Students face riveting events in their daily lives and it makes sense to put school counselors in place to assist students who lack parental support and guidance to reach postsecondary outcomes. Many urban districts have been deemed as “dropout factories” and I hope the report invokes the outrage amongst all professionals needed to spur the positive actions required to erase the inequities that hinder students from obtaining access to higher education.
Hopefully, this work will result in a systematic strategy of training and support so that public school counselors are adequately armed with information and resources to become effective college counselors for students attending public schools, especially in large urban areas.
Joyce V. Brown
Manager, High School Counselors
Chicago Public Schools
The task force is asking that all professionals rededicate themselves to a Declaration of Values and has outlined seven ‘Action Commitments' that help turn those values into reality. The Action Commitments are summarized as follows:
- The task force, with the support of the College Board, will develop at least ten training modules to advance the broad agenda laid out in this document.
- As signers of this document, we commit our individual institutions to reviewing their practices, policies, statements and messages against the ten-part statement of values laid out above.
- We commit to making our practices as inclusive as possible, recognizing the many ways in which this generation of students represents an entirely new demographic in the school-to-college transition.
- We ask the community to engage leadership at the institutional level (schools and colleges and universities) in discussions about these issues.
- We ask counselors to commit to genuine college counseling while the task force, for its part, will highlight the need for additional resources to bolster counseling in K-12 education.
- The task force looks forward to reviewing the recommendations for improving student aid processes recently delivered to the College Board by the Rethinking Student Aid study group.
- The task force will bring the recommendations in this letter to the attention of the College Board's Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education to encourage provosts, chancellors and presidents to adopt a new way of thinking about institutional excellence and the school-to-college transition.
Read the full text of each Action Commitment in the full report.
