May 2008
| Volume 65 | Number 8
Reshaping High Schools
Marge Scherer
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Bob Wise
The U. S. high school system is in crisis, Wise argues. More than 1 million students drop out every year, significant numbers of college freshmen require remedial courses to handle college work, and employers consistently express disappointment in the skills of graduates. The high dropout rate and students' lack of preparedness carries consequences for students and society; both young adults' earning power and U. S. international competitiveness are severely compromised. Wise compares the breakdown in the high school system to both the crisis of the Sputnik launch in 1957 and the demands for equity for black students that came to a head in the same period. However, the nation cannot respond to the current high school crisis as it responded to Sputnik, by directing a few top students into training in certain essential fields. Rather, the federal government must provide leadership promoting reform for all high schools. The article suggests three approaches that states, school districts, and schools should take, and directions for how federal policy should support reform.
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Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Friedlaender
Educators Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Friedlaender share findings from their recent report highlighting five California high schools that have beaten the odds in supporting the success of low-income students of color. Animo Inglewood Charter High School, Stanley E. Foster Construction Tech Academy, June Jordan School for Equity, Leadership High School, and New Technology High School are located in California's largest cities and are nonselective in their admissions, but they have graduation rates and college-going rates significantly higher than the state average. All five schools provide personalized settings, offer rigorous and relevant instruction, and promote professional learning and collaboration. The study also identified four policy areas that influence the ability of high schools to enable students of color to succeed: organization and governance (for example, state and federal policies need to favor the creation of small high schools); human capital (for example, policies should ensure the creation of effective training programs for both teachers and principals); curriculum and assessment (for example, policies should promote the use of performance assessments and the practice of collectively scoring assessments); and funding (for example, policies should make funding more equitable by establishing weighted student funding formulas. Funds would follow the student and additional funding would be allocated for students with the greatest needs).
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Gary Hoachlander
Multiple pathways connect college-preparatory curriculums with exceptional career and technical education, motivating students to learn by helping them answer the question, Why do I need to know this? Real-world learning is organized around such industry sectors as finance and business; health science and medical technology; building and environmental design; and arts, media, and entertainment. Each pathway is grounded in four guiding principles. Pathways prepare students for both postsecondary education and a career, connect academics to real-world applications, lead to the full range of postsecondary opportunities, and improve student achievement. Pathways are characterized by a challenging academic component, a rigorous technical component, a work-based learning component, and supplemental services. California currently boasts 296 Partnership Academies (the equivalent of career academies) and 300 career academies. Research to date suggests that multiple pathways integrating challenging academics with demanding career and technical education around major industry themes can produce many benefits for students, especially those who traditionally have not done well in conventional high school programs.
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Hugh B. Price
In spite of federal and state reform efforts, many high schools are still failing to motivate and teach large numbers of students. The U.S. military, writes the author, is one promising place to look for new approaches to serve the needs of these struggling students. The author describes an alternative program for dropouts run by the National Guard and several high school academies operated by the military in collaboration with public schools. These programs have achieved outstanding results for students who were previously unengaged and at risk of failure. Key ingredients—including a safe and secure environment, accelerated learning, and a focus on the whole adolescent—could be replicated in purely civilian schools without official military involvement.
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Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe
Why are so many high school students bored, passive, and apathetic? Why do they typically perform adequately on assessments requiring recall and basic skills, but do poorly on tasks requiring application or careful analysis and explanation? The authors trace these problems to a lack of clarity about the goals of a high school education. The mission of high schools, they write, is not to cover content but rather to help learners become thoughtful about, and productive with, content. Curriculum and instruction need to address three different but interrelated goals: helping students (1) acquire important information and skills, (2) make meaning of that content, and (3) effectively transfer their learning to new situations. The sequence of these goals is important: High schools need to challenge the mistaken notion that students cannot deal with meaning until after they acquire facts and skills. The article provides examples of instructional units that engage students by putting understanding first.
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John D. Forbes and Catherine Richelieu Saunders
The Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART), a California charter school for high school juniors and seniors, combines relevant, career-focused education with college-preparatory, standards-based academic rigor. Students spend a three-hour block at CART either in the morning or afternoon; they spend the rest of the day at their regular high school. Students enroll in one of 14 labs dedicated to such areas as psychology and human behavior, finance, and biomedical engineering. Typically three teachers run the labs: an English teacher, a teacher responsible for the lab-specific course, and a teacher with science or social science credentials. The school creates a motivating environment through its focus on cognition, academics, real-world connections, technology, and personalization. Lessons learned are that four key areas—professional development, conflict resolution, recruiting diverse students, and effectively dealing with high school legacy structures—are crucial for success.
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Jacqueline Ancess
Many leaders of today's small high school reform movement seem to have forgotten that small size alone will not improve student learning. In attempting to raise graduation rates and standardized test scores, these schools have become indistinguishable from their larger counterparts. Ancess argues that we must recover the purpose of the original small schools movement—to teach students to use their minds well. For a small school to realize its full potential, she writes, four ideas must become part of the school's core culture: caring relationships, a unified school community, a strong safety net, and transformative intellectual experiences.
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Billie Donegan
Donegan, an educational consultant specializing in 9th grade, asserts that when it comes to truly changing the freshman year, words abound but actions are few. Although everyone involved in the "high school conversation" agrees that the first year of high school is pivotal to success, few schools take on the challenge of truly reshaping 9th grade—beyond holding glitzy orientation events or biweekly advisories. One reason is that deep reform requires a fundamental reshaping of school culture, which means stepping on a few toes and threatening harmony among teachers. Schools should start by reversing the trend of placing a school's top teachers with upperclassman while assigning struggling first-year teachers to freshmen. Donegan suggests concrete strategies, based on her work schools seeking reform, for bringing productive changes to the freshman year.
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Anthony Jackson
The International Studies Schools Network provides a model for high school reform that addresses two intertwined imperatives facing U.S. education today. Schools in the Network not only raise their low-income, minority students' academic achievement, but also give them the deep knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to succeed as active citizens of the world. The Network's 13 schools serve students in low-income urban and rural areas across the United States. This article describes how Network schools achieve this mission by integrating knowledge about the world into science, social studies, language arts, and foreign language courses.
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Janet Quint
Quint reports on a synthesis evaluation of three widely used high school reform models—Talent Development, First Things First, and career academies. She highlights approaches within each model that helped high schools restructure themselves in ways that affected student outcomes, particularly for struggling 9th graders and students from low-income backgrounds. Quint focuses on five key areas in which these initiatives helped low-performing high schools: creating a sense of belonging, helping freshmen with weak academic skills, preparing students for postsecondary success, improving instruction, and stimulating lasting change. She details how each model implements such strategies as small learning communities and intensive remedial courses for 9th graders.
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Carol Caruso
Guidance counselor Carol Caruso describes Henry Hudson Regional School's experiences providing online courses to its students. The small Highlands, New Jersey, high school began offering online classes as a way to expand its previously limited elective, advanced placement, and foreign language offerings. A Hudson faculty member oversees student learning, keeping track of their work and helping them when they get stuck. The classes have allowed students to explore unusual interests, earn college credit, and build independent learning skills. The experience has not been without challenges. Some courses are not as beneficial as expected, and some students prefer to do their work at home and use the class period dedicated to online learning as a study hall. Caruso describes the course selection process, student contracts, and grading practices that have helped the school alleviate some of these problems.
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Mary Hatwood Futrell and Joel Gomez
More than five decades after the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of the "separate but equal" doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education, a "separate but equal" curriculum still exists in U.S. schools. Tracking and ability grouping, assert the authors, results in the separate of students by race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. It creates a poverty of learning primarily for poor and minority students and denies them access to an enriched curriculum that would prepare them for success in college and career. It is time to challenge this entrenched practice and guarantee equal education opportunity for all students.
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Nancy DeFord
The President of the ASCD Board of Directors describes visits to Australian schools that she and other board and staff members made during a recent trip. Although the three schools are diverse, all demonstrate a commitment to improvement that comes from within.
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Jane L. David
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W. James Popham
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Thomas R. Hoerr
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Douglas B. Reeves
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Judy Seltz
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Jeffrey Beard and Ian Hill
Today's students need skills that will prepare them to compete in a global economy. The International Baccalaureate has more than 40 years of experience in instilling these skills in students. IB students develop a more global perspective by taking foreign language classes, exploring international issues, and participating in exchange programs with schools around the world. The program's service requirement, its theory of knowledge course, and the guiding questions posed by teachers help students build important skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and teamwork. Case studies of three IB schools show how the program has transformed education for all students in these schools.
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Tom Clark
Until recently, discussions on redesigning U. S. high schools focused little on the potential for online learning to aid in these efforts. But that's changing, according to Clark. Clark clarifies key terms related to online learning, virtual schooling, and virtual charter schools, and presents statistics on the increase of enrollments in online programs, particularly for secondary students. He gives examples of online learning's potential for expanding students' learning options and their engagement. Clark also discusses—and refutes—common misconceptions about virtual schooling that the public still harbors.
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Keni Brayton Cox
Whittier Union High School District in Southern California responded to a 25 percent increase in the number of students living in poverty and an upsurge in English language learners, by instituting successful reforms rooted in teacher collaboration. Cox sketches how the Whittier district instituted teacher professional learning communities, common assessments, and significant teacher leadership districtwide. She describes in closer detail changes at the district's flagship school Whittier High School. Teacher leadership at Whittier High lead to four innovative strategies that increased student achievement: (1) the "teacher swap," through which students who receive a D or lower at the end of the first semester of any course could switch teachers; (2) mandatory tutorials built in to block-scheduled courses; (3) retesting without penalty; and (4) a "minimum 50 percent" grading policy. Cox shares evidence of Whittier students' achievement gains across multiple measures.
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Teresa Preston
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Laura Varlas
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