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College Readiness: The latest educational “hot topic” in Maine has been Governor Baldacci’s school district reorganization plan, which was passed and finalized on June 6, 2007. The plan calls for a reduction of the number of school districts from 209 to 80. With such a drastic decrease, this issue has been a polarized one, with newspaper headlines reading: Law Has Superintendents Fuming, Consolidation Impact on Education is Immense and Legislators Succumb to Pressure. As Governor Baldacci stated in his closing address to the state legislature, “We’ve created a two-year state budget that makes the most significant reforms in K-12 education in more than 50 years.” Notwithstanding the challenges of such a reform, Maine’s education leadership also found the time to move ahead in the quest for higher college readiness standards. On April 4, 2007, the Maine Higher Education Council, made up of the presidents from each of Maine’s colleges and universities, adopted a Statement on College Readiness, outlining the high school requirements for postsecondary educational success. With every higher educational institution in the state in agreement, it carried a unified message to Maine’s secondary schools. The statement sprang from the efforts of one woman. Lynne Miller is, among other things, the co-executive director of the Southern Maine Partnership at the University of Southern Maine (USM). She is also an active member of the Composition Coalition, a group created to explore and define the notion of college readiness. Her work with the Coalition came about when the Chancellor of the University of Maine System asked Miller and her colleague, Ann Dean, to compile a set of principles defining college expectations and what it takes to succeed. The result: in September of 2005, College Readiness In Writing: A Report to the Field was published. With the help of numerous contributors, including several members from the Composition Coalition, Dean and Miller produced a document delineating what a student should expect from a postsecondary education at any one of the seven institutions of the University of Maine System; but, with sample assignments and rubrics from statewide college courses and writing samples from first year college students, the document retains a universality, a malleable tool for any secondary student. Following the publication of College Readiness in Writing, the University of Maine System office asked Lynne Miller to go to each of the Chief Academic Officers at each of the system’s seven universities to propose a broader set of readiness standards. The result was a College Readiness Guide, one page in length, listing the secondary educational coursework necessary for success in higher education. Miller’s challenge was to get the seven Chief Academic Officers to agree to the need for four years of both English and math, at least three years of lab science and social studies, and at least two years of a world language. Recognizing these courses as infrastructural to higher learning, they whole-heartedly endorsed the set of standards. . Shortly thereafter, the statement was posted on the University of Maine System’s website; although for a while this triumph in the development of defining “college-readiness” remained within the confines of the University System and its website visitors. When the Executive Director of the Maine Higher Education Council (MHEC), Heidi Farber, stumbled upon the statement she was surprised. “When I learned that—I thought, ‘Hey, why can’t we do this state-wide?’” she recalled. Given the need to work with all of Maine’s 33 private colleges, Farber’s goal of adopting the college readiness statement was not a foregone conclusion. She went first to MHEC’s Executive Committee, composed of two representatives from the public universities, community colleges and private colleges. The statement she proposed was similar to the one adopted by the University of Maine System. After two months of warming them up to the idea and a week of deliberation, the Executive Committee unanimously endorsed the curricular guidelines for college readiness. With that, the rest of MHEC’s membership followed. Farber remarked, “Of course, it’s not necessarily the ideal curriculum for each and every one of them, but they all saw that it was a solid college ready curriculum. They also saw the benefit to speaking with a unified voice about college readiness, especially since our K-12 commissioner was about to propose new standards and graduation requirements to the legislature.” Coincidentally, State Education Commissioner Susan Gendron had been working to strengthen the Maine’s curriculum standards and graduation requirements for its secondary educational system. The Maine Legislature was in session and, although Gendron was busy with Governor Baldacci’s reorganization plan, she kept college readiness on the forefront. She developed her own set of readiness standards, comparable to those of the Maine Higher Education Council’s, and proposed them to the state legislature. Vocational high schools responded to the proposal with opposition, however, arguing that the requirements would leave virtually no room in students’ schedules to take their classes. Two weeks before Gendron was to go before the legislature to present the proposed college readiness standards and address the concerns of the Career and Technical Education representatives, Farber approached her with MHEC’s readiness statement. Soon after, Gendron went to the legislature and asked lawmakers to amend her proposed requirements to include the coursework outlined by the Council’s statement. The bill proposing the notion of statewide graduation requirements has currently been scheduled for the next legislative session. Wanda Monthey, the Advanced Placement (AP) Director of the Maine Department of Education, noted that the movement of the bill to the next session would give an opportunity to develop models that illustrate how the proposed requirements can sustain enrollment in the Career and Technical Education classes and develop the standards further. The department intends to achieve passage of the bill by October 2007. Although the unanimous support of public and private higher educational institutions does not ensure the bill’s passage, it places significant weight upon the proposed standards. When asked if the Maine Higher Education Council’s public agreement on the standards was helpful, Monthey—who works closely with Commissioner Gendron—said, “Eventually it will be, and we are totally behind it.”
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