Beyond High Stakes Testing: Rural High School Students and Their Yearbooks.

I conducted surveys, focus group interviews, and analyzed the yearbooks of fifty four yearbook students from five rural high schools to investigate students' process of yearbook construction and to determine what was meaningful and memorable to them throughout their high school experience. Chang's (1992) construct of an adolescent ethos, including the elements of getting along with everyone, being involved, and being independent, provided a conceptual framework, and was affirmed by students' responses. References to rites of passage and intensification embedded in the high school program as described by Burnett (1969) confirmed these students' perceptions of high school as a four year passage experience. Key Words: Adolescence, Rites of Passage, Ethos, High School, Rural Schools, and Yearbooks ********** "Academic excellence doesn't equal human excellence" (Heath 1994, p. 112). "Through Girl Scouts, a part time job, music, and many extracurriculars, I learned time management skills, people skills, and all the important things that schools skip over." (Jennifer Bunch, as a first year university student in a social foundations class) What is the purpose of high school? Even before reports such as A Nation At Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and continuing with the more recent Raising Our Sights: No High School Senior Left Behind (National Commission on the High School Senior Year, 2001), policy makers, business leaders, and academicians have expressed concern and dismay about the desultory qualifications and abilities exhibited by high school graduates nationwide (Kleibard, 1995). In spite of the dramatic changes in the national and international landscape that have occurred over the last fifty years, and the public lament that high schools are ineffective (Giella & Standfill, 1996), most Americans could enter their local high school and recognize the sights, sounds, procedures and events, or "the grammar of schooling" as virtually identical to their own, even if their tenth, twenty-fifth, or fiftieth high school reunion is, but a memory (Sizer, 1992b; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). How, in spite of constant and consistent demands for restructuring and revamping, does high school continue on, virtually undisturbed? Adults who create the mission statements, determine curriculum, teach content, and manage the day-to-day workings of the school will inevitably identify high school as a primarily academic institution with emphasis on student learning and achievement (Goodlad, 1984; National Association of Secondary Principals, 2004; Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985; Sizer, 1992a; Sizer, 1992b). School leaders operating in the shadow of the specifications of the No Child Left Behind Act (2002), concerned about their students' performance on an array of state and national tests, ponder their students' academic achievement as never before. However, in spite of the best efforts of adults to promote student academic challenge and achievement, adolescents have consistently demonstrated that their focus is on issues other than the academic ones (Hollingshead, 1975; Lynd & Lynd, 1929; Peshkin, 1978). In their ethnographic account of the Coalition of Essential Schools, modeled after a school reform initiative designed by Ted Sizer (Muncy & McQuillan, 1996), muse that helping students learn to use their minds well seems a reasonable high school goal, yet, "... in practice, making an 'intellectual focus' a school's top priority has proven difficult" (p. 289). The Value of Adolescents' Perspective and Interpretation Goodlad (1984), noting the strength of a unique adolescent culture in the United States, wondered, "why we have taken so little practical account" of its relevance to school program design and implementation (p. 75). In a review of chapters on learning, school improvement, and school leadership in the second edition of the Handbook on Educational Administration Levin (1999) ponders the absence of students' voices in discussions about high school improvement and reform, noting that "where they do appear, they are still treated as objects of policy, not as actors whose volition is critical to the work of the schools" (p. …