State’s Top College Officials Vow to Work to Improve Student Performance : Education: Uniform high school graduation standards and better teacher preparation are among the goals of a group meeting in state Capitol.

The leaders of California’s three public college systems and the state Department of Education announced Monday that to improve student performance from kindergarten through college, they will try to do something that many assume they do already: collaborate.

Gathering in the state Capitol, the state’s top educators unveiled what amounts to a strongly worded promise to work as a team--to agree on high school graduation standards, clarify expected competencies for college admission and strengthen teacher preparation.

“For too long, we’ve all been going about our own business. We haven’t seen each other as partners,” said California Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, who called Monday’s announcement “a real decision to link arms and go together to fight” for education.

“More than ever before in the history of California, you’re going to see these segments working together,” she said.

Eastin and her colleagues--who, along with representatives of the California Postsecondary Education Commission and the Assn. of Independent California Colleges, make up a six-member group called the Education Round Table--released a 10-page report outlining several initiatives to improve student learning.

The report laments the lack of consensus about what students should know before they graduate from high school and calls for the formation of two task forces--one on math, one on English--to draft unambiguous statewide academic standards. Those standards will be used to develop comprehensive examinations to measure students’ performance, Eastin said.

“Students will receive [these exams] potentially when they’re juniors or even sophomores so they’ll know if they’re deficient in an area in advance of the time that they attempt to enter higher education,” Eastin said.

In addition, she said, incentives will be offered to college students to lure them into elementary and secondary classrooms to tutor children in basic skills. “We’re talking about . . . a real partnership between the big kids and the little kids,” she said.

The report calls for the expanded use of technology to improve teaching, help students understand university entrance requirements and simplify the process of applying for college admission and financial aid.

“Being 50th of 50 states in computers-per-child in the home of the Silicon Valley amounts to adult malpractice,” Eastin said of the current situation in California’s elementary and secondary schools. “Being last is unacceptable.”

Richard Atkinson, the president of the nine-campus University of California system, acknowledged that some of the initiatives sound familiar.

“One might say, ‘Is there anything new here?’ These sorts of things have been at the center of everyone’s agenda for the last six or seven years. Are we really going to add something new?” he said. “My answer . . . is that the time is right to begin to move in a very vigorous way.”

Warren Fox, the director of the California Postsecondary Commission, stressed that a coming boom in high school graduates--from fewer than 300,000 last year to about 500,000 annually by 2005--makes it imperative that the state’s education systems form a united front.

“This is a new step forward,” he said. “It is a real cooperative effort to make sure that students have the skills to succeed in the future.”

Barry Munitz, the chancellor of the 22-campus Cal State system, vowed that the Education Round Table, which he heads, will aggressively implement the new initiatives, setting “timetables, deadlines, targets and criteria for judgment if we’ve met them. There’s no intention to throw this document out and hope that a year later something has happened.”

Munitz also announced that the Hewlett Foundation on Monday awarded the Education Round Table a $420,000 grant to re-examine California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, which was drafted in 1960 as the blueprint for providing public higher education for all. Some analysts fear that the document, though heralded as the world’s model for comprehensive planning, has been undercut by the massive budget problems of the 1990s.

Monday’s news conference came on the eve of the first-ever joint meeting of the Cal State Board of Trustees, the Community Colleges Board of Governors and the State Board of Education. Today, the three boards will convene to discuss remedial education, which Cal State is considering phasing out over the next five years.

Supporters of the proposal say it will force the state’s public schools to better prepare students and raise Cal State’s academic standards. Opponents warn that the proposal will penalize students from poor schools and disproportionately exclude minority students from college.

Overall, about 60% of Cal State freshmen need remedial courses in math or English based on their poor performance on college placement exams. The percentage is higher among minorities and recent immigrants.

Munitz said the remedial issue is a good example of why the systems will be better off working together. Cal State trains the majority of California’s public school teachers, he said, so it shares responsibility for improving K-12 education, which in turn would lessen the need for remedial help in college.