Improving Academic Achievement: What School Counselors Can Do

The school reform movement has been a major societal and political agenda item for nearly two decades. The impetus for the reform movement continues to be derived from a variety of sources. Chief among these are the unfavorable comparisons of the achievement records of students in the U. S. with students in other industrialized countries (Peak, 1997), 'report cards' from the U. S. Department of Education documenting that many students are not proficient in core academic areas, and concerns that students who graduate from U. S. schools will be ill prepared to perform the tasks in the increasing numbers of technical occupations (Daggett, 1997). As a result of the pressure stemming from the movement to make schools more effective, many changes have occurred. The most obvious of the changes that have resulted from the school reform movement is an increased emphasis on assessment. End-of-grade tests, end-of-course tests, and standardized achievement tests are used to measure the performance of individual students, individual, schools, and entire school districts. The most dramatic changes involve takeovers of low functioning schools by state boards of education. Although takeovers may take many forms, one approach is to send an educational SWAT team to a low-performing school and essentially redirect that school from within.

Some of the approaches to educational reform involve the carrot instead of the stick. The establishment of the National Board for Certified Teachers (NBCT) is a more positive approach. The NBCT, when it has completed its work, will have established criteria aimed at improving the skills and knowledge of teachers, counselors, and others. States and local school boards then reward certified educators with significant pay increases. Another positive approach to promoting increased academic achievement involves rewarding the faculties of high performing schools, which in essence involves the introduction of merit pay based on the performance of the entire school. Vouchers that allow parents to remove their students from low-performing public schools and place them in private schools have been introduced in Florida and Ohio. Many educators in public schools oppose the voucher system, perhaps because it threatens their job security. However, parents who take advantage of the system view vouchers as a positive step toward providing a sound education for their children because they can send them to private schools and have part or all of the cost paid for by their school districts. Charter schools, which are an alternative form of public schools, have also sprung up across the country. Charter schools and the use of vouchers creates competition between charter schools and private schools on one hand and public schools on the other, something many people believe is essential for promoting change in traditional public schools.

School counselors, like teachers and administrators, are expected to play an important role in the school reform movement. One prominent role that counselors fill in many school districts is testing coordinator. Paradoxically, the amount of time required to coordinate the increased amount of testing resulting from school reform has decreased the amount of time that counselors can spend in their traditional roles. Although coordinating the testing program is labor intensive, school counselors are under pressure to make other types of contributions to the efforts to improve student achievement. Recently the Wake County, North Carolina Schools adopted a policy that requires each school counselor to identify 30 at-risk students and develop programs that will increase their academic achievement. Other school districts have not been as direct as the Wake County Schools in challenging counselors, but the message is the same: help promote student achievement. This digest is designed to outline a number of strategies and techniques that school counselors can use to meet this challenge. A much fuller discussion of these strategies can be found in Proven Strategies for Improving Learning & Achievement (Brown, 1999).