A Meaningful High School Diploma

A war is being waged over what knowledge is most important and who is best qualified to teach it to students in grades 6 through 12. The board of education in my state of Washington chose "meaningful" as the one word to describe its mission in re-examining graduation requirements and high school diplomas. What more could we hope to give students than the ability to create meaning in their lives? When we ask whether a public education should prepare graduates to survive and thrive in the world as we know it, or whether it should prepare graduates to invent and create a world greater than what we can even imagine, the answer must be a resounding Yes to both. Abandoning either responsibility would be a critical failure to educate. Giving meaningfulness primacy in graduation requirements and diplomas implies the intellectual power, imagination, and compassion to build a better world, as well as the skills and knowledge to earn a living wage and participate in our economy and in both our local and our global communities. The construct of meaningfulness must be both practical and ideal. Enter the graduation requirements debate. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's authoritative study, The Silent Epidemic (Bridgeland, DiIulio, and Morison 2006), confirms that nearly a third of U.S. high school students do not graduate. Thus, we must transform high school into something that fully engages all youth. Merely tinkering with the current structure will only perpetuate the inequities, antiquities, and failings built into it. Wrong and outdated notions of what constitutes an appropriate high school education persist. We cannot serve all students best and set the stage for creating tomorrow's world by relying on a 200-year-old "core" that was intended to educate only those being groomed for power and influence. Over the past decade, the standards and high-stakes testing movement has had a chokehold on content, dismissing alternative views and affecting budget-poor high schools by eliminating electives, arts, career and technical education, and other approaches to learning. The "tail" of narrow standards has wagged the "dog" of secondary education, doing some good, but more damage. RETURN TO THE ROOTS We need to reconnect secondary education to some of the roots of what a meaningful education is, roots that have been lost in the shuffle. Thus I propose a system that can hold most of what we now offer in high schools but is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of student experiences and the waves of a changing world. This structure has four worlds of knowledge, each with its own convincing argument. PREBACCALAUREATE The first argument is that the four-year college degree, or baccalaureate, is the benchmark for the success of a high school education, and all high school education should be geared toward preparing students to pursue a baccalaureate degree in either a humanities/liberal arts or a math/science/engineering focus. No matter what career young adults ultimately choose, liberal arts prebaccalaureate studies prepare them best. High schools are and should be judged by how many of their students get admitted into "good" colleges. Courses here would include humanities/liberal arts or math, science, and engineering. CAREER + TECHNICAL No form of education is more engaging to students and more important to the U.S. economy than career + technical education. Career + technical education connects with the greatest range of learning styles, and it connects students to the greatest range of career possibilities. There is no more powerful tool for dropout prevention. Career + technical education is the original and logical place for contextual, project-based, and community-based learning. Learning through your hands plays a crucial role in developing the mind (Wilson 1999). We already produce many humanities-based college graduates, but we are lacking college graduates with science and technical degrees and industry-certified graduates of technical and vocational schools. …