As a district manager for Cold Stone Creamery, Patricia Morrison has plenty of opportunities to assess the quality of applicants taking their first steps into the work force.

“You’d be surprised at what the schools are turning out,” says Morrision, who oversees company operations in Village West, Zona Rosa, Independence and the Country Club Plaza. “These kids will be running our country some day, and this is what we’re turning out? A lot of them can’t even count money. If the register can’t tell them how much change a customer should get, they can’t figure it out on their own.”

That’s a valid concern at a small business operation that lives and dies by the cash register. Overcoming that concern is a challenge that has enticed a group of regional universities into forming a research consortium that hopes to identify barriers to academic success and, in many cases, entrance into a college classroom. The results, those involved say, could contribute to a higher-quality work force in the Kansas City region.

The Kansas City Area Education Research Consortium, armed with an $800,000 grant from the Kauffman Foundation, is bringing together research talent from the region’s Big 12 universities—MU, KU and K-State—plus the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Washington University in St. Louis. Researchers with backgrounds in the hard sciences, social science and education will work with area public school districts—eventually, as many as 30—to study ways of elevating student achievement, particularly in math and science.

Even as it sets up its operating structure, the consortium has already begun a three-pronged research effort, working with a handful of districts, into issues relevant not just to K-12 education, but to what one researcher involved calls K-20 education—from kindergarten through postgraduate studies.

“The goal isn’t to figure what’s wrong with K-12,” said consortium researcher Tamera Murdock, who chairs the psychology department at UMKC. “Our goal is to look within and across districts in the Kansas City metropolitan area and get a handle on which kids are being successful, what experiences they have shared in common and what experiences are shared in common with students not being successful.”

Identifying those factors, she said, could provide early indicators of trouble ahead for students likely to have difficulties with math and science courses—two key pieces for producing an up-to-date work force.

“One of the problems with past research,” Murdock noted, “is that K-12 districts own the data on K-12, and
universities own theirs beyond that. Our focus is to get a better understanding, a better handle on the level of academic preparation students need to have coming out of high school in order to make the successful transition to math and science careers.”

What Universities Add

While many universities can point to longstanding community-improvement initiatives, the consortium effort represents a unique level of collaboration between public school districts and the colleges that draw much of their student base from them. Those involved say there is strong evidence that the resources of universities—intellectual as well as financial—can provide influential leadership and much-needed guidance for the broader community.

A sterling example of that is the Joint Education Partnership established by the University of Southern California. Since its inception in the 1970s, more than 50,000 USC students have worked as
volunteers in clinics and hospitals, mentored youth through foster care and juvenile facilities, worked with shelters for the homeless or battered women, and gone into the schools, teaching such varied courses as French, biology,
and Greek mythology.

As a service-learning project, it is fundamentally different in mission and scope from the research consortium’s goals, but both efforts speak to the obligations that universities share as members of their own communities. A bonus: Efforts that help turn out more qualified high school graduates help deepen the pool of potential college students.

Closer to home, service-learning programs at UMKC and MU, as well as Kansas State, have been developed. Each focuses on educating college students while providing community service, such as classroom instruction. But as a research function, the regional consortium takes university-level involvement to a different level, acting purely as a means for improving the K-12 system, not by providing collegiate course credit.

The education consortium’s director, Joseph Heppert of the University of Kansas Department of Chemistry,
said a wide range of academic interests can be served with projects like this.

“To a large degree, schools have such limited time and resources now, and the demands for accountability are so dramatic, that we need to be looking at fundamental questions of high importance to schools,” Heppert said. “We are looking at issues that are really critical for the districts.”

 

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