The Education Gadfly Weekly

Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

Years ago, I was asked to speak to school officials and parents who were rethinking their district’s graduation requirements. They wanted outside opinion on what should be required.

I suggested they talk to employers who hired high school graduates and to community college instructors. What knowledge and skills did an eighteen-year-old need to qualify for an entry-level job and pass an entry-level class? That should be the requirement.

The district was trying to focus on the “whole child” and was considering adding a requirement covering emotional health, good citizenship, love of learning—stuff like that. An earnest man asked what I thought.

“Imagine a student who’s a miserable human being,” I said. “He hates school, doesn’t get along with people, isn’t a nice guy, but he’s passes all his classes with A’s. Now imagine denying him a diploma.”

A shudder went through the audience.

“You wouldn’t do that,” I said. “So don’t require it.”

That’s still my advice. Don’t require the impossible—unless you’re prepared for a lot of cheating.

These days, all high-school graduates are supposed to be ready for college. Most enroll. The unprepared drop out quickly.

Many high schools are pushing up graduation rates by making it easy—very easy—for students who’ve failed classes to make up credits. Most exit exams, which typically ensured graduates had mastered eighth-grade skills, have been dropped. The scandal in Washington, D.C., which was handing diplomas to no-show, no-learn twelfth graders, is not unique.

If we want nearly everyone—or everyone who shows up and makes an effort—to get a high school diploma, not just a “certificate of completion,” then the requirements must be lowered to the bare minimum. Community college leaders say there’s some hope of success for students who show up with seventh-grade skills or better. Perhaps that’s the minimum for a “basic” diploma that would signify the student showed up, followed the rules, and learned something. Employers like people who show up and follow rules, which is why traditionally they’ve preferred high school graduates to GED earners.

Schools should make it clear to students that higher-level diplomas have higher payoffs. I envision a “career-readiness” diploma for students aiming for on-the-job or community college–based vocational programs. It might include certifications in specific job skills, but the key is to teach students the academic skills they’ll need to learn in the future. Some might go on to earn a four-year degree. Others will find they don’t need or want it.

For those aiming for a bachelor’s degree or higher, schools should offer a rigorous “honors” or “university-ready” diploma that truly signifies preparation for college-level academic work.

I’d also like to see a very strong effort to identify students who are falling behind in elementary and middle school, figure out why they’re struggling and give them help to get on a career-ready or university-ready track before it’s too late.

We expect high schools to perform miracles and then, when that doesn’t happen, we expect colleges to perform miracles. Let’s get real.

Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

A high school diploma should be more than just a piece of paper. It’s a promise we make to our children: Put in the hard work to earn one, and you’ll be on the path to achieve your goals in life. By that standard, we in public education are lying to hundreds of thousands of students every year.

The problem extends far beyond the handful of cities accused of manipulating their graduation rates. Nationwide, fewer than half of all high school graduates are prepared to earn even a “C” in their college courses, based on SAT and ACT data. About 40 percent of those who enroll in college are placed in remedial classes, where they spend time and money learning skills they were told they’d already mastered. And most who take a remedial class won’t go on to earn a degree.

Graduates who opt for a career straight out of high school aren’t faring much better. Most employers report that high school graduates enter their roles “deficient” in the skills they need to do their jobs well.

In other words, you could walk into any high school in the country, and the odds are you’ll find at least some students on track to earning diplomas that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. That’s the problem we need to solve: How can we ensure students are finishing high school on track to meet their life goals?

We could make a Common Core–style push to move from the current hodgepodge of state graduation requirements to one set of national standards. I personally think that would be good policy, but politically it’s a pipe dream. And graduation standards will always have a difficult time accounting for the full range of students’ aspirations—for example, careers that don’t require a four-year college degree but require a specific kind of postsecondary certification or training.

So here’s a better and more realistic idea: Instead of diving right into tinkering with graduation requirements, let’s focus on explaining students’ progress against those requirements in a way that’s more transparent and relevant to them and their families. That means actually asking students what they want to do after high school, and providing easy-to-understand updates on their progress toward their life goals—not just when they graduate, but throughout their K–12 career.

Here’s how it could work. Beginning in elementary school, schools should ask students and their families about their postsecondary goals, and track the answers just as they would grades or other important academic information. This should happen at least once a year—through some combination of a survey and parent-teacher conferences—because students’ goals will evolve over time. And schools should use this process as an opportunity not just to passively collect information, but to encourage students to set truly ambitious goals for themselves.

Once schools know what students want to do after high school, report cards at every level could include a narrative section that clearly explains whether students are on track to meet their goals (not just graduation standards). And when students graduate from high school, their diplomas should come with a report that clearly explains whether they are ready to take the next step toward their career goals. For example, is the student ready to be successful in a four-year college or not? States and districts should track these assessments and should be willing to stand behind them, especially if they are checked against graduates’ actual post-secondary success.

Connecting diplomas more explicitly to students’ life goals would provide students with more honest, useful information about their academic progress. Notably, schools would need to make much more accurate assessments of college readiness because most students’ goals include attending college.

This system would also provide policymakers and researchers with access to a wealth of new data about students’ life goals, and how many graduated on track to meet them. They could supplement these data by following students after graduation—for example, to see how many students certified as “college ready” actually earned credit in their freshman courses or went on to earn a degree. That would open up new, more meaningful accountability measures for schools and school systems focused on what percentage of students (overall and by subgroups) go on to achieve their college or career goals. And it could lead to a more thoughtful conversation about changes to graduation standards, based on a clearer picture of how current standards connect to students’ lives after high school.

Most importantly, this new view of diplomas would create powerful incentives for schools to reorient all their policies and practices around understanding and helping students meet their life goals. Instead of expecting students to adapt to the current one-size-fits all approach to school if they want to succeed, we’d start expecting schools to craft education programs for every student that acknowledge their potential and honor their aspirations. And we’d ultimately judge school systems not on how many of their students earn a paper credential, but on how many actually reach their goals after high school.

You might assume this is how schools already operate, but think about it: If you’re a parent, when’s the last time a teacher or principal asked about your hopes and dreams for your child after high school? When’s the last time anybody asked your child? I think the key to many of the challenges we face in public education today lies in asking those questions, listening, and making the answers our collective North Star. Applying that principle to high school diplomas seems like as good a place to start as any.

Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

Whenever a classmate would question the question, my favorite law school professor would say, “Don’t fight the hypothetical.” It’s a good premise for intellectual exercises—like a Wonkathon—and so I’ll begin by answering the question directly before getting to the deeper issue at hand.

Standards for graduating high school

There should be just two overarching standards for high school graduation.

First, every student must demonstrate academic competency. No diploma (*spoiler alert—or certificate or credit) will carry a graduate far without high competency in core academics because every student must be a lifelong learner. Others can debate how to demonstrate that competency and in which specific subjects, but those debates should not overshadow or water down the critical premise: If a student is not prepared to continue learning, then she is not prepared to graduate.

Second, every student must demonstrate that they can apply the skills they’ve learned in a post–high school setting. Employers are constantly telling us that how you can apply skills is as important as what you actually know. When hiring, they’re looking at habits and behaviors. Students must be able to think critically, collaborate with colleagues, solve problems, and adapt in real time. Fortunately, there are many pathways for demonstrating achievement in this standard—and I have some ideas below.

How to get there

Now how we get there—that’s the bigger question. What should the high school experience look like? What should high school students be doing?

So here are a few ideas—call them guiding principles—to chew on.

Agility starts with academics.

Successful high schools emphasize a rigorous curriculum because they know they’re preparing lifelong learners. Competency in core academic skills is the key to every other door. Even the most expertly trained technical student is likely to need some additional education or skills training during her career.

There is good research to support this idea. Effective apprenticeship models facilitate high permeability between vocational and academic programs. Students master the fundamentals so they can go back and forth between tracks and learn new skills as needed.

What we know about the future of work should influence our thinking here too. Automation and artificial intelligence are forcing radical shifts in the workforce. Over the next two decades, a huge number of jobs will disappear as new ones take their place. 

Today we talk about preparing students for a career. Yet being trained in one specialty will only get graduates so far; it’s far more likely that even those who go directly into a career will need to go back to school at some point to stay in the workforce long-term. Agility will become currency. Workers will need to be agile in order to adapt and succeed, and that requires the ability to learn continuously.

Our school system must become agile too—which leads us to the next element.

Twelfth grade is not a hard stop

A high school diploma has to be a forward signal, not a record of past achievement; there’s more to your diploma than just completion of grades kindergarten through twelve. The line between high school and post-secondary education isn’t just blurred, it’s irrelevant and should cease to exist.

Pioneers of this principle have been hard at work for years. Dual-enrollment programs offer students the chance to pursue college courses in addition to their high school classes. Early college high schools go a step further, enabling students to earn full college credits. The Colorado Early Colleges Network public charter schools, started in Colorado Springs, CO, consistently rank among the top-performing high schools in the state, and 80 percent of 2017 graduates earned an associate degree along with their high school diploma. Students at Metro Early College High School in Columbus, OH, who complete their core academic classes can move on to take college-level courses at The Ohio State University and/or Columbus State Community College.

In fact, the average graduate of an early college program has earned thirty-six college credits. Such opportunities can make the transition to college seamless; early college students are more likely to attend college after graduation because they’re already on the path.

These programs—and the next evolution of them—need to become the norm because the experience they provide for students can no longer be exceptional.

Students are the focal point.

Successful high schools will figure out how to personalize learning opportunities for every student and offer a variety of programs to meet their specific needs. Small learning communities and college and career counseling are among the top evidence-based strategies identified by the U.S. Department of Education for Next Generation High Schools (along with rigorous curriculum, dual enrollment, and early-college programs).

And for good reason. Small learning communities provide the space for individualized learning and support, where students have a defined peer network critical for developing the social skills necessary to succeed later in life. Likewise, college and career counseling are particularly important for low-income and first-generation college students, who often can’t rely on access to adults who have “done it before” to illuminate the opportunities available to them or guide them through the choices they’ll have to make.

To do all of this, we’ll need an agile funding system too, one that provides sufficient resources to meet students where they are (meaning students with greater needs receive a greater share of the resources) and sufficient flexibility to follow students to wherever (and however) their learning takes place. Rather than locking resources into a building that is supposed to house all educational opportunities, state funding schemes should unlock the combined power of technology, choice, and specialization to enable students to learn in a variety of venues from multiple providers.

Educators and operators can and will step up to the challenge of creating a more agile education system that responds to changing job and student needs—if we design school funding models to be agile enough to accommodate whatever they dream up.

Experience is the lead teacher of a core subject.

Critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration with peers, and the soft skills everybody reading this takes for granted—these are all keys to success in a twenty-first-century workforce. Graduates without such skills are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to capitalizing on the enormous freedom and opportunities that technology and continuous innovation provide.

Twenty-first-century skills aren’t taught in a course; they come from experiences. Whether the experience is gained in real workplace environments, apprenticeships, or college classrooms, every high school student needs opportunities to learn these skills and demonstrate her proficiency in them.

Once again, many educators—often through innovative partnerships with business leaders—are ahead of the curve here, paving the way for the rest of our high schools to catch up. Check out Honda’s partnership with the STEM Academy Early College High School in Marysville, Ohio. Or South Carolina’s Apprenticeship Carolina program, giving high school students job training while they’re still in school.

If we rethink high school with these principles in mind, secondary education just might become meaningful again.

On this week's podcast, Roberto Rodríguez, president and CEO of Teach Plus, joins Mike Petrilli and Alyssa Schwenk to discuss race and poverty in education. During the Research Minute, David Griffith examines whether authorizers are making it harder for people of color to win charter contracts.

Amber’s Research Minute

Ian Kingsbury, “Charter School Regulation as a Barrier to Entry,” University of Arkansas (March 2018).

One of the most compelling reasons offered at the time for developing new Common Core–aligned tests was that they would allow educators and policymakers to compare the effectiveness of schools across state lines. And nearly all states initially wanted in: At their inception, forty-six states originally joined one of the two consortia established to create common CCSS-aligned tests, PARCC (the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

Eight years down the road, however, consortia membership is faltering, and fewer than half of states remain members in either group.

A new resource released last month by Education First (in the form of PowerPoint slides) summarizes this dramatic rise and fall of consortia membership over the past decade, assesses the current state of state assessments, and identifies national trends to determine where the field is headed.

As the report describes, the once narrowing national testing landscape is rapidly diversifying: “Every year between 2013 and 2015, five to six states left PARCC and three states left Smarter Balanced.” States are instead opting to partner with vendors such as American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Pearson to develop their own tests, particularly for K–8 assessments. States are also increasingly moving to use the SAT or ACT as their high school accountability tests, despite serious concerns about whether these “aptitude” tests are well-aligned to state standards and contain sufficient accommodations for students with learning disabilities and English language learners. Still other states, such as Massachusetts and Louisiana, are opting to use assessments that comprise both state- and consortia-created test items.

This increasingly diversified landscape raises several concerns. For one, it makes it virtually impossible to compare schools’ student achievement results across the country. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress provides a regular snapshot on national, state, and large city performance, but can’t get more granular than that.) And because the vast majority of states are still implementing the Common Core State Standards or a close variant thereof, it’s also concerning that so many are walking away from tests that were explicitly designed to assess those standards—and that have been found, by Fordham and numerous others, to be high-quality, reflective of the most important content needed for college and career readiness in both ELA/literacy and mathematics, and more rigorous than prior state tests.

Nearly a decade after the creation of Common Core State Standards and accompanying consortia tests, the national assessment landscape is clearly still in flux. In addition to the dramatic decline in consortia membership in recent years, an additional “twenty-two states have nonconsortia assessment vendor contracts that expire in 2017 or 2018.” Education First’s report is therefore a timely, if cautionary, look at the rapidly evolving national testing landscape.

What’s not clear is whether the new tests are actually new—or just PARCC or Smarter Balanced in different packing. We also don’t know whether they are well-aligned to state standards—a critical gap in our understanding that should be filled pronto.

As we at Fordham have always stressed, good tests matter. Whether states are abandoning consortia tests for political, time, or cost-related considerations, it’s critical that replacements closely align to state learning standards, and that they’re are equally rigorous and, above all, high quality.

SOURCE: “Whatever Happened to All Those New and Better State Tests? The State of State Assessments,” Education First (February 2018).

Despite genetic hardwiring of babies’ brains to learn language, emerging evidence suggests that different languages are acquired in different ways based on their specific characteristics. Most of what child development and education professionals know about language acquisition in young children is based on monolingual studies and is difficult to apply to bilingual children. But a large and growing number of young boys and girls worldwide are operationally bilingual—which means they receive regular input in two or more languages between birth and adolescence. Because language instruction and assessments are typically monolingual, understanding how simultaneous bilingual acquisition affects the taught/tested language could be an important step in supporting language development for young children. Does a low English score mean that a child is academically behind and in need of intervention? Or is she exhibiting a normal pattern based on her amount of exposure at home? A group of United Kingdom–based researchers believes they have made a breakthrough in the area of language development measurement that may open new avenues of education and support for dual language learners.

Their work involved three separate projects. The first consisted of collecting data on language exposure in a cohort of 372 typically-developing two-year-olds simultaneously learning English and one of thirteen other languages. They assessed variables such as the amount of each language overheard by the child in the home, which parent spoke which language, whether parents were fluently bilingual, overall language exposure, and various demographic data. The researchers developed a checklist of one hundred familiar words in English and the other languages, remaining sensitive to cultural differences to construct the most universal lists possible, and parents reported whether their children recognized or could say the words in both languages. This resulted in development scores in both languages. As has been observed in other research and practice, the English scores for these bilingual children were generally below the average achieved by monolingual English learners. And large variations were observed among the non-English languages, which indicated that some linguistics-based “interference” caused by simultaneous bilingual acquisition might be at work in suppressing the English scores.

The second project tested the relationship between the two sets of scores, looking for the variables that most influenced English language outcomes. The typical family-based variables came into play—parental education levels, socioeconomic status, and overall language exposure—but researchers also tested an outside variable called “linguistic distance,” or the difference between English and the other test language. This distance was determined by a number of linguistic factors, including lexical and phonological overlaps—words that sound similar and mean similar things in two different languages—as well as the relative complexity of pronunciation and the subject-verb-object structure in which the words typically occur in each language. They determined that the more distant the additional language was from English, the lower the child’s scores would be in both perception and production of English test words. Put another way, two-year-olds learning both Mandarin and English at the same time will have a lower average English vocabulary score than two-year-olds learning both French and English at the same time. And both sets of bilingual children will have a lower average score than monolingual two-year-olds exposed only to English. This isn’t because they’re learning English at an improper rate, it’s because learning two very different languages at once is difficult, even for youngsters whose brains are fully capable of the task. Researchers were able to create a weighting system to determine a more accurate average English score based on this weighting, leading to a new assessment tool—the UK Bilingual Toddlers Assessment Tool (UKBTAT). It takes into account the interference that bilingualism exerted on children learning English, which results in a more accurate assessment of proficiency and better tools to help those who need assistance.

To test the UKBTAT’s validity, the final project used the tool to predict the English scores of a new cohort of fifty-eight two-year-olds bilingual in English and other languages not initially studied in the development of the UKBTAT. The researchers assessed the new languages for linguistic distance from English and plugged them into the UKBTAT protocol, along with family-based variables. The weighting factors accurately predicted the children’s English vocabulary score, confirming the validity of the tool.

The researchers believe that this new English assessment protocol, if widely implemented in the UK, will reduce the number of children who are wrongly diagnosed with language delays, and will help teachers, speech therapists, and healthcare providers more easily find children who are truly in need of services. Additionally, the types of assistance needed by young children learning two languages should, theoretically, vary based on the linguistic distance of those two languages. One size does not fit all, especially when it comes to language acquisition and development from toddlerhood into school age. The more we know and the more effective tools that teachers can have at the ready, the better.