Counselors See Conflicts in Carrying Out Mission

Middle and high school counselors believe they have a unique and powerful role to play in preparing all students for good jobs or college, but they feel hamstrung by insufficient training, competing duties, and their own schools’ priorities, according to a study released today.

The online survey of 5,300 counselors was conducted this past spring for the College Board’s Advocacy & Policy Center. One of the largest-ever surveys of counselors, it paints a picture of a committed but frustrated corps that sees a deep schism between the ideal mission of schools and the work that takes shape day to day.

Nine in 10 counselors, for instance, said that two objectives should top their schools’ priority lists: ensuring that all students have access to high-quality education and that they graduate well-equipped for college and careers. But fewer than four in 10 said their schools actually operated as if those goals were central to their mission.

That disconnection was even sharper among counselors in public and low-income schools than in private and wealthier ones. Only 19 percent of counselors in high-poverty schools said college and career readiness was part of their schools’ day-to-day mission, compared with 30 percent of counselors overall. Two-thirds of those in private schools said so, compared with one-quarter of those in public schools.

“We have more than 100,000 counselors in our [school] system, and yet they’re not being strategically deployed,” said John Bridgeland, the lead author of the report and the president and chief executive officer of Civic Enterprises, a Washington-based public-policy group that includes high school improvement among its focus issues.

“Counselors are uniquely positioned to see the whole life of the child; to see their family circumstances ... their social and emotional needs, the nonacademic supports they may require, and their academic progress and challenge, not just in a given year, like a teacher can, but over time,” he said. “That’s an advantage that’s extremely powerful. Not deploying counselors in a way that takes advantage of that unique role is a huge national loss.”

Job Interference

Counselors reported that a broad and unclear conception of their role gets in the way of focusing on what they believe to be most important. Nine in 10 said they wanted to reduce their administrative burdens and have smaller caseloads so they could get more training and spend more time helping students with supports and preparation for careers and college. The average caseload of the counselors in the study was 368 students; 427 in schools with high poverty rates.

“Counselors’ duties should be aligned to the needs of students, but that doesn’t always happen in a school setting,” said Patricia Z. Smith, who is now a counselor-consultant to the Hillsborough County school district in Florida, after three decades as director of guidance services there. “They get pulled into lunchroom duty and bus duty, into substituting for teachers, and proctoring tests. This is a shock to new counselors when they first get into schools.”

The quality and focus of counselors’ training is a problem, said Ms. Smith. Typical training programs—focusing on skills such as counseling technique, group counseling, crisis intervention, and human growth—are stronger at preparing counselors for their roles as personal and emotional supports to students than they are for their work helping students plan for college and careers, she said.

The study reflects that appraisal. Although seven in 10 middle and high school counselors hold master’s degrees, and half were teachers first, only 16 percent rated their training as “highly effective” in preparing them for their counseling work in schools.

“Despite the good intentions of many of these professionals, research suggests that little alignment exists among counselor training, work assignments, and school goals,” the report says. “There seems to be consistent misalignment between the counseling field and the education system.”

Creating Links

The counseling field has begun to grapple with such schisms and define the roles counselors should play in supporting students’ all-around success.

The Education Trust’s National Center for Transforming School Counseling, for instance, developed a “new vision for school counseling,” which advocates a role as “powerful agents of change” and “leaders” who create opportunities for all students to “pursue dreams of high aspirations.” In April, the College Board’s National Office for School Counselor Advocacy released eight components of work it considers crucial to schools’ mission of promoting college and career readiness, including helping students see and create strong links between their academic programs and their future work and education plans.

School leaders don’t always appreciate the role counselors can play in the school’s academic-improvement plan, said Mel Riddile, a former principal of two Virginia high schools. Counselors are key in connecting the dots between the broad goals and the concrete, student-level changes necessary to reach those goals, he said.

“Principals who get it realize that when you have a school plan to implement, the plan is implemented when counselors sit down with students to schedule them [for classes]. That’s the moment of truth,” said Mr. Riddile, who is now the associate director of high school services for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, based in Reston, Va.

The report advocates key policies to bring about shifts in school counseling.

Counselors must be seen as “leaders focused on keeping students on track to graduate from high school ready for college and career,” and their activities should be tightly tied to that vision, with “less expensive” and highly trained staff members redeployed to handle administrative functions, the report says.

More professional-development dollars should be aimed at counselors, and preservice training should be reworked to reflect the current demand for deeper skills in supporting ...

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Special coverage on the alignment between K-12 schools and postsecondary education is supported in part by a grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education, at www.luminafoundation.org.