Saving high school.

The American High School: Can It Be Saved?" Despite the alarmist title and even more clever-but-frightening illustrations in this forum (Winter 2006), the answer that your authors [Jeffrey Mirel, Jay Greene, and Chester Finn Jr.] give seems to be "yes," or at least, "maybe."

We agree that big changes are needed. But the problems in American education are so varied and so complex--our nation is so varied and so complex--that we cannot find a single persuasive, agreed-upon analysis of the problem. So we rush into "solutions," and when they don't "work" for every one of every child's problems, we declare the solution a failure.

American education has always had two passions: for excellence and for equity. Excellence in the Committee of Ten era meant singular coherence, so that the many new high schools being provided would know what to teach, so that their graduates would be admitted to college. Today, excellence is often described as college admission, especially to selective colleges, but is also likely to be described as being "competitive with the world's standards," chiefly as seen in test scores. That's where equity comes in. If all we had to do as a nation was to fill up selective colleges with bright, skillful students, a number of us might consider our "problem" solved, especially if we were the parents of those students. However, we have many more students than that, and they have to create decent adult lives for themselves in an economy that will make new demands on its workers. Moreover, at a time when democracy itself is embattled by those who are bent on fooling rather than informing the electorate, we need to take our, and their, roles as citizens seriously.

Equity is unlikely to arise from the aping of the Committee of Ten or even its watering down. Instead, it is the careful rethinking of exactly what a young adult needs to know, not only to go to college, but to live a worthy life: which skills, taken to which level, and which content, taken to which depth. Instead of the sense that each child should be stacked up against all others in a battle of memory and speed, we tend to think in terms of value added. Does she read more skillfully this year than last year? Might we, every year, tape-record a session in which she reads and explains what she has read? Would we know how to assess such a performance? Would that tell us more about what we and she want to know?

There we go, being Progressive again. We would like to include some joy in these places of learning, and we believe that each will enhance the other. Rather than boredom and, worse, fear in that journey, there is joy for both student and teacher. It is individual, time-consuming, frustrating at times, and worthwhile. It may look messy to some. To us it is, on the deepest level, the only orderly way to proceed.

THEODORE R. SIZER

NANCY FAUST SIZER

Harvard Graduate School of Education 

A single American high school would be a novel concept. And the arguments made in the Winter 2006 forum are undeniably valuable to the dialogue about high-school reform. However, the debate about the current status of the high school assumes that a single American high school really exists.

In fact, secondary education in the United States is so complex that we have not resolved the question of a single high school in more than a century of trying. Chester Finn hits the exposed nerve when he says a lack of "common metrics by which to gauge progress" is the real culprit. Dr. Richard Thomas, executive director, the School Administrators Association of New York State, says, "NCLB is necessary, but not sufficient."

Although they must be given, tests are just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, I am not convinced that we possess the national will to look below the surface at what is drawing student achievement down. If we can't agree on testing, I am convinced we won't broach the meatier issues affecting high-school students.

As I think about what I accomplished today, as a high-school principal, I can say that I got into two classrooms, barely. My day began with an emotionally disturbed girl who had been raped by a family friend, another girl upset at being called a baby killer by a student who found out about her abortion, a parentless boy caught smoking ... and that was before first period. Reform that scenario, and high-school achievement will follow!

JAMES D. DONNELLY JR.

Principal, James A. Greene H.S.

Dolgeville, New York