Joyce Brown, president of the Illinois-based Center for College and Career Readiness, said the role of guidance counselors in Chicago was “repurposed.”
In order to make sure all students leave high school prepared for college, a greater emphasis must be placed on the often-overlooked role of school guidance counselors and how to engage them in more thoughtful and systematic ways.
Those were among the key points made Monday during a daylong White House college access seminar hosted at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
“This is a great window of opportunity for all of us,” said former guidance-counselor-turned-education consultant Pam Martin, referring to the fact that college access has gained unprecedented attention from the White House as of late.
Monday’s meeting was a follow-up of sorts on the White House’s College Opportunity Agenda, launched earlier this year.
With attention on issues of college access from the highest levels of government, Martin said school systems and college access organizations must do more to expand the reach of what they do.
“One of the things that’s going to be important is to think about scalability,” Martin said, noting the Obama administration’s goal of making the United States the most college-educated country in the world by the year 2020.
“When we have programs that are really good, and they only reach 20 to 30 students, we can’t reach the goal,” she said.
