The New College Try

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The university has benefited in other ways. Teachers in training, who used to crowd into cavernous auditoriums for class, can spend their days on-site at the K-12 public schools. Several mornings a week, a professor lectures in a borrowed room and then the education students fan out to classrooms to perfect their new skills. Says Sally Blake, an associate professor of education at UTEP: "Now I can see what actually works in the classroom with real students and teachers." Henry Levin, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, says that "universities like to cop the attitude that they can make public schools better overnight." But after working hands-on in those schools, "they become a lot less brash rather quickly."

Coppin State in Maryland devoted much of the first year of its partnership with Rosemont to mundane matters like making sure the school had working telephones and a fresh coat of paint. The college also took on the more daunting task of educating the school's parents. Coppin offered child-rearing classes to Rosemont parents, but the instructor soon realized some of the parents had trouble reading the handouts. After surveying school parents about their educational needs, Coppin began helping some work toward high school diplomas.

In other cases, it's the teachers who need tutoring. Working with a Los Angeles-area high school, a math professor from California State University, Dominguez Hills, spent weeks fashioning an algebra unit in which students would operate a fictive bakery. But half the teachers fell back on their familiar lesson plan. Why? They reportedly felt their algebra skills weren't sharp enough to let them field student questions.

Even more jarring, especially to those in academe who enjoy the permanence of tenure, is the dizzying rate of turnover in struggling public schools. Take the partnership between a high school in California's central valley and a neighboring community college, which won a five-year, $300,000 grant from the state. By the second year, 85% of those involved with the project had left. Says Dave Jolly, who administered the grant for the state: "The principal, the vice principal and most of the best teachers were all gone." The partnership fizzled.

Improving public schools without affronting those who run them is a delicate enterprise. And the K-16 movement has spawned more than its share of bruised egos and snubbed feelings on both sides. After a committee chaired by Georgia State University Provost Ron Henry spent months drafting a list of academic-content standards, not a single school district adopted it. Instead, the Atlanta school district drew up its own, albeit similar, guidelines. Says Peyton Williams, the deputy state superintendent of schools: "There's a quiet kind of resistance."

And sometimes there's a noisy kind. At Marian Manor Elementary, one of the participating El Paso schools, a fifth of the teachers quit rather than follow the new plan, which required them to attend meetings in their free time and spend their weekends at workshops. But more often the tensions are subtler tussles over turf and authority. "Now I answer to two bosses, the college and the school district," says Russell Perkins, Rosemont's principal. "And sometimes I just have to tell them not to look over my shoulder."

But Perkins, his bosses and his teachers think it's worth enduring a little friction to hear stories of students like Rosemont fourth-grader Briana Hopkins. Though her mother dropped out of college after two years and her elder brother forsook higher education for a job as a maintenance worker, Briana spent last summer taking enrichment classes at Coppin State and tells her mom how she wants to go off to college one day. Says Briana's mother JoAnn: "If going to college had been stressed earlier, it could have been totally different for me and my son." And now it may be for her daughter.