It took two years of hard work and good will to get this done. We convened composition teachers and they worked out a universal standard for passing freshman English. The next step is to get high school faculty on board, so they are teaching what colleges expect freshmen to know. Part and parcel of our efforts to ensure every student is learning what he or she needs to know to succeed in college is the need to ensure the best and brightest of our young people pursue careers in teaching. The teachers sending students to college came out of our colleges.
Colleges simply can no longer exist in isolation, especially isolation from our primary schools.
The idea is that professors who would rather be doing research should invest their time in teaching the next generation of teachers. I am sure all of us here today find this view skewed, but that does not change the fact that the view does indeed persist. Just think about how little interaction there is between schools of education and the arts and sciences faculty. By sharing their love of their subjects and helping teachers understand biology and botany and chemistry, they are sending emissaries into the schools who will transmit that passion for science to the next generation of college students. The alternative is teachers who neither like nor understand science, and that attitude can be transmitted to students just as easily.