American School Board Journal, November 2004
http://www.asbj.com/current/coverstory.html

Remaking High School

By KATHLEEN VAIL

A changing economy and an influx of aid are spurring the radical transformation of a faltering American icon.

Fifty years ago, the American high school was doing fine. Most students weren't headed for college. If they earned a high school diploma, they could land a well-paying job. If they didn't graduate, they could still find good work.

"But today it's a disaster," says Tom Vander Ark, director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "A third of American students drop out, half of Hispanic and African Americans drop out. That's a civic, social, and economic disaster."

Vander Ark, whose foundation has spent millions to reconfigure comprehensive high schools across the nation, is not alone in his assessment. Educators have spent much of the past two decades focusing on reform at the preschool and elementary school levels and not paying as much attention to high schools. Recent studies, however, have revealed soaring dropout rates, even more appallingly high for minorities. The higher education and business communities are speaking out about the huge numbers of high school graduates not prepared for work or college.

The resulting hue and cry, which has been gaining in intensity, has pushed high school reform to the forefront. In his bid for reelection, President Bush has proposed spending $300 million to bring all incoming high school students up to grade level in reading and math.

While different in philosophy and approach, reform models all seek to change the basic building blocks of high schools: their size and how and what they offer. The Gates Foundation and other private groups, as well as the U.S. Department of Education, are pouring millions of dollars in research and technical assistance into districts willing to change how they run high schools.

This influx of cash and aid is propelling school districts around the country—from New York City to San Diego, Minneapolis to Baltimore, and Boston to Mapleton, a suburb of Denver—to radically transform one of the most firmly entrenched icons in American education.

"The work on high school reform is crucial to the lives of young people and the future of public education and to our country," says Michele Cahill, who is in charge of New York City's massive high school reform. "Unless we really face that we need to retool our system of public education, then we will have an increasingly divided society where a large group of youths are prepared only for the low-wage sector of the labor market."

Dropout Factories

The graduation rate for U.S. schools in 2000 was 85.7 percent, with a 14.3 percent dropout rate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). However, several recent high-profile studies refute those numbers, showing that the dropout problem in our country is, indeed, a crisis.

For example, Jay Greene at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research found that high school graduation rates in 1998 were only 70 percent. A study by the Business Roundtable in 2003 came to a similar conclusion, saying about 30 percent of students are not graduating with a high school diploma.

Why are these statistics so different from the NCES data? The Manhattan Institute's report looked at eighth-grade enrollment in 1993 and compared that with the number of students earning diplomas in 1998. The Roundtable report compared the number of diplomas earned with the number of 17- and 18-year olds in the country.

According to the Roundtable report, students who complete GEDs frequently are not counted among dropouts in national data even though they did not receive high school diplomas. Also, students who are jailed are not counted as dropouts.

At least 14 states do not report dropout data in a uniform way, and reporting at the district level in all states is not uniform either. Some schools count only students who drop out in the 12th grade; others count only students who sign papers officially dropping out. In some cases, students who say they are transferring from one school to another, but never show up at the second school, are not counted among district dropouts.

The dropout rate is much worse for minority students. Gary Orfield of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and Christopher Swanson of the Urban Institute found that about 50 percent of black, Hispanic, and Native American students fail to earn high school diplomas.

Not surprisingly, poor and minority students attend the worst high schools. In June 2004, Robert Balfanz and Nettie Letgers, two researchers with Johns Hopkins University's Center for Social Organization of Schools, found that graduation is not the norm in 20 percent of U.S. high schools. Looking at high school "promoting power"—the schools' ability to get their ninth-graders to 12th-grade graduation in four years—Balfanz and Letgers identified 2,000 weak schools that they dubbed "dropout factories." These schools, which have 40 percent or fewer seniors than the number of freshmen four years earlier, are attended by nearly half of the country's African-American students and two out of five Hispanic students.

The outlook doesn't get much better for most students who do manage to graduate. According to the American Diploma Project (ADP)—a partnership of three education advocacy groups, including the Education Trust—more than 70 percent of high school graduates go immediately to two- or four-year colleges or universities. But 28 percent of them have to take remedial English and math courses before they can start their regular college work.

About 58 percent of students will take remedial English or math courses sometime in their college career. In 2002, the California State University system had to place 59 percent of its incoming freshman class in remedial math and English courses. According to ADP, 60 percent of employers question whether a diploma means students have learned academic basics.

"Everyone is really beginning to realize the major leaks throughout the system," says Naomi Houseman, coordinator of the National High School Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for high school students. "Because business and higher education are clamoring for change, it's causing leaders to look at the whole pipeline, to figure out what we want our students to finish high school knowing how to do."

Anatomy of Reform

Large comprehensive high schools started out trying to be something for everyone, and therein lies their major fault. At a time when few students went on to college, and most went to work after graduating, it made sense to offer three tracks: college bound, general, and vocational. But now, many youth advocates, educators, researchers, and members of the business and higher education communities agree the system is broken.

In these large schools, many students feel anonymous. They don't connect with adults in the building. If they're not taking college-prep classes, they often have little or no impetus to study challenging subjects. If they are struggling academically, little help is available. They don't see the connection between what they are learning and the world they will soon enter. The school's size prevents teachers from getting to know their students well.

Much of the money from the Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and groups such as the Carnegie Foundation is geared toward breaking down large high schools or starting new smaller schools. The small size is not an end, but rather a means to make other reforms work better.

"If a school is relatively small, it's easier to create a coherent curriculum, easier to create a high-performance culture, to create a personalized environment," says Vander Ark. "All those things get exponentially more difficult the bigger the school gets."

Smaller schools with more personalization and high expectations are not new ideas, of course. The roots of much of this reform are 20 years old or more, researched and put forward by Theodore Sizer and his colleagues at the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, two organizations that advocate for more personalized schools. However, many of the changes we're seeing now did not become mainstream until 1996, when the National Association of Secondary School Principals released Breaking Ranks, a reform blueprint containing many of the Annenberg ideas. (NASSP has subsequently published Breaking Ranks II, which gives more explicit examples of how to make these reforms work.)

While some believe that No Child Left Behind and high-stakes high school exit exams could exacerbate dropout rates, others say NCLB and the tests actually help put a spotlight on high schools by recording and reporting how students are performing.

Reform advocates say that for reform to really work, it must occur at the district and state level as well. The Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education has held regional meetings on reform with state and local education officials. The object is to align state and local law and policy with reforms. "If we are serious about saying all high school students will earn a diploma," says Susan Sclafani, assistant secretary for Adult and Vocational Education, "why have a law that allows students to drop out at 16?"

One thing is clear: reform is happening, and the rate is accelerating. "There always is confusion before there is equilibrium," says Sizer. "We are in the middle of the confusing stage."

Barriers to Change

Reform models that transform high schools also seek to transform teaching and instruction. And as with any reform effort, if the teachers don't buy into it, it's not going to work.

High school teachers often aren't prepared to teach in teams, act as advisers, or teach across subjects. "We're asking people who work in high schools to do something they haven't signed up for. They say, 'Dropouts aren't my fault. Kids have issues at home.' Now we are asking teachers to be responsible for it. The nature of the job is different," says Joseph DiMartino of the Education Alliance at Brown University.

Union rules about seniority and other work-related issues can be a barrier, unless the union decides to work with the district on reform, as has happened in San Diego and the Mapleton School District, near Denver.

Nostalgia can also be an obstacle. Parents and community members who fondly remember their high school days often protest when changes are proposed. It can be especially hard to reform old, historic high schools. Some districts solve this by allowing a revered old school to maintain its name, mascot, sports teams, and colors while breaking it into smaller learning communities.

Sometimes, too, the doubt that students can perform to rigorous standards will impede change. "The biggest resistance to improving high schools is a deep-seated belief that many of our students cannot learn much. We've created a system that allows them to validate that," says Gene Bottoms, executive director of High Schools That Work, a reform effort now in about 1,000 schools in 30 states. "When adults decide to change that, wonderful things happen."

Making It Work

The mantra of high school reform is rigor, relationships, and relevance. The ultimate goal is to have all students prepared for college and the workplace when they graduate. Reformers also seek to make high schools places where students, and adults, want to be.

New York City opened 40 new small high schools last year and 60 more this fall. Cahill, who was in charge of urban school reform at the Carnegie Foundation, came to the nation's largest school district last year to oversee a total revamping of its high school program. "Fifty percent of our students graduate in four years," Cahill says. "There's an urgency to change."

A sense of urgency can also be seen in the 138,000-student San Diego Unified School District. "We can't put Band-Aids on sucking chest wounds," says Matthew Malone, the district's chief of secondary reform. "What about the 25 percent who drop out and don't do anything? That piece of the pie is too big, too much."

Malone is no stranger to controversial reform movements. In Massachusetts, he was the principal at a South Boston high school that was broken down into smaller schools. Now, in San Diego, he's overseeing high school reform on a larger scale. Funded in part by the Gates Foundation, three high schools—Crawford, Kearny, and 100-year-old San Diego High—closed over the summer and reopened this fall with redesigned, small, separate schools within their buildings.

Within San Diego High, for instance, are the School of International Studies, the School of Business, the School of Science and Technology, and the School of Media, Visual, and Performing Arts, among others. To maintain their traditions and sense of history, the three high schools have kept their own sports teams and mascots, though the learning communities within the schools have their own colors, as well.

From the start, a plus for the San Diego reform effort has been buy-in by the teachers union. "This had been teacher-led from the beginning," Malone says. "Teachers have dreams to do something new because it wasn't working for them. Who wants to work in a place where the dropout rates are higher? No one."

In addition to the small learning communities, San Diego is also using other reform models, all with the intent of breaking down the larger comprehensive high school and ultimately offering students a choice among many different kinds of schools that would suit their needs.

Small learning communities are the focus of the Minneapolis high school reform, as well. Bob McCauley, secondary school superintendent, says a data collection company helped the 43,000-student district assess its graduation rates in 2001. The number was 47 percent, and the dropout rate in ninth grade was even worse.

"We disaggregated data and faced the brutal facts. We cannot tolerate this any longer. We have to have a high school transformation process," says McCauley, noting the district set a goal of an 80 percent graduation rate by 2010 for its 12,000 high school students.

"We wanted an aggressive, accelerated high school reform program. We couldn't wait on any high school, so rather than phase in one school at a time, we'd try reform for all seven of the comprehensive high schools," he says.

With grants from the McKnight Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, the district opened 34 small learning communities in 2002 in existing high school buildings. Students apply to the programs in eighth grade. If enough students don't enroll, the school will close.

"We are trying to create choice but not tracks," says McCauley, noting that some programs even compete with each other for students.

Colorado's Mapleton School District looked at its graduation rate and made a similar decision to reform. About 400 students showed up at the high school for their freshman year. Four years later, that number had dwindled to 200. So the 5,000-student district—which is 49 percent Hispanic and 44 percent white, with about 25 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch—decided to radically alter its high school.

It formed a partnership with the Denver-based Coalition of Small Schools, which provided Gates funding as well as help with research and design. This year, the district opened a Big Picture high school and an expeditionary learning high school. Next year, a Coalition for Essential Schools high school will open, along with an Expeditionary Learning through the Arts school, and a technology school.

"The reason we are moving as quickly as we are," says Superintendent Charlotte Scarpella, "is that it's unethical not to do it, if you know there's a better way."

Kathleen Vail (kvail@nsba.org) is a senior editor of American School Board Journal.

Copyright © 2004, National School Boards Association. American School Board Journal is an editorially independent publication of the National School Boards Association. Opinions expressed by this magazine or any of its authors do not necessarily reflect positions of the National School Boards Association. Within the parameters of fair use, this article may be printed out and photocopied for individual or educational use, provided this copyright notice appears on each copy. This article may not be otherwise, linked, transmitted, or reproduced in print or electronic form without the consent of the Publisher.

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