Virginia wants warranty on high school grads

Local school systems in Virginia would issue a "warranty" on their high school graduates and promise to pay the cost of remedial classes that the students had to take as college first-year students, under a plan being developed by state higher education officials.

The proposal reflects state officials' growing frustration at the large numbers of college students who are having to learn basic skills they should have mastered in high school. One-fourth of Virginia public high school graduates at the state's public colleges take at least one remedial class in reading, writing or math during their freshman year.

The remedial courses are costing about $40 million a year, state officials estimate-roughly $15 million of it borne by the college students and their parents and the rest covered by state taxpayers.

Shifting those costs to local school districts would create a powerful incentive to do a better job of preparing students for college-level work, advocates of the warranty plan say.

"This is rather a rifle shot ... to raise the profile of the issue and to communicate to the K-12 institutions that they have responsibility for the outcome of their students," said William Allen, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education, which is preparing the proposal.

But many school officials are wary of the idea, saying the high enrollment in remedial courses is partly because more students are attending college. If colleges don't want to provide such classes, they need to be more selective in their admissions, local educators say.

Across the country, the issue of college remedial classes is stirring debate, with educators and politicians viewing the courses as an acute symptom of lax academic standards. College officials complain of being forced to dumb down their curriculum, and they worry that too few of their students are taking the rigorous courses they will need to be successful in their careers.

Some states, such as Colorado, Georgia and South Carolina, have eliminated remedial courses at four-year colleges. Other states are putting limits on funding of the courses or are capping enrollment

So far, no state has adopted a plan to charge local school systems for the cost of the classes, although there have been proposals to do so in several states, including Texas, New Jersey and Montana.

Members of Virginia's higher education council have asked their staff to present a warranty plan by January. An early draft of the proposal recommends that the warranty initially cover students who graduate from high school with an advanced studies diploma and a grade-point average of at least 2.5.

Rather than mandate the warranty program, which would require action by the state legislature, council officials say they envision persuading a few school districts to offer the guarantee voluntarily.

At that point, public pressure would force more districts to join the program, state officials believe.

"Who is going to want to be the district to stand up and say, "We don't guarantee our graduates," Allen said.

Local school officials agree they need to do a better job with their students, but they say it is unfair to hold them totally responsible for their graduates' problems in college - especially when standards can

vary greatly from one state college to another.

"Our job is to do everything we can to ensure our students meet a certain standard when they graduate," said Pam Gauch, associate superintendent for instruction in Prince William County. "To hold us responsible afterward, based on a college's standards, well, I'm not sure that's a good idea."

11-24-98