Policy Recommendations

Policy Recommendations: Word | PDF

The Alliance project identified policy recommendations to support partnerships, each aimed at preparing all students for success in college and careers and closing socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps. These recommendations are directed at system and campus leaders of California's public and private higher education institutions, school district boards and superintendents, the California Department of Education, the California State Board of Education, and county boards of education. These recommendations will also be of interest to other states and to educators and scholars. Recommendations are organized under five policy goals.

Policy Goal 1: Improve Alignment across Educational Segments

1. Assign joint responsibility for ensuring alignment of high school and college expectations to the respective chief executive officers of each school district, each institution of higher education, and each county office of education.

2. Create and maintain broadly representative committees for college and university teacher preparation programs, which also include faculty from education, arts and science disciplines, counseling programs, and teachers from local public schools and faculty from local community colleges.

3. Include representatives of public schools, community colleges and the local community in higher education admissions and placement policy planning.

Policy Goal 2: Increase Incentives and Resources for School-University Collaboration

4. Use best practices of school-university collaboration as criteria for funding educational reforms.

5. Support K-12 teachers with opportunities to participate in K-16 collaboration.

6. Recognize and reward community college and university faculty and leadership for effective school-university collaboration.

7. Develop collaborative professional development for teachers, counselors and administrators, aligned with state content standards and higher education competency expectations.

Policy Goal 3: Encourage Cross-Institutional Use of Human Resources

8. Encourage flexible cross-institutional use of human resources by providing portability of benefits and, sometimes, waiving collective bargaining agreement provisions.

9. Create efficient and portable hiring and training processes for college tutors and other personnel bridging educational segments.

Policy Goal 4: Effectively Use Student Achievement Data

10. Assign to each institution of higher education the responsibility to summarize and communicate to local schools the performance of high school graduates in their first college year.

11. Strengthen the California system for measuring the success of students as they move across educational segments.

Policy Goal 5: Strengthen Accountability for Student Attainment of Higher Education

12. Include expectations for preparing and sending students to higher education in accountability systems for public schools.

13. Include expectations for collaborating with local schools into accountability systems for higher education.