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# **What Ails U.S. High Schools?**

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# **How Should They Be Reformed?**

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# **Is There A Federal Role?**

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Chester E. Finn, Jr.

John M. Olin Fellow, Manhattan Institute

&

President, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

April 2002

This paper was prepared for the Office of Vocational and Adult
Education, U.S. Department of Education pursuant to contract no.
ED-99-CO-0160. The findings and opinions expressed in this paper do not
necessarily reflect the position or policies of the U.S. Department of
Education.

*What Ails Schools?*

*How Should They Be Reformed?*

*Is There a Federal Role?*

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

***Introduction***

American high schools aren't working nearly well enough. They're
producing weak academic results. Many are troubled institutions,
confused about their missions. Only about three quarters of their
entrants graduate "on schedule". In many communities, especially our big
cities, they're often unruly places where little learning goes on.

To be sure, the United States also has some highly regarded secondary
schools that do well by their (mostly) upper middle-class, college-bound
students---the New Triers and Stuyvesants in the public sector, the
Andovers and Sidwells in the private sector. There are less famous
schools, too, often in small towns that perform reasonably well. But
it's a mistake to be too dazzled by the bright stars. What they're most
useful for is demonstrating what's possible in happy situations
characterized by close convergence between a school's mission,
clientele, community and resources.

The more typical U.S. high school is murky as to its raison d'etre,
attended by a mix of young people with differing levels of preparation,
aspiration and family support, and staffed by adults with variable
skills and motivations. It's caught up in a whirl of education reforms
and economic changes that don't mesh comfortably with its accustomed
patterns and practices. Its graduates pose problems for colleges,
private employers, even the military. Its dropouts pose problems for law
enforcement, the welfare system and the civil society that they inhabit.

# **Today's Concerns**

# 

It's nothing new to remark upon the troubled performance and ill-focused
mission of American high schools. We can trace such criticisms back to
the mid-19^th^ century and they've been frequent in the four decades
since Harvard's James Bryant Conant almost single-handedly shaped the
"comprehensive" U.S. high school, as we still know it.

The specific content of those critiques has varied with the enthusiasms
and alarums of their times. In the 1960's and '70's, for example, we
learned that high schools were repressive, authoritarian places that
cramped the free spirits of their

students. Since 1983 and the report of the *National Commission on
Excellence in Education*, the dominant critique has been their failure
to impart enough academic skills and knowledge to their pupils. As the
TIMSS report made vivid, when judged in international context on their
math and science prowess, young Americans look pretty good in 4^th^
grade, so-so in 8^th^ grade but really bad by 12^th^ grade. Something is
amiss and it's worse in high school than in the early grades.

Our high schools' meager academic output is also attested to by college
professors who find ever more of their entering students in need of
"remedial" work before being ready to tackle college-level courses, even
when these are gauged by the modest standards of many American
postsecondary institutions. Employers of recent high school graduates
similarly lament their weak academic skills, shoddy work habits and
dubious character traits. Monitors of civic engagement and voting
patterns remark both on how little our high school graduates know about
their community and government and on how little many of them seem to
care.

Linger for a moment with those latter criticisms and note that they
pertain not only to academics but also to civic and personal attributes.
The fact is that we want our high schools---our last truly universal
"socializing" institution before young people enter adulthood---to
prepare their pupils on many fronts, not just cognitive skills and
knowledge. Indeed, this entire discussion would be easier and its
conclusions simpler if faulty academics were the exclusive criticism of
today's high schools. If that were the sole problem seeking a solution,
we could readily visualize---even if we could not easily implement---a
set of plausible reforms. But it's hard to stop there. America wants
strong academics from its high schools, yes indeed, but we want more
than that. We also want them to forge good adults.

Why is so little of this happening today? Many thoughtful individuals
and solemn commissions have sought to diagnose what ails the American
high school at the dawn of the 21^st^ Century. We can detect the
beginnings of a rough consensus about the problem. It includes seven
elements:

## First, Mission Confusion. Writing for the National Commission on the High School Senior Year, Michael C. Rubenstein put it well:

> Throughout their history, high schools have periodically reacted to
> three major visions \[that\]...have competed for the hearts and minds
> of Americans...with each taking turns rising and falling in the
> politics of education. Thus, high schools have been subjected to
> destabilizing reform cycles as one vision fell out of favor and was
> replaced by another. The first vision, championed most eloquently by
> John Dewey, views schools as social agents whose mission is to produce
> well-rounded, literate citizens able and ready to advance the cause of
> democracy and civilization.... The second vision, perhaps best
> captured in the 1983 report, *A Nation at Risk*, views schools first
> and foremost as academic institutions whose mission is to prepare
> students for advanced learning in college and beyond.... The third
> vision, espoused by the 1991 Secretary's Commission on Achieving
> Necessary Skills (SCANS), views schools primarily as economic
> institutions, whose mission is to prepare students for employment in
> an expanded economy.... Proponents of these three visions have been
> unable to find common ground. Instead, each carved out a piece of the
> high school, splintering the institution and its mission.
>
> Second, *remediation.* As if three competing visions weren't vexing
> enough, today's high schools are also expected to shoulder another
> weighty burden: completing (or even re-doing) the basic education that
> our elementary schools cannot be counted upon to supply their
> students. If the three R's and a decent ration of fundamental
> knowledge don't get solidly implanted during a student's first nine
> years of formal schooling, it becomes the high schools' job---albeit
> one for which they're ill-prepared and unsuitably staffed---to fill in
> what's missing. For some youngsters, therefore, what should have been
> a solid secondary education becomes a belated primary
> education---which naturally means that some source other than high
> school will have to supply a proper secondary education, if such a
> thing ever gets supplied.

## Third is scale. Most U.S. high schools are simply too big, making them impersonal, anonymous places where it's easy for timid students to disappear, for troublemakers to elude responsibility, and for adults to view their youthful charges as numbers rather than individuals. This scale is partly a consequence of public education's quest for efficiency but primarily a result of the push for comprehensiveness: the insistence that every high school contain within its own four walls a complete college-prep program (with multiple foreign languages, honors courses, science labs, etc.); vocational and technical options for students aiming for the workforce; the remains of the old "general" track for students who don't know where they're headed but crave that diploma; the full gamut of extra-curricular and athletic programs, from varsity football to orchestra to newspaper; and a slew of health and social service programs for students, families and community. 

Fourth is *pupil motivation*. Every state has a compulsory attendance
law that ostensibly requires young people to attend school until they
are sixteen, seventeen or eighteen years old. Enforcement is spotty,
however. Nobody goes to jail or gets fined for dropping out of
school---or letting their kids skip classes. Hence high school
attendance is often low while truancy and tardiness soar, along with
dropout and fall-by-the-wayside rates. Yet perhaps the biggest
motivation problem stems from the fact that, for many young people, high
school is deeply boring---and how one does there doesn't much matter. So
long as one puts in the time and accumulates the credits for that
diploma, one's grades, class rank and extracurricular participation does
not count for a lot in the real world, except for that small fraction of
students aiming for highly selective colleges. For everyone else, the
college down the road can be counted on to admit them pretty much
regardless of their grades and test scores. While an employer may ask if
they have a diploma, he's not apt to inspect one's transcript.

Though a number of states are ratcheting up the pressure by requiring
students to pass exit exams before graduating, the world outside the
schoolhouse still whispers that how one does in high school isn't
terribly important. That message wreaks havoc at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday
night when an adolescent must decide whether to buckle down to revise
that history paper, turn on the TV, or go out with his pals. In their
own

peculiar way, teen-agers are rational beings that constantly subject
their options to an informal cost-benefit analysis. The high school can
rarely persuade them that the benefit of studying harder is worth the
effort---and deferred gratification---entailed in doing so. In *Horace's
Compromise*, Theodore Sizer painted a devastating portrait of the U.S.
high school as a place where students and teachers strike a Faustian
bargain under which the young don't give too much grief to the old so
long as the latter don't inflict too much work upon the former.

Fifth is *Obsolete Notions of Teaching and Learning.* One reason that
high school is boring is that its instructional modes and technologies
haven't changed in a century, though everything else in the world has
changed. The typical instructional setting still consists of 20-25
students sitting at their desks for 50 minutes while a grown up talks
at---and, if they're fortunate, with---them. Worse, those adults usually
see themselves more as college faculty---i.e. the custodians and
presenters of their particular subject---than as partners with young
people in a complicated learning process. They assume that it's the
students' responsibility to absorb, process and internalize the
knowledge they have supplied. That mindset, which could allow---even
justify---widespread student failure, is simply incompatible with the
nation's policy goal of ensuring that all its young people reach high
levels of achievement. And it's apt to strike students as unhelpful,
off-putting, and boredom inducing. In other parts of their lives, they
encounter far more riveting ways of learning things and people who are
far more engaged in their lives (sometimes for ill). Is it really a
surprise that they learn more outside of school than in? And that they
can't wait for school to end each afternoon so they can get to the
interesting parts of their education?

Sixth, *Changing Lives and Career Patterns.* Technology isn't all that's
changed. So have the lives of young people. Our high schools were
designed for a world that no longer exists for many American
adolescents. When one cumulates the effects on them of popular culture
(especially television and music); the internet, cell phone and e-mail;
the sexual revolution, drugs and alcohol; teen-age employment; juvenile
gangs; the automobile; and the deteriorating family, their world no
longer resembles the Ozzie and Harriet society of James B. Conant in the
1950's. Though today's high school makes an effort to keep
pace---installing computers in classrooms, perhaps operating a day care
center for students' babies, adding drug-abuse prevention programs and
sex education classes---its basic institutional arrangements are sadly
out of whack with the world these young people actually inhabit.

So are its inherent assumptions about their subsequent careers. Few of
today's young Americans are pointed toward single life-long jobs like
those of their grandparents. Instead, they're headed onto curving paths
that will include (multiple) stops in higher education and an array of
jobs, very likely in different fields and with very different skill and
knowledge requirements. That means it's time to retire the old high
school sorting mechanism that directs some students into the college
track and others onto a vocational pathway.

## Seventh and finally is the proliferation of rival providers. High schools are losing their monopoly on secondary education. Even without explicitly embracing a policy of school choice, America has begun to provide teenagers and young adults with many ways of getting---and showing that they got---an education. They can study at home; enroll in "virtual" schools; sign up for courses at the local community college or technical institute; attend an "alternative" or continuation school, possibly one with an appealing work-study component; learn on-the-job via employer-provided programs, many of these delivered with great technological sophistication; and use the G.E.D., state exit tests or other means of demonstrating that they've learned what they needed to. High schools aren't used to competing in this kind of marketplace and few are well situated to do so. 

# **Reform's Sorry High School Record**

Many efforts have been and are being made to revitalize the high school
as part of America's larger project of elementary-secondary education
reform. In fact the "Excellence Commission's" main prescription in 1983
focused on the high school, urging that it beef up graduation
requirements to demand exposure to the "new basics" (4 years of English,
3 years of math, etc.) for every student. Many efforts have since been
undertaken by states and communities, as well as corporations,
foundations, universities and education groups, to cure what ails U.S.
high schools.

Yet little has come of it. Test scores---whether one is looking at NAEP
results, TIMSS scores, SAT averages, etc.---remain essentially flat at
an unacceptably low level. Graduation rates also remain flat at too low
a level. That the country is doing as well as it is, is due not to the
terrific contribution of today's high schools but, rather, to a
remarkable set of "coping" mechanisms that enable us to field a
sufficiency of competent adults despite our high schools. Ours is an
endlessly forgiving society in which one can always come back for more
education or another credential, and lots of people do. Employer-run
training programs, community colleges and GED programs all flourish.
Churches, the Marine Corps and a reasonably robust civil society work on
character and citizenship. Adults return to technical schools or learn
from the Internet. And when we can't grow enough of our own skilled
workers, we import them from abroad.

So we cope and, as a nation, we've fared pretty well. But we can't thank
our high schools for much of that, nor can we claim that the reform
movements that seem finally to be gaining traction in the earlier grades
are also having the intended effect on high schools. Indeed, it's
generally conceded by school watchers that the two dominant strands of
reform in U.S. education---the standards-based version and the
competition-based kind---have had much greater impact on our elementary
schools than our secondary institutions.

Standards-based reform is making headway in the K-8 schools as states
set standards, create tests that are (ostensibly) calibrated to those
standards, and deploy

an array of incentives and sanctions for students and educators that are
meant to push them to strive harder to attain those standards. Even more
of this will happen as new federal rules grab hold, requiring every
state to set standards, test all its students (in grades 3-8, as well as
once during high school) and intervene in cases of failing schools.
Conscientious states and communities go further, aligning their
curricula, textbook selections, teacher training and other elements of
the "delivery system" with their standards and tests and trying to
ensure that every youngster has a decent chance to learn that for which
they'll be held accountable. Yet aside from the imposition of statewide
graduation tests (often pegged to a 10^th^ grade achievement level or
even lower), this whole edifice of standards-based reform has scarcely
touched America's high schools. Where it has, as in Texas, the new
results-based approach is typically layered atop a set of "excellence
commission" style efforts keyed to course requirements and Carnegie
units. The result, not surprisingly, is confusion as to whether the
standards that matter are those associated with the courses or those
built into the exit tests. This confusion is deepened by the move in
some states to institute uniform "end of course" exams.

Competition-style reform is also less robust at the secondary level.
Voucher users (both the publicly funded and privately funded kinds) are
mainly to be found in K-8 schools. Few of America's 2400 charter schools
are high schools. And even in the domain of "public school choice",
secondary students have fewer options, if only because their schools are
less numerous, larger, geographically more distant and---thanks to the
assumption of comprehensiveness---more apt to resemble one another.

### *Federal Policy Perplex*

High schools are a stepchild of federal policy, too, marooned between
Washington's focus on the early/middle grades and the major attention
that Uncle Sam pays to college. The newly enacted "no child left behind"
amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) are
emblematic of this indeterminate status. Despite the "S" in the law's
name, most of the attention and money is concentrated on the "E". That's
where the new annual testing (and National Assessment) requirements hit
hardest; where the main emphasis on academic standards is placed; where
"adequate yearly progress" will be monitored most closely; where the new
reading program will happen; and where we find most of the programs and
rules designed to produce better teachers, better uses of technology,
better curricula, and so forth.

Stepping back, we can encapsulate in a few words what Congress and the
President expect the K-8 system to do: produce measurably higher
academic achievement in reading and math (and, in time, science) across
the board, close the performance gap between rich and poor children, and
turn around failing schools.

We can also say with fair clarity what federal policy makers expect of
our higher education system---and are putting many billions into
subsidizing: wider economic access to college combined with world-class
scientific research.

But what does Washington want from the country's high schools? Nobody
can quite say. Only in the realm of vocational/technical education are
there sizable programs with reasonably clear objectives at the secondary
level, and most of those have their roots in the very different society
of the early 20^th^ century. Most, moreover, relate to non-college-bound
students---a shrinking population---and to specialized "tracks" or
schools designed to help ready them for direct access to lifetime trades
of the sort that grow ever scarcer.

To be sure, that's not the whole story. Washington stories are seldom
simple. Besides the long-established voc-ed programs of the Perkins Act
and its kin, we find a hodgepodge of smallish initiatives. We find a
"Presidential Scholars" program meant to recognize high school students
who do well in completing a reasonably demanding core curriculum. And we
find incidental policies that affect high schooling but may even work at
cross-purposes with one another. For example, the armed forces now
expect their recruits to have high school diplomas; but the Department
of Transportation recently ruled that the newly federalized airport
baggage inspectors need not possess such credentials.

Taken as a whole, it simply doesn't add up. As Churchill once said of a
bland dessert, "This pudding has no theme." We don't exaggerate much in
saying that there is no real federal policy for high schools.

Is that a good or bad thing? Given Washington's propensity to
complicate, even mess up, that which it touches in education, it's not
irrational to prefer benign neglect. In this case, however, the federal
policy vacuum mirrors the nationwide confusion that besets high
schooling and the absence of clear direction and expectations that we've
also noticed at state and local levels. Uncle Sam would be wise to stay
out of something that's working well. But when it comes to high schools,
the federal policy muddle reflects the country's uncertainty about what
they should be accomplishing.

***Sad Confusion or Needed Experimentation?***

What to do? As we look ahead, let's acknowledge that some worthy efforts
are underway to rejuvenate the American high school, even if they're
less obtrusive than the fractious public policy battles over tests and
vouchers. The federal Education Department and the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, for example, are experimenting with making high schools
smaller and with encouraging new school designs (although the Gates
dollars seem to favor "progressive" models to those that stress content
and standards). Some of the whole-school models that have achieved
attention in recent years focus on the high school years, among them the
Southern Regional Education Board's High Schools That Work program and
Theodore Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools. The recent report of
the *National Commission on the High School Senior Year*

offers numerous suggestions for revitalizing the twelfth grade, which
many believe to be time largely wasted. A couple of states---most
famously Oregon---are devising a

"certificate of mastery" approach to high schooling, meant to create a
common academic threshold that is to be attained ---and then branched
off from---by all young people. Others are striving to smooth the high
school to college transition by viewing education as a "K-16" continuum.

The experimentation is surely worthy---and I suggest more of it below.
To date, however, there's no shape or direction to it. It seems like a
helter-skelter array of "try something different" schemes with no common
theme beyond discontent with the status quo and the sense that surely
there must be a better way to do things. Just as mission confusion
characterizes the high school itself, so does reform confusion typify
our efforts to solve the problem.

This, too, could turn out okay. As has oft been noted, private
philanthropy can do things that government is not able to undertake, and
states---our "laboratories of democracy"---often serve us well by doing
things differently from one another. If America has no clear national
consensus about what its high schools should be, how they should work
and what they should produce, perhaps we ought to welcome
experimentation with various reform strategies. This approach will prove
more beneficial, though, if we're vigilant in monitoring and rigorous in
evaluating the various innovations so that serious lessons can be
gleaned from this round of experimentation.

Besides experimenting, can we point to any clear destination for U.S.
high schools in the early 21^st^ Century? I can begin to glimpse a
path---two paths, really\--through the present thicket. If we walk a
little way down each of them, we might also find the beginnings of
guidance for future federal policy.

***On the Threshold of Adulthood***

The soundest way to think of high schooling is preparation for
adulthood. Every society, every culture, indeed every tribe, has some
arrangement or rite of passage whereby its young get inducted into adult
society, a means by which they learn what they need to know and acquire
the habits and values they are expected to display as grown-up
participants in their society.

What does America want from its young adults? I believe we have three
main hopes for them.

First, that they possess the skills and knowledge that will make them
independent, self-sufficient and productive members of our society, no
matter what educational and vocational paths they later follow. Call it
economic readiness.

Second, that they be ready to take their places as citizens, with decent
knowledge of their government and community, some grounding in the
history, governance, geography and culture of their nation, and a desire
(and the requisite know-how) to participate constructively in adult
society. Call it civic readiness.

Third, that they be good people, self-disciplined and ethical, honest
and law-abiding, cooperative, confident, caring and optimistic. Call it
personal readiness.

When we set this trio of desiderata alongside the traditional U.S. high
school, we quickly note that only the first of them---economic
readiness---fits reasonably well. We are most accustomed to viewing
schools as places where the young gain skills and knowledge. This is
their minimal role, the mission that most of the recent reform fuss has
been about, and the realm where they are least apt to share the burden
with other institutions. School is where most people learn algebra and
U.S. history, chemistry and poetry. Doing a better job of those things
is what we're clearest about when it comes to education reform. All the
fuss about standards, tests and accountability derives from our
insistence that schools do a better job of it---and that students be
expected actually to learn it, not just pass their time going through
the motions.

The second attribute---civic readiness---is something most people would
like to see American schools guarantee even as we acknowledge that they
have difficulty in accomplishing this. Insofar it depends on a knowledge
base---knowing, for example, that each state has two Senators---we can
reasonably look to schools to construct it (and we have tests to measure
it). But much of civic readiness consists of attitudes, habits and
dispositions. There's little decent data on this matter---there seldom
is on such "soft" topics---but a lot of cultural signals, anecdotes,
employer comments and suchlike indicate that we're not doing a
satisfactory job of producing young adults with the right mix of
qualities. Many teachers earnestly try to impart such attributes to
their students but it's my impression that most of today's high schools
are simply not very effective in this domain---possibly because we have
traditionally expected other civic institutions to shoulder much of this
burden.

As for personal readiness---the third attribute---we've relied primarily
on church, family, community, the military, and other elements of civil
society (e.g. the Boy Scouts, the Girls' Club) to do the heavy lifting.
Schools may try to assist via guidance counselors, coaches and other
adults, as well as the valiant efforts of conscientious classroom
teachers, but American society hasn't really expected them to bear much
of the responsibility. Nor do we have reliable assessments by which to
know how well it's working, though lots of anecdotal and
quasi-statistical evidence (e.g. high rates of cheating and plagiarism
among college students) suggest that we ought be far from satisfied.

In pondering the high school's future mission, therefore, let's
acknowledge a paradox. High school is our principal instrumentality for
assuring the orderly passage of children into adulthood, our chief
public institution for trying to ensure that all our young people are
well prepared for that passage. Of all our acculturating institutions
(aside from family and mass media), it is the only one that aspires to
universality. Yet a lot of our young people don't even stick with it to
completion. And of the three forms of "readiness" that we seek in our
young adults, today's high schools---when they're working well---are
good at perhaps one and a half of these.

***Two Big Options***

We should, therefore, take one of two paths into the future. Either we
should scale back our expectations of high school to accord with what
today's institutions can handle---and what can be assessed among those
who don't go through conventional high schools---or we should
re-engineer these institutions so that they're proficient on all three
fronts. If we take the former path, we greatly simplify the task of
reforming high schools. We focus on skills and knowledge and economic
readiness and we strive to create schools that are effective in that
dimension, while also building tests whereby young people who can
acquire the requisite skills and knowledge elsewhere need not waste time
in school. If we focus our efforts so narrowly, however, we risk not
ending up with the sorts of adults that we really want.

If, instead, we expect high schools to succeed on all three fronts---to
vouchsafe their graduates' civic and personal readiness as well as their
economic preparedness---we may need different kinds of institutions.
Earnest teachers may not suffice. Though we surely need to learn more
about the attributes of existing high schools that seem relatively
strong in these other dimensions (e.g. Jesuit schools), and determine
the extent to which their formula is transferable, we may also wish to
design high schools that function more explicitly "in loco parentis."
Today, that's most often found in specialized 24/7 settings, ranging
from elite boarding schools to juvenile prisons, from old-fashioned
orphanages to a handful of residential charter schools. But they're very
different from conventional six-hours-a-day high schools. And their cost
is greater.

Is American society ready to give its regular high schools much stronger
leverage over the formation of adolescents? Pay the dollar price? And
risk the marginalizing of other institutions---from church to family to
YMCA---that could result from an enlarged high school mission? No,
American society is probably not ready to do so. It is, however, a
suitable area for experimentation, and this may suggest a fruitful field
for federal (and philanthropic) activity. We'll return to this below.
First, though, the simpler policy option deserves attention.

***Beefing Up the Academics***

Sticking for now to the high school's academic mission and its
strengthening, the clear trend of state policy is to set exit
requirements that students must meet before receiving diplomas, and to
enforce these via high-stakes tests. The point is to insist on a certain
level of skill and knowledge attainment before conferring the credential
that signifies high school completion.

As we have seen, this effort is fraught with difficulty. Lots of young
people arrive in high school without a decent elementary foundation.
Once there, few are motivated to study hard and do well. Too many give
up or get bored and drop out.

Behind standards-based reform are two hopes, which, if realized, would
go a considerable distance toward solving these problems.

First, it is hoped that having to meet standards in the earlier
grades---and being tested and held accountable for them---will cause
elementary schools and their pupils to do a far better job with basic
skills and knowledge. That would help ready young people for a true
secondary education in high school (and ease the dropout problem by
ensuring that more young people feel successful in school and less
inclined to flee from it.)

Second, it is hoped that statewide high school exit test requirements
will motivate diploma-hungry students to take their studies more
seriously, at least seriously enough to prepare to pass those pesky
tests.

There is early evidence from some states that these hopes are not
fantasies, that after much grousing about "teaching to the test,"
"narrowing the curriculum" and "turning floors into ceilings", actual
gains do result from this regimen, rich-poor achievement gaps do narrow
and minority youngsters do better. Still, it's premature to be certain
how far-reaching these effects will be and whether they will be
accompanied by such unwanted side effects as more dropouts at the low
end and fewer Advanced Placement courses at the high end.

How might federal policies further the cause of standards-based,
academics-centered renewal at the high school level? Five possibilities
hold promise:

First, academic requirements for federal student aid (and federal
employment). In dealing with real-world incentives, there is a huge
opportunity for the federal government but it's a bullet that Congress
and the executive branch have heretofore been afraid to bite, which is
to add some academic attainment prerequisites to federal student aid. If
we're unwilling to prescribe these nationally, what about saying that
nobody gets aided unless they've met the full requirements for high
school graduation set by their state of residence? The upcoming
reauthorization of the Higher Education Act is the obvious time to
tackle this. But we need not wait for that to try to turn Uncle Sam into
a model employer who insists not only on high school diplomas from all
his workers but also makes it matter whether someone did well or poorly
in school. Higher civil service grades, military ranks or pay levels for
those with a strong academic record would be the obvious way to start.

Second, Better 12^th^ Grade NAEP. It's commonly acknowledged that the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a far better
barometer of student achievement in grades 4 and 8 than in grade 12.
There is discouraging evidence that high school seniors don't take it
seriously because, once again, it doesn't "count" in their lives. So
mistrusted are those scores, in fact, that the move to report NAEP
results at the state level (and, in a few places, the local level) has
never included 12^th^ grade results in any subject. This needs to
change. And Washington needs to find ways of motivating 12^th^ graders
to take these tests seriously. (The solution may be as simple as

paying them for at least completing the tests.) If we don't have good
data about student achievement at the end of high school, we'll never
know whether efforts to improve the high school are making any headway.
States need those data even more than Uncle Sam does.

Third, research and pilot programs geared to making high school more
engaging for young people. This includes some of the experimentation
with new school designs noted above---and careful evaluation of efforts
undertaken by others. It could also include imaginative investigations
of the use of technology and distance learning, different ways of
training high school teachers, etc.

Fourth, extend the logic of "no student left behind" to place greater
attention on the high school years. As noted earlier, the recent renewal
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act stressed the "elementary"
part. The main secondary testing provision level simply stipulates that
students be tested "at least once" during their high school years.
Though states must develop and publicize their academic standards at the
secondary level and must disclose how well individual schools are doing
at making "adequate yearly progress" toward those standards---sunshine
and public information that will help call attention to problem
schools---the single round of testing means that a lot of the oomph is
gone. It means, for example, that there's no way to measure the academic
"value" added to a student or cohort of students from one year to the
next. Because the range of important high school courses goes far beyond
reading and math, the federal testing requirement may even distort the
curriculum while neglecting some key subjects. And the many high schools
that receive no federal Title I dollars will be spared from the specific
sanctions mandated for low-performing Title I schools. All of this
suggests that the next E.S.E.A. cycle should focus on secondary schools,
pushing states to set good standards for high school attainment---across
a full core curriculum---and accompany these with suitable assessments,
rewards and interventions.

Fifth, promote school choice, not just for the familiar reasons set
forth on behalf of charter schools, vouchers and the like, but also as a
promising form of dropout prevention and recovery. Adolescents are
ornery, authority-averse people who don't like being told what to do.
They like to make their own decisions. Let those decisions include which
schools to attend. There's evidence that people perform better in
schools they've chosen for themselves. Once someone has dropped out,
moreover, the best bet for getting them back into education is through
some alternative arrangement, not returning them to the same schools
where they failed. Though states bear the main burden of school-choice
policy, Uncle Sam could assist through aid to charter schools, programs
that encourage alternative schools, and a host of ways by which
community (and other) colleges, job-training programs and adult
education programs could be made accessible to teen-agers. The Secretary
of Education might also convene a summit conference on the pros and cons
of compulsory attendance, whether---and how---to do it, and what some
alternatives might be.

***Re-engineering the High School***

Returning to the "macro" conception of high schools, i.e. as
institutions that attend to personal and civic as well as academic and
economic readiness, it's important for Washington to tread lightly.
These are domains where Americans are wary of governmental (especially
federal) involvement and where damage can be done to civil society if it
appears that government is taking over. But that does not mean Uncle Sam
must be inert. Here, too, he might explore five policy directions.

First, explore more experimentation, research and evaluation, not just
with government-sponsored programs but also the privately conceived
sort. Just how good are those Jesuit high schools, for example, at
inculcating civic and personal as well as economic readiness in their
students? For that matter, are we sure that this is handled well at
Andover? Are there "conventional" high schools that do a relatively good
job of it and, if so, why? To what extent can their formula be
successfully imparted to others? As for efforts to imagine and design
new institutional forms, we should expect that they'll work differently
from one another, that some will work better for some purposes than
others, and that no one model will fit every young person's---or
community's---situation. Institutional reinvention is hard. There will
be false starts. It's not impossible, though. The community college is
an extraordinary institutional innovation of American education. So is
its cousin, the technical institute. Perhaps it's time to become as
inventive with respect to the high school.

Second, this kind of innovativeness---preparing young people for life,
including but not limited to economic readiness---might become the focus
of the next generation of the Perkins Act and other traditional venues
for federal vocational education policy. I think much leeway ought be
given to states and communities to use these dollars flexibly, and I'm
not knowledgeable enough to suggest many specifics. But this feels like
the right direction, especially when coupled with results-based
accountability akin to the "charter states" idea that President Bush
proposed for E.S.E.A. If it no longer makes sense to isolate some
students in a vocational/technical track while others are prepared for
further education, it cannot make sense to isolate federal dollars for
that purpose.

Third, Washington should engage in orderly, creative thinking about its
own civic and character-shaping programs outside of formal education.
These range from the military to the Peace Corps to the Corporation for
National Service. They have traditionally focused on people who have
already completed high school. Perhaps they should create
opportunities---on and off campus---for those who have not yet
graduated. "Junior ROTC" is one model for this.

Fourth, explore more choice policies. Given the strong views of families
and communities on these matters, Washington is wiser to help create
options than to impose mandates. It may be, for example, that extra
funding should be provided to charter schools that operate 24/7 or
schools that operate year-round. Perhaps civic institutions should get
extra incentives to open school-like or "virtual school" programs that
afford additional choices to young people. But the theory of choice does
not stop

with individuals. States and communities should also have wide
discretion over how they spend their federal education dollars,
particularly with regard to high schools.

Fifth, examine the bully pulpit. Re-engineering the high school needs
changed attitudes and expectations at least as much as it calls for new
structural arrangements. National leaders can do a great deal here:
calling attention to problems, giving air time to ideas, saying things
that get journalists to write about them, rewarding innovators,
fostering debate about options, creating "summits" to focus the minds of
others on these issues. Today, one seldom hears top federal
officials---in Congress or the executive branch---addressing high school
issues (except for discipline and violence) in sustained and interesting
ways. That should change.

***Conclusion***

It would be wrong to end this discussion by implying that what ails the
high school is a disease waiting for a federal cure. As with everything
in American education, most key decisions will continue to be made by
states and localities, in individual schools and classrooms, and around
millions of kitchen tables. Most of the money will continue to come from
non-Washington sources, as will most of the energy for reform. We would
make matters worse if we even hinted that these wellsprings of resources
and resourcefulness could flow elsewhere while Uncle Sam takes
responsibility for this problem and its solution.

Yet this brief overview has argued that policy incoherence in the
nation's capital with respect to high schools is representative of a
broader national confusion about them. The latter is the real problem.
Washington could contribute in various ways to its solution. The place
to start is by acknowledging that our high schools urgently await this
kind of attention.