A Nevada County Shows That Schools and Colleges Can Work Together

Educators ended the blame game and identified what students need to succeed

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By JENNIFER JACOBSON

You'd expect to see a college basketball coach on television plugging a local car dealership, not an academic subject like math.

So when Mark Fox, the men's coach at the University of Nevada at Reno, went on the air to encourage kids to stick with mathematics, people noticed.

The public-service announcement has been airing in the Washoe County area since November. "Everything has a progression to it in basketball, and mathematics is very similar to that," Mr. Fox says in the 30-second spot, as footage of his team appears on the screen. "Very few people that play college basketball didn't play high-school basketball. And math is very similar. It's hard to take a year off and then be really good at it the next year."

The segment was created by the Education Collaborative of Washoe County, which includes the public schools, Truckee Meadows Community College, and the university. The group's 25-member board is made up of the schools' superintendent, the college and university presidents, and other education officials and business people.

For more than five years, the collaborative has worked to raise student achievement, lower the high-school dropout rate, and better prepare students for college. In the past, schools and colleges blamed each other when high-school graduates arrived on campuses unprepared. The Education Collaborative, however, has shown that cooperation is possible. At a time when the transition from high school to college has become a major focus of education reform, a growing number of cities and states are looking to establish partnerships like Washoe's.

"What we've been able to do is identify enough people to carry on that conversation," says William N. Cathey, a vice provost at Reno, who is president of the collaborative. "You don't have to have every English professor talking to every high-school English teacher. You just need to have a few key English people."

The key person in Washoe County's effort was Reno's vice president for academic affairs, Robert Hoover. He became interested in K-16 cooperation after attending a meeting of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that has long promoted such partnerships. Mr. Hoover, who is now president of Albertson College, in Idaho, established a K-16 council in the early 1990s that later merged with another group to form the collaborative.

Since 84 percent of the school district's graduates attend the university or the community college, it made sense for the three institutions to work together, Mr. Cathey says. The council's first project was to track the percentage of district students who went on to higher education. That was nearly eight years ago. At the time, Nevada was near the bottom among national rankings, says Mr. Cathey — an "embarrassing" performance, he acknowledges.

As it turned out, though, the council's officials found that 65 percent of high-school graduates in Washoe County went on to college — just at the national average. The collection of such information would lead to the collaborative's most important work, the "Washoe K-16 Data Profile," an annual report that since 1997 has tracked the district's high-school students and their subsequent performance in college. It examines patterns in students' choice of courses in high school and college, and results of college-entrance exams.

The 2002 data profile showed a disturbing trend: a two-year increase in the percentage of school-district graduates enrolled in remedial English or math courses (or both) at Reno and at Truckee Meadows. The profile, which uses students' scores on the ACT and SAT to determine whether they need remedial work, has focused on that issue ever since. According to the most recent data, from last fall, 36 percent of the 2004 high-school graduates who entered the university needed remediation in English, and 36 percent in math. Those figures were higher for graduates who went on to the community college: 74 percent in English and 76 percent in math.

"If we didn't use the data to improve what we're doing" in the Education Collaborative, says Mr. Cathey, "it would have been a waste of time."

While education officials want to reduce the need for remedial courses, they still must accommodate the demand for them. Last fall the university offered three more remedial-math sections than it had the previous year, for a total of 14, and three more remedial-English sections, for a total of 29.

Starting next year, however, the Nevada Legislature will no longer pay for remedial courses at the university. Lawmakers said they were fed up with paying for students to take subjects in college that they should have mastered in high school. Members of the collaborative believe that the Legislature, by forcing the university to pay for remedial courses out of its own pocket, hopes to create a sense of urgency among education officials to fix the problem. "There ought to be some accountability in the system," says Lynn Hettrick, a Republican member of the Assembly from Washoe County.

Last semester 454 out of 2,432 freshmen at Reno took remedial math, at a cost of $306 per student, says Edward C. Keppelmann, chairman of the math department. The high number of unprepared students concerns him. "There must be a communication problem, some breakdown of what our expectations are and what they think our expectations are," he says.

For the past year and a half, he and Martha Robertson, the school district's math coordinator for grades six through 12, have met regularly. "He's really trying to reach out and keep us in the loop," she says. They have discussed, among other things, the math-marketing campaign. Its goal is to raise math awareness among parents and students, says Denise Hedrick, the collaborative's executive director. The school district's recent decision to develop a more demanding math curriculum served as the impetus for the project, she says. Starting with the graduating class of 2009, high-school students will be required to take a fourth year of math.

Some people might wonder if Mr. Fox's basketball players should take more math and improve their academic records. The National Collegiate Athletic Association categorized Reno's basketball team as "academically borderline" in 2003-4, the year before he became coach. The team's Academic Progress Rate, as the NCAA score is formally known, was 907 out of 1,000, although the association said it expected the team to meet the standard once 2004-5 data were collected. The rating is based on the number of athletes who remain enrolled and the number who remain academically eligible for sports. The NCAA predicts that a team that maintains a score of at least 925 over a long period of time will graduate 50 percent of its athletes.

Mr. Fox says that he leaves the academic advising of his players to trained professionals on the campus, and that the NCAA rating does not fairly represent his program. He bristles at questions about his appearance in the math public-service announcement when his team has had academic issues of its own. "I'm an advocate of education and always will be," he says.

Mr. Cathey says the Education Collaborative is pleased to have Mr. Fox's endorsement. "He is well respected, well liked, and a positive role model for young people," the vice provost writes in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. The coach is committed to his players' success off the field, Mr. Cathey says. The university saw improvement in the cumulative and semester grade-point averages for the men's basketball team from 2004 to 2005 and hopes to see improvement in future graduation rates as well, he writes. And Reno's overall student-athlete graduation rate has improved, he adds. According to figures released in 2005 by the NCAA, the university's graduation rate for athletes enrolled in 1998-99 was 56 percent, compared with 44 percent the previous year.

The collaborative, meanwhile, has created a Web site (http://www.washoemath.org) that features fun facts about math and various games (and video of the public-service announcements). The site lets students take practice placement tests to see what math courses they would be qualified to take in college. Two professors in Reno's math department created the tests, which Mr. Keppelmann, the math chairman, describes as "basically entrance exams to our lower courses."

"What we're trying to encourage is that students take care of this remedial work before they get here," Mr. Cathey says. "Telling them to do that is one thing. Telling them how to do it is where we can really be helpful."

The Education Collaborative will issue its next data profile this summer, which for the first time will focus on English. Studying the need for remedial work in English, however, will be a challenge because English courses do not follow the linear sequence of math courses, says Anne Loring, a member of the collaborative who is a former member of the Washoe County School Board.

In the meantime, she hopes, when students watch Coach Fox's public-service announcement, the message that four years of math is important will sink in.

The one with Mr. Fox is "nifty," Ms. Loring says. "Because the UNR basketball team was really successful last year, I think it's going to resonate with the young people here."