Reforming Education Across New England

by Evan S. Dobelle

Good New England jobs that were once open to smart, ambitious high school graduates now require a bachelor's degree at minimum. However, young New Englanders face two daunting barriers to college success. One, many are simply not prepared for college -- academically or in other ways; at least 25 percent of those who enter ninth grade will not even graduate from high school. Two, many cannot afford the high tuition, fees, books, and other charges -- or believe they can't.

Addressing higher education access and success should be a top regional priority for New England's governors. Problems and solutions will vary somewhat from state to state, but here are some regional strategies for the six chief executives to consider:

• Hold a summit meeting on how public education is financed. New England is failing its urban, rural, low-income and first-generation students from the Berkshires to Boston. All the best intentions about making these underserved students “college-ready” and closing the “education gap” are empty as long as tax-poor cities are dependent on local property taxes to finance their schools.
  
  
• Create a regionwide forum for best practices in teaching. Some education reformers would put creative teachers in a straitjacket of restrictions and tests. Teaching is both a profession and a passion. To get innovation, teachers and adminstrators should be given financial incentives to try new ideas and to share information on what works and what doesn't.
  
  
• Expand kindergarten and make preschool mandatory for 3-year-olds. This one's a no-brainer. The six states can invest in early childhood education now or continue to spend the money in the criminal justice and social welfare systems. Pay now or pay later, but states will pay, so why not make it an investment?
  
  
• Develop a regional network of policymakers and educators, from prekindergarten through college, to explore ways to make sure what our schools teach is aligned appropriately with what public and private colleges and universities expect of freshmen. Toward this end, New England could create a regional exchange program enabling college professors to spend a semester working in K-12 schools and giving school teachers time off to undertake meaningful research projects at New England colleges.
  
  
• Develop marketing campaigns targeted at those groups of students who face the most difficulty in entering and succeeding in college. These campaigns should work in partnership with after-school and enrichment programs administered by the region's community and faith-based organizations. Their goal must be to impress upon students and their parents the value of a college degree in today's job market, and to direct them to one-stop web sites for the information and resources they need to successfully navigate college options. The culture of college aspirations must be changed.

Some of these steps toward improving student preparation for college are already being undertaken by the New England Board of Higher Education’s “College Ready New England” initiative. This effort marks the first time in history that the region’s governors, state higher education executives, and education commissioners have come together with the business community to increase college preparedness and success.

The region's governors and other key officials also need to step up to the plate on making higher education affordable.

The federal Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance conservatively estimates that in this decade, more than 2 million low- and moderate-income high school graduates who are college-ready will not complete college due to financial barriers. This is unacceptable. Here are some strategies for New England:

• Use political leverage to lobby for strengthened Pell Grants. The recent Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education recommended raising the purchasing power of the average Pell Grant to cover 70 percent of average in-state tuition at public four-year campuses, up from the current 48 percent. Five years of efforts to raise the maximum Pell Grant have failed. But Congress and the administration might be ready to listen to New England's bipartisan delegation of governors if they went to Washington in force to argue for more need-based aid.
  
  
• The governors should find powerful allies among New England's US Senate delegation. Remember, states like Florida may have more population than the six New England states combined, but this region has 12 senators to Florida's two. It needs to use that advantage and also support the efforts of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative John F. Tierney to expand student financial assistance.
  
  
• Direct aid dollars to need, not merit. The recent history of federal and state student aid is marked by two trends: a shift from grants to loans and tax breaks and a shift away from awarding aid based on student financial need to aid based on sometimes dubious measures of merit. Merit aid often benefits students who would go on to college anyway. If we are serious about the value of higher education to our future, we need to use scarce student aid resources to fund students who would not otherwise go to college -- that means prioritizing need-based aid.
  
  
• Create a regionwide corps of students, including nontraditional students, to address teaching and nursing shortages by waiving tuition in exchange for a guarantee that they will practice their profession for four years in New England after graduation -- not unlike the service obligations used by military academies.
  
  
• Make community college free, and ease transfer of credits earned to four-year institutions. The six New England states should adopt region wide the recent recommendation from University of Massachusetts chairman Stephen P. Tocco to make community college tuition-free. Then they should work to ensure that the region's 43 community colleges and more than 200 public and private four-year colleges and universities set clear guidelines on what they expect a given course to cover.

The goal is to make all New England college credits applicable at all New England accredited institutions, to the extent possible, regardless of whether they are focused on workforce training or liberal arts. Harry Truman suggested 60 years ago that education should be tuition-free through “14th grade.” It’s time to make this happen.

We are in economic class war without a battle plan. College readiness and affordability present a quagmire for too many New England students. The success will be easy to measure.

Today, for New England kids who do graduate high school, the numbers are still startling. In Connecticut, 38 percent of high school graduates do not go on to college. In Maine, 49 percent do not. In Massachusetts, the figure is 35 percent; in New Hampshire, 44 percent; in Rhode Island, 47 percent; and in Vermont, 55 percent.

Surely, we can comprehend what this failure rate means to our economy, our civility, and our collective future. Working together, the region's six governors have a brilliant opportunity to change this and offer those students hope.