One-track mind: Creating consensus around high school reform 

The American high school needs a makeover.

That seems to be the consensus among education policy-makers, school administrators, governors, legislators, parents, and yes, the students themselves. And when you consider the radical transformation required in the educational mission, the course requirements, teaching styles, school layout, size, and culture being considered for these institutions, it might be referred to as an extreme makeover.

As society changes and new discoveries are made, schools must constantly update what they teach. Furthermore, new research about how people learn calls for a retooling of the traditional high school so that each student can develop the skills and knowledge he or she needs to be a fulfilled, contributing member of society. At least, that’s the vision. But the persistent problem of students dropping out or being poorly prepared for college and work makes it clear that high school as an institution is not doing the job it should.

The issue is pressing enough to be the focus of efforts by policy-makers at every level. A good number of school districts have already launched reform strategies. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell has organized a council to improve education from preschool through college, with what happens in high school being a primary focus. The California School Boards Association has formed its own task force of board members and superintendents who are looking at the issue from a governance perspective. The National Governor’s Association recently held a summit of educators and legislators concerned about making sure students graduate high school ready for college and the workforce. And President Bush made high school reform a focus of his second term via the No Child Left Behind Act.

Before the hand-wringing begins, remember that we’ve actually been through this before. From the Sputnik crisis in the 1950s to “A Nation at Risk” in the 1980s, the supposed lack of rigor in high school coursework has been blamed for everything from economic weakness and military unpreparedness to social inequality and the decay of the nation’s morals. The problem, experts say, is that the institution of high school has not changed with the times. “Secondary education …, like any other established agency of society, is conservative and tends to resist modification,” warns one report on high school reform. “Failure to make adjustments when the need arises leads to the necessity for extensive reorganization at irregular intervals. The evidence is strong that such a comprehensive reorganization of secondary education is imperative at the present time.”

Sound familiar? It should. “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education,” from which the above quotation was taken and which served as the blueprint for the American comprehensive high school, was written in 1918. Thus, current efforts at high school reform are really just the latest in a cycle of crisis control that spans the better part of a century.

Just because we’ve heard it before doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be serious about trying to find a model that works, says Priscilla Cox, a board member in the Elk Grove Unified School District in Northern California. It’s becoming ever more critical that students find success in high school, since the vast majority of new jobs now require postsecondary education.

“You can’t give up on anybody,” says Cox, who is a CSBA delegate and member of CSBA’s high school task force. “We’re very concerned, because the research is just so powerful. It’s very telling that for our students to compete – not just in our country but in the world – we have to prepare them better. Our country’s depending on it.”

As frustrating as it is to educators to still be having this conversation, the fact remains that there is plenty of evidence that high schools, as a rule, are not achieving their goal.

Roughly speaking, one-third of American high school students do not graduate with their class. The Harvard Civil Rights Project reported recently that California’s on-time graduation rate actually averages 71 percent, with African-American and Latino students graduating at rates at or below 60 percent. And Educational Testing Service put the state’s graduation rate at 68.8 percent in 2000 – actually a 5.6 percent increase from a decade earlier. A good number go on to earn a diploma or equivalency as adults in alternative programs, bringing the percentage of high-school completers in the total population closer to 90 percent. But that may be precisely the point: students with the aptitude and motivation to learn are taking a pass on the traditional high school system.

Consensus on need for a new vision

Researchers for Achieve, Inc. is a bipartisan organization created by the nation’s governors and business leaders which sponsors the American Diploma Project that seeks to “restore value” to the high school diploma. The group asked public school graduates, employers and college instructors about how well students are prepared for life after high school. About four in 10 of both workers and college students felt their high schools didn’t give them all the skills and abilities they needed to be successful, and their employers and instructors, in similar proportions, agreed. The professors faulted their students’ written and oral communication skills, and their ability to do science, math and research. Similarly, the employers complained about the graduates’ ability to read and understand complicated materials, think analytically, solve real-world problems and communicate orally.

In California, business leaders have similar complaints. The California Business for Education Excellence recently released its own prescription for strengthening high school, citing figures that remediating freshmen at California public universities costs tens of millions of dollars, and that, nationally, about one-third of job applicants can’t read or do math well enough to do the job they’re applying for.

A-G or CTE?

The upshot of the whole college-prep versus voc-ed debate is that everyone needs essentially the same preparation, as Mike Hanson, deputy superintendent of Fresno USD, will attest.

“The more I look at what our kids are expected to do upon graduation, realistically, it looks pretty much the same,” he says. As a principal, he often had to convince non-college-bound students of the value of doing the required senior project. Such projects are obviously good preparation for someone on an academic track, he says, since completing a thesis requires the same steps: identifying a problem, doing research that will help inform a solution, proposing a solution and then testing it out.

But precisely the same steps are required in the world of work, says Hanson. “The person who gets ahead and who does well and maintains good status at their job is the one who can identify problems on the job, do the research to figure out how it could be improved, present the information to the boss and work on implementing it to improve the lot of everyone on the job.”

In fact, the evidence is beginning to mount that creating ties between academics and the world of work is valuable for all students. Not only do students score better on tests of knowledge they gain in a “real-world” context, but college-bound students also benefit from experience in teamwork and perseverance.

“In English, one should learn how to write business plans, scripts, lyrics, news releases, essays, editorials, commercials, medical reports, etc.,” says John de Beck, a San Diego City Schools board member and CSBA Delegate for Region 17, whose district has been actively pursuing high school reform since 1998. “Also, the right triangle is the basis of solutions in navigation, astronomy, surveying, architecture and the arts. Find those applications and others like them in a high school curriculum and reform is on its way.”

California’s Partnership Academies and a growing number of high schools – such as the Center for Advanced Research and Technology, or CART, in Clovis and San Diego’s High Tech High – are using that technique to add “relevance” to students’ educational experience. And the state’s new career-technical education standards more clearly embed rigorous academics in workforce preparation programs to allow students to graduate with marketable abilities (sometimes industry certification) and the foundation they need for further education. Thus, the same preparation serves workforce or college-bound students equally well.

From single-school to district-wide reform

Much could be said about which strategies work best. For school boards, however, high school reform means much more than revamping one school – it means systemic change.

Many districts have a great school or two. The challenge is to make every school in the district the right place to nurture learning for a certain population of students. That doesn’t mean a tracking system, but a recognition that one size does not fit all; students with different interests and learning styles should have a portfolio of high school choices, says Constancia Warren of the Carnegie Corporation. Carnegie’s Schools for a New Society initiative has been helping districts across the country to create a system-wide approach to high school reform.

Sacramento City Unified School District undertook the process in 1999 with the help of grants from Carnegie and later the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The ambitious effort to reform the district’s four high schools and eight middle schools included extensive input from students, parents and community members, teachers and administrators, with the media following every move. Hundreds of students actively participated in a “youth congress” summit to share their vision for the new high schools. Riding the groundswell of support they were receiving from their corporate partners and the community, the united board and superintendent opened several small theme schools and made plans to create smaller learning communities in the comprehensive high schools, add counselors or advisors, and schedule common planning time for teachers.

But systemic reform takes more than momentum.

Jay Schenirer, a former Sac City board member who now works with the Gates Foundation, has a word of caution for boards beginning the reform process.

“We had a pretty unique situation for about seven years,” he says of the time the board and superintendent were of one mind. “We just made an assumption that we were going to go on this road and everybody would be happy working together. We had created a culture of partnership within that administration and on the board. But I think one place we fell down was in not institutionalizing the work itself.”

As the district worked to implement its reform strategy, the board faced the decision of whether to close one persistently low-performing high school and reopen it as a charter school. Teachers and some community members adamantly fought the change, and in the aftermath of a legal challenge from the teachers union, the superintendent decided to retire and two board members, including Schenirer, lost their board seats in a subsequent election.

See also "Lessons Learned": Former Sacramento City Unified board member Jay Schenirer talks about what he learned during the district's attempt to turn around one flailing high school.

His advice to districts thinking about retooling their high schools?

“Be thoughtful, be deliberative – which doesn’t necessarily mean go slow, but understand what you’re doing. Understand the risks,” he says. “You need a vision around this. Then go about it in a way that creates a culture and institutionalizes what you’re doing. I don’t think we did enough work internally within the district to educate people that this is going to be hard and it’s going to require you to change as well – and change is hard everywhere.”

Elk Grove is also attempting to reconstruct education in the upper grades. First, the school board set the goal of, within three years, having 100 percent of students score proficient or advanced on standards tests, pass the exit exam, or graduate college and career-ready, as appropriate for their grade level. Then, a process for achieving that goal had to be set in place.

Associate Superintendent Hanson, who has since joined the Fresno Unified School District as Deputy Superintendent, says the district has very deliberately constructed a process that will eventually lead to an action plan adopted by the board of education. The district’s College and Career Readiness Task Force has been meeting since last summer to analyze data about student outcomes, consider school reform research, and listen to groups of students, parents, business leaders, and school leaders. An update to the board in March yielded a set of clear guidelines about what trustees would like to see in the final recommendations, which should come before them for adoption in June.

All of that planning is necessary, Hanson insists. “I think the reason that big task force decision-making gets a bad name is because people overlook the importance and the heavy emphasis that should go into the planning to make the decision.”

Testament to that is the fact that Elk Grove’s reform effort has continued to move forward across three superintendents.

Hanson admits that the goal of 100 percent proficiency in three years is a stretch. “Yes, it is ambitious and we’re a distance away from achieving that ultimate goal,” he says. “But nobody in our district – none of our board members nor any of our staff – want to the be ones to identify who we leave out of that 100 percent in order to make it seem like a more realistic goal. The fact is that our community members and our parents and even our students come to school with the expectation that they’re going to be better off for having completed the experience, and we need to uphold our end of the bargain on this.”

In the south, San Diego City Schools, another beneficiary of several corporate grants, also went ahead with bold reforms under the direction of former superintendent Alan Bersin, who has since been named the governor’s Secretary for Education. The Blueprint for Success, which focused on professional development and a uniform curriculum, was eventually set aside under criticism from the teachers union that it was too rigid and centrally driven. The Blueprint reform evolved into a model with smaller schools and learning communities to provide a greater menu of choices for students. It’s still too early to tell what effect that may have on student outcomes system wide.

It’s ironic, however, that as millions in grant money make far-reaching reforms possible, they also compound the problem of sustaining the changes. “When the grants go away,” says San Diego board member de Beck, “the reform will eventually die because the reform is more expensive than the past practice. I personally prefer that a systematic plan for reform come from within and funds come after the plan is in place.”

Sometimes big grant money comes with strings to implement a particular strategy, such as the Gates Foundation’s penchant for small schools. De Beck recommends laying the groundwork to see if the strategy will work in the district’s schools before trying to implement it district wide. “Set your vision and direction,” he says. “Do all your homework and be sure to pilot the idea to see if it can work on a larger scale.”

Important considerations

There are times when a district may not be ready to undertake the hard work of systemic reform – beginning with the board of education. Seeing the facts in black and white can be difficult, says Elk Grove board member Cox. “It really makes you think about what you’re doing and that you need to do something differently. It’s obviously much easier to just try and maintain, but when you’re doing something that’s not working that well, you don’t want to do that.”

So the board’s ability to take a cold, hard look at the data is essential, Hanson says. “If the board can’t tolerate the real truth, it’s ill-advised to go into it, because you’re just going to drive your staff nuts and you’re going to create a circus atmosphere that probably won’t get done what needs to get done.”

District staff also has to be able to examine its own practice objectively. “I think you’ve got to be very, very honest with yourselves,” Hanson adds. “You can’t start the process without being incredibly honest about your current reality, warts and all. In fact, highlight your warts.”

He recommends examining all available data – test scores, graduation rates, attendance patterns, suspension and expulsion rates, etc. – to give staff a framework for its work. “And once you draft recommendations,” he concludes, “have people kick the tires and really look at them before you go to the board.”

Words of advice

Districts that have already gone down the road of high school reform confirm the value of planning before taking action. Strategies for changing the curriculum or organization of schools should be undertaken slowly and deliberately, says de Beck.

“If you decide you want small high schools, start one of the small schools and get it working before you split up the entire school. I would always start in the ninth grade and then add a grade until you have the entire program in place.” To do otherwise may cause seniors to feel disoriented, he adds.

“Last, be sure that your school community and parents are solidly behind any changes,” de Beck counsels. “I think most everyone likes the flexibility of a comprehensive high school, and making it small sounds interesting until you find out that it limits flexibility more than one would expect.”

To personalize a large school without dividing it into small schools, he says, districts could also use teacher-advisers to mentor a small group of students throughout high school. Such advisers should be able to act as a counselor does to arrange a student’s schedule and advocate for them with other teachers.

Beware of simply choosing whichever reform is currently in vogue, de Beck says, as many that are being sponsored by external “experts” are still unproven. “If you accept the thinking that ‘what we have is not working, so any change is better than none,’ you may end up throwing the baby out with the bath water,” he says.

Perhaps as more districts throughout the state look at their own systems of support for high school students, some of the secrets to boosting graduation rates and other success indicators will become known. One thing’s for sure – as long as employers need to hire new employees, the debate about how well public schools are fulfilling their mission will continue. In fact, in many areas local school boards are striking up a discussion with the business community about how to better prepare graduates. Using that knowledge puts school boards in a position to make high schools in their community what they need to be in the 21st century.

Kristi Garrett (kgarrett@csba.org) is managing editor of California Schools magazine.