There's wide agreement that U.S. high schools urgently need reforming, due to their dismaying drop out rates, paltry test scores and the testimony of employers and college professors that their graduates are ill-prepared for adult challenges. There is also wide agreement that the sprawling "comprehensive" high school devised by James B. Conant almost half a century ago-and still the dominant model in America today-exacts too great a price in anonymity, anomie, drifting students and bureaucratic control. Adolescents will have brighter prospects for success in smaller institutions where people know their names, know whether they're attending, behaving and learning, know their families and can talk to them promptly. That is surely part of the reason why Catholic schools and charter schools do relatively well-and have more contented clients.
But high school reform is a bigger and more complex topic than simple size reduction. The U.S. Department of Education recently commissioned a set of papers on how best to renew the American high school, and last week it hosted a well-attended conference on the subject. The Brookings Institution has also invited a batch of papers on high school issues and will hold a major conference next month, chaired by Diane Ravitch. The Aspen Institute is hard at work on this under Michael Cohen's leadership. National commissions have been formed. The topic is gaining momentum. And a number of major private foundations have been investing in it, particularly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under the imaginative leadership of Tom Vander Ark.
Gates's special passion within the world of high school reform is creating more small high schools-and carving out small units within big, Conant-style institutions. To this end, Gates, joined by the Carnegie, Ford and Kellogg foundations, pledged an impressive $40 million last month to create seventy small high schools under the heading of the "Early College" initiative. Eight organizations will receive and expend these funds, led by Boston-based Jobs for the Future. Says Vander Ark, "At these small schools, students will receive the personalized learning and the accelerated learning they need to ensure a smoother transition to college or the workplace."
The Gates people and their allies recognize that there's more to high-school reform. Program director David Ferrero terms smallness "an enabling condition for other good things to happen in the areas of teaching and learning." His Ohio henchman, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation's Chad Wick, says "The goal here is to take everything we know that works and put it into practice."
Beware of such claims. For the "Early College" plan doesn't do anything like "take everything we know that works." Rather, it rests on the narrower proposition, most prominently associated with Bard College president Leon Botstein, that the last two years of high school are largely wasted and that the secondary school program should therefore be shrunk, accelerated and merged into college work. Thus "Early College high schools" are described (by Jobs for the Future) as places "from which students leave with a diploma, a two-year Associate of Arts degree, or sufficient college credits to enter a four year liberal arts program as a sophomore or junior. By changing the structure of the high school years, compressing the number of years to the A.A., and offering new incentives, Early College has the potential to improve high school and college graduation rates and to better prepare students for entry into high skill careers."
Sounds great, sure. But unpack it a little, bearing in mind that the gravest shortcoming of today's high schools is that so many students emerge from them knowing so little-unready for college-level academics, unready to succeed in the jobs of the modern economy, unready for citizenship. And this is after FOUR years of high school. How come smart people now suppose that LESS high school will produce stronger results? What undergirds the conviction that disadvantaged high-school students, already lagging far behind in reading, writing and math, will be so motivated by the chance to earn a college degree rather than a "mere" high-school diploma that they will speedily catch up and then some? Will they be able to make up enough ground or does this plan rest on further diluting the value of a college degree? And further marginalizing the high-school diploma?
To be sure, the "Early College" folks seem to have multiple agendas, even to be a wee bit confused. Some of them talk about educationally disadvantaged kids with deficits to correct. Others seem more interested in "poor but bright" youngsters who are turned off by their current schools but are not educational laggards.
It's important to know which high-school problem we are supposed to watch this initiative solve. Generous as it is, it cannot solve them all. Botstein, it may be recalled, began with elite, upper-middle class students who were bored with high school. Perhaps the same strategy will work with the "poor but able." I'm hard pressed, though, to see it working magic with those whose achievement is far behind where it should be, whether that's due to school failings or environmental factors.
Also a bit perplexing is this plan's emergence just as upscale high schools are jettisoning Advanced Placement courses and more than a few colleges are spurning A.P. credit for work done in high school or else are demanding very high scores before awarding such credit. Harvard recently announced that it will give credit only for "5's" on Advanced Placement exams. The stated reason is that students with lower scores don't do too well in the Harvard courses they wind up in. This does not augur well for a new venture to get younger students from heretofore-unsuccessful high schools to do college-level work-and expect colleges to confer credit for it.
The "Early College" initiative tries to associate itself with today's standards-based reforms by positing that "gains in grades K-4 diminish as students move through their school years." Indeed, that's so, and a serious problem indeed. But is bringing college closer to kindergarten the best solution? Why, for example, are these heavy hitters ignoring the problem of the middle school, a misguided institution if ever there was one. The reason U.S. youngsters emerge from 8th grade so much worse off than they emerged from 4th grade is because they don't learn much in grades 5-8. That's no accident. It's because "middle schoolism" holds that schools' foremost duty during those years is not to impart academic skills and content in an intellectually rigorous way but, rather, to help boys and girls grow up, avoid stress, and feel cared for. Middle school devotees typically assume that raging hormones preclude serious academics.
If our mightiest foundations wanted to do something about high schools, they might usefully start by seeing whether middle schools could be reformed such that 9th graders would be intellectually prepared for a bona fide secondary education. Such young people would be less apt to drop out. They would be more likely to finish high school well prepared for college and the workplace. They might even be ready for adulthood.
That's not to say the high school itself doesn't need attention, too. Some institutional changes are in order including, no doubt, smaller units in many situations. But don't expect too much from that reform alone. I've been in wee high schools that were devoted to frivolous, trendy and highly politicized curricula, more concerned about relevance than the enduring value of their course content. We've recently watched founders of quirky small high schools seeking waivers from the New York Regents exams and other state graduation tests on grounds that what they do is unique and their students shouldn't be judged by ordinary standards. One must wonder whether the Gates initiative (in which are enlisted some of the alternative high schools that have struggled hardest against the Regents and similar exit exams) is yet another way to get students a diploma, maybe even a college degree, without meeting the standards that everyone else has to attain.
Size matters some when it comes to high schooling, but it's not all that matters. As we see from such successful ventures as the Southern Regional Education Board's "High Schools That Work" project, a strong curriculum, taught by people who know their material, and judged according to rigorous academic standards-that matters, too. So does enrolling youngsters in 9th grade who came out of 8th with a decent command of English, math, history and science. I wish the "Early College" initiative well but wonder whether it is the best use of all this welcome attention and largesse directed toward high-school reform.
Fore more information on small schools and the Gates initiative, see http://www.gatesfoundation.org/nr/public/media/newsletters/possibilities/spring_02.htm#About%20Us and http://www.earlycolleges.org/.
For copies of the papers discussed at the U.S. Department of Education symposium on high schools, surf to http://www.ed.gov/offices/OVAE/HS/commisspap.html
