Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2022 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can states remove policies barriers that are keeping educators from reinventing high schools?” Learn more.
Despite many proclamations over many decades, neither the average educator nor the public at large thinks American high schools are obsolete. In fact, satisfaction with local schools is at a five-decade high. Until perceptions shift, the potential for policy solutions to catalyze “transformative action” will be severely constrained. In order to get traction, we’ve got to get grounded in reality. Public will, however, can only take us so far. To move the needle, secondary educators must be informed by and rewarded for the real-world, postsecondary achievements of their students.
Sharing the truth
Graduation rates are at historic highs, and incremental improvements fuel optimism that high schools are changing with the times. In fact, of course, the real world is changing at a decidedly different pace. College and career readiness, measured by traditional metrics, remains the holy grail. The class of 2022, however, is entering postsecondary life at a time when demand for academic credentials is rapidly giving way to a craving for actual competence and AI is surprising us daily. The reverberations of these shifts should be shaking the foundations of old institutions. Adult America remains unmoved.
Parents and educators will continue believing that current institutions suffice unless we dignify their love and ambitions for students with the truth. We know what lies in store for most high school graduates today and can foresee where the trajectories are headed. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in P20W longitudinal data systems over the last twenty years enable us to know.
We know, for example, that in the years preceding the pandemic, approximately 12 percent of Houston ISD graduates earned a four-year degree within six years of graduation and 6 percent earned a two-year degree. We know that the median income of Houston ISD graduates without a two- or four-year degree (82 percent of graduates) was about $29,000. We know that in Harris County, where Houston ISD is located, a living wage for a family of four with two children in child care is $76,824. So, we know that the great majority of Houston ISD graduates are struggling mightily after they leave the care of their high school teachers.
We also know that teachers do not go to their classrooms every day in service of such a future. Families do not envision such a future when they enroll their child in a district to which the state awards a “B” rating. Students do not walk across the stage expecting such a future. Yet, year after year, we permit the illusion to continue rather than pulling back the curtain to show what the future holds.
Longitudinal data systems in over half the states enable visibility into student trajectories from K–12 into postsecondary and the workforce. Another ten link K–12 and postsecondary. These numbers are growing. Even California, a perennial laggard, is poised to leapfrog into the P20W future.
Sharing, indeed shouting, the truth about the lives students lead after high school is the first step toward building the public will required to let go of outdated structures and norms. High school “feedback reports” and subsidized access to National Student Clearinghouse (NCS) data are two ways states have begun to raise awareness, but these are relatively feeble measures in view of the possibilities. Feedback reports tend to be passively available rather than pushed to stakeholders and provide only a small subset of postsecondary information collected. NCS data are useful but do not include employment outcomes and are typically visible to only a few central office staff.
Align incentives with real-world goals
Public will can get us started down the road, but we’re dependent on K–12 system leaders to keep driving toward the goals that matter in the lives of students. If policymakers continue rewarding achievement of postsecondary “readiness” metrics only, then leaders will continue to calibrate their systems to those metrics without regard to actual outcomes. This would be fine if postsecondary readiness indicators corresponded tightly to postsecondary success. We know, however, that they do not. Compare the percentage of any high school’s “college-ready” graduates with the percentage of its graduates who go on to secure a postsecondary credential. The disconnect will be plain.
Instead, policymakers should incentivize and enable K–12 educators to grapple with the postsecondary realities of their students. Some states are moving in this direction. Texas awards outcome bonuses to districts based in part on college enrollment. Louisiana commissioned a Mathematica study that evaluates the “promotion power” of its high schools. The report assesses a high school’s impact on the long-term success of its students (including success in the job market). Massachusetts recently published a new report that clearly presents employment and earnings of high school graduates (at the district level for now). The state board is contemplating implications for accountability. Nationally, efforts toward enhanced UI wage records will produce a richer picture in coming years.
These advances are encouraging, reflective of principles that have driven large-scale success in other contexts. The systems guru Donella Meadows laid out the formula:
The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality. If everyone can work harmoniously toward the same outcome (if all feedback loops are serving the same goal), the results can be amazing. The most familiar examples of this harmonization of goals are mobilizations of economies during wartime, or recovery after war or natural disaster. (Meadows, D. H. (2015). Thinking in Systems, p. 115. Chelsea Green Publishing.)
In our context, the formula requires that we envision one P20W system with component subsystems. For all our talk of seamless pathways on the ground, we should, in the spirit of JFF’s Big Blur, work to conceive a seamless system in state policy. This shift can be accomplished without consolidating state administrative structures. We can achieve many of the advantages of a unitary system by piping information across systems and arranging incentives within each component in a way that all are driving toward common goals. Meadows puts it this way:
Change comes first from stepping outside the limited information that can be seen from any single place in the system and getting an overview. From a wider perspective, information flows, goals, incentives, and disincentives can be restructured so that separate, bounded, rational actions do add up to results that everyone desires. It’s amazing how quickly and easily behavior changes can come, with even slight enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information. (Thinking in Systems (p. 108).)
These ideas are dressed up in language befitting a Wonkathon, but are really quite straightforward. In sum: Pull back the curtain to reveal the real-life outcomes of students graduating from legacy institutions so that policymakers have the political capital to allow (and fund) data-driven experiments; provide K–12 educators with timely information about the postsecondary success of their students so that they can regularly improve preparation and transition support; and reward K–12 educators for improvement in postsecondary outcomes, as well as for progress on readiness indicators.
