accept new nonstandard
courses and assessments. Ironically, these nonstandard courses and assessments
resulted from efforts to make school more meaningful to students by integrating
curricula and assessing mastery and performance. In spite of the substantial
private, state, and federal investment in these reforms, they will not undergo
the test of systemwide implementation if a full range of American youth and
educators are not participating. The university holds the key because
college-bound youth and parents will not participate if they believe their
chances for university admission are compromised. This two-year project
focuses on two questions: (1) How are state universities coping with
curricular experiments? and (2) What difficulties have reformers
encountered with universities? To answer the questions we propose to
undertake a historical review of university-high school relations followed by
case studies of how universities located in four different states presently
cope with reform efforts of high schools and community colleges. We then will
scale up our analytic efforts to the fifty states, followed by a forum for
reformers and university leaders to discuss strategies needed to support
promising and educationally sound reforms.
We will produce three documents. The first is a final technical report that
will include the historical analysis and results from cross-case analysis of
the state case studies and the demonstration forum. The report should be of
interest to researchers, universities, reformers, and the policy community.
The second document is a guide for reformers that will include the results of
the fifty-state survey. The third document is a short policy brief.
In addition, we will convene study participants at a forum designed to further
study efforts beyond analysis. We plan a development activity between
reformers and university leaders to address opportunities and barriers to lower
school reforms.
We will report our findings widely in the practitioner, policy, and research
communities through presentations at national meetings hosted by NCRVE, AVA,
AVERA, and AERA. We also expect to produce journal articles for
policy-oriented journals. The RAND policy brief will be written in
nontechnical language to promote interest in the general policy community.
Dissemination will also occur with the convening of the forum.
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