The American high school: can it be saved?

The American high school, once an austere brick building serving a few hundred children, mostly white boys, who studied reading, writing, and arithmetic, has grown into a sprawling mall complex for thousands of boys and girls, of various ethnic groups, offering something--from algebra to band and basketball--for everyone.

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Is such a school right for education in 2005? Last spring, in a much-quoted speech, Bill Gates, whose education philanthropy is the subject of another story in this issue (p. 44), told the National Governors Association that America's high schools were "obsolete." Even when they're "working exactly as designed," he said, they "cannot teach our kids what they need to know today."

How did we get here? Is it where we should be? In the following pages Jeffrey Mirel traces the roots of the modern high school, Jay Greene documents the sad facts of the current crisis, and Chester Finn assesses the proposed remedies, while providing guidance for would-be reformers.

THE TRADITIONAL High School

HISTORICAL DEBATES OVER ITS NATURE AND FUNCTION

For more than a century, American educators and education policymakers have chosen sides in a great debate about the nature and function of American high schools. The origins of this long-running argument can be traced to 1893, when the influential Committee of Ten, a blue-chip panel of educators, issued a report proposing that all public high-school students receive a strong, liberal-arts education. Ever since then we have been fighting about whether our high schools should be college prep for the masses or, as another blue-ribbon panel would put it 90 years later, a "cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main course."

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There have been, of course, winners and losers on both sides throughout this long discussion, as our high schools have grown into multibillion-dollar institutions serving, or ill serving, hundreds of millions of American adolescents.

Yet the question of winners and losers in this debate about our secondary schools is, to borrow a phrase, academic. The reality is that, quite some time ago, our high schools were set on a course of diversification. And the questions today are whether and how much this "comprehensive high school" has contributed to the declining quality of secondary education in this country. On this issue, we can learn much from history.

Committee of Ten v. Cardinal Principles

There is little dispute about the historical importance of the report of the Committee of Ten. Appointed by the National Education Association (NEA), the committee, composed mainly of presidents of leading colleges, was charged with establishing curriculum standardization for public-high-school students who intended to go to college. During the previous half century, from roughly 1840 to 1890, the public high school had gradually emerged from the shadow of the private academy. While enrollments were still small by today's standards (probably less than 5 percent of American teenagers attended public high school in the post-Civil War era), by the 1870s and 1880s the number of public secondary schools was increasing fast enough to occasion some attention. And the Committee of Ten was convened to bring some order to the varied curricula that were growing with them.

Under the leadership of Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University, the committee undertook a broad and comprehensive exploration of the role of the high school in American life, concluding, significantly, that all public-high-school students should follow a college preparatory curriculum, regardless of their backgrounds, their intention to stay in school through graduation, or their plans to pursue higher education. As Eliot, author of the final report, put it, "every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease...."

From Eliot's perspective, high schools fulfilled the promise of equal opportunity for education by insisting that all students take the same types of rigorous academic courses. While the Committee of Ten did suggest different programs of study for high schools (for example, programs specializing in classical languages, science and mathematics, or modern languages) and introduced the concept of electives to American high schools, its guiding principle was that all students should receive the same high-quality liberal arts education.

It is not hard to see where the battle lines would have been drawn, even then, especially as a wave of new immigrants was bringing tens of thousands of foreign adolescents to our shores. G. Stanley Hall, a noted psychologist and president of Clark University, denounced the Committee of Ten's curriculum recommendations, because, he said, most high-school students were part of a "great army of incapables ... who should be in schools for the dullards or subnormal children." Numerous critics joined Hall in attacking the Committee's report as an elitist view of reality. But the reality was that soon the number of students aged 14-17 attending high school soared, rising from 359,949, less than 6 percent of the age group, to 4,804,255, almost 51 percent of the age group, between 1890 and 1930 (see Figure 1).

In the middle of this demographic revolution, in 1918, another NEA group, this one called the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, issued a manifesto that turned the fundamental belief of the Committee of Ten on its head. It called for expanded and differentiated high-school programs, which it believed would more effectively serve the new and diverse high-school student population.

This commission's final report, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, built its case on two interrelated assumptions that became central to discussions of the American high school for most of the 20th century. First, it assumed that most new high-school students were less intelligent than previous generations of students. Second, it claimed that since these new students lacked the intellectual ability, aspirations, and financial means to attend college, it was counterproductive to demand that they follow a college-preparatory program. Such a hard-core regimen would force many of the "inferior" students to quit school, exactly the opposite of what the country wanted. Put simply, the Cardinal Principles proponents believed that requiring all students to follow the same academic course of study increased educational inequality. The proposed solution to these problems was curricular differentiation, a policy that allowed students to follow programs and take courses suited to their interests, abilities, and needs.

The Faux Equality of Diversity

It's possible, of course, to see the origins of the fault lines in these early reports as a product of the differences of the perspectives of the people who were on the two committees. While the Committee of Ten membership leaned toward college (in addition to the college presidents, it included two headmasters and a college professor), the Commission for the Reorganization of Secondary Education was dominated by members of the newly emerging profession of education, specifically, professors from schools and colleges of education. Thus focused on high school as an increasingly independent entity, the Cardinal Principles team endorsed a new institution, the "comprehensive high school," which would offer students a wide array of curriculum choices.

As we know now, the Cardinal Principles team won.

And they won because supporters of comprehensive high schools defined equal education as equal access to different and unequal programs. Guided by the new IQ tests (which did as much as any single thing to convince American educators that tracking was not only possible but preferable) and the rise of guidance and counseling programs (which could match young people with the curriculum track best suited to their "scientifically" determined individual profiles), America entered an era of democratic dumbing down: the equal opportunity to choose (or be chosen for) failing programs. Proponents of comprehensive high schools argued that these curriculum options would encourage increasing numbers of students to stay in school and graduate, already a standard by which to judge high-school effectiveness. Unlike the Committee of Ten model, in which all students followed similar college preparatory programs, in the Cardinal Principles model equal educational opportunity was achieved because all graduates received the same ultimate credential, a high-school diploma, despite having followed very different education programs and having met very different standards in the process.

Economic Imperatives

By 1920 most big-city high schools in the country were offering four high-school tracks: college preparatory, commercial (which prepared students, mostly young women, for office work), vocational (industrial arts and home economics), and general (which offered a high-school diploma without any specific preparation for future educational or vocational endeavors). But most American high-school students were still following a college preparatory course of study, though few went on to college: less than 17 percent of 14-17-year-olds even graduated from high school. In 1928, for example, more than two-thirds of the classes taken by American high-school students were in the traditional academic areas of English, foreign languages, math, science, and social studies. Industrial arts and home economics, the most widely touted vocational courses, accounted for less than 9 percent of student course taking.

In essence, high schools in this period balanced important aspects of both the Committee of Ten and Cardinal Principles. These schools maintained strong academic programs, but they also offered enough vocational and elective courses for students to have some curricular choice. In effect, the nation's urban high schools, which served increasing numbers of young people from poor and immigrant families, were arguably providing the best academic and, for a smaller number of students, vocational education available in the United States at that time.

Unfortunately, this situation changed drastically in the 1930s. The collapse of the national economy, particularly the collapse of the youth labor market, forced a huge number of adolescents back to school. By 1940, 7,123,009 students between the ages of 14 and 17 were in high school, more than 73 percent of the age group. Amid this unprecedented enrollment surge (an increase of some 2.3 million students over 1930), education leaders once again argued that the intellectual abilities of the new high-school entrants were weaker than those of previous groups of students; and these new students needed access to less-demanding courses. L.A. Williams, an education professor from the University of California-Berkeley, wrote in a 1944 book that most American high-school students of the era were simply "incapable of learning so-called liberal subjects." These education leaders reiterated their belief that a rigorous regimen of courses would force many of the new students to drop out, a dreadful prospect during the Great Depression.

The economic crisis and the resulting enrollment boom combined to produce a profoundly important shift in the nature and function of high schools. Increasingly, their task was custodial, to keep students out of the adult world (that is, out of the labor market) instead of preparing them for it. As a result, educators channeled increasing numbers of students into undemanding, nonacademic courses, while lowering standards in the academic courses that were required for graduation. Though justified by claims that these curriculum changes increased equal opportunity of education, in reality they had a grossly unequal impact on white working-class young people and the growing number of black students who entered high schools in the 1930s and 1940s. These students were disproportionately assigned to nonacademic tracks (particularly the general track) and watered-down academic courses.

The Hell of Democratic Intentions

As David Angus and I discovered in researching our book on the history of the American high school (The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890-1995), these curriculum policy changes led to changes in student course taking. Between 1928 and 1934, academic course taking dropped from 67 percent to slightly more than 62 percent. The most telling aspect of that shift: Health and Physical Education (PE) courses increased from 4.9 to 11.5 percent of total course taking nationwide. These courses were entertaining, relevant to young people's lives outside of school, required little or no homework, and, for PE, were amenable to high student/teacher ratios.

Over the next half century health and PE was the fastest-growing segment of course taking. By 1973 it was second only to English in the percent of student course taking nationwide.

As these less-demanding, nonintellectual courses proliferated, a new "movement" was born, the Life Adjustment Movement, a federally sponsored curriculum reform effort that began soon after World War II. According to Charles Prosser, the father of Life Adjustment, only 20 percent of American young people could master academic content; another 20 percent were capable of doing vocational subjects; and the remaining 60 percent needed courses in subjects like health and PE, effective use of leisure time, driver training, and knowledge of such "problems of American democracy" as dating, buying on credit, and renting an apartment.

Stimulated by the Life Adjustment Movement, the dilution of the high-school curriculum continued apace. In 1928 nonacademic courses accounted for about 33 percent of the classes taken by U.S. high-school students; by 1961 that number had increased to 43 percent. One stunning fact puts into perspective this dramatic growth of the nonacademic segment of the curriculum: in 1910 the share of high-school work devoted to each of the five basic academic subjects (English, foreign language, mathematics, science, and history) enrolled more students than all of the nonacademic courses combined; by 1982, more than 39 percent of all high-school coursework was in nonacademic subjects.

Despite the sharp decline in the share of academic course taking, indeed, because of this decline, education leaders in the 1940s and 1950s declared that significant progress was being made toward equal opportunity for education. Pointing to growing high-school enrollments and graduation rates as evidence of the success of their policies, education leaders reiterated that getting diplomas in the hands of more students was far more egalitarian than having all students educated in discipline-based subject matter.

Still, as early as the late 1940s, researchers were discovering high correlations between track placements and social class. And by 1961, a study of the Detroit public schools found that students from the poorest families in the district were eight times more likely to be in the general track than children from upper-income families.

As the cold war bore down on the nation, this transformation of the high school from a ladder to success into a vast warehouse for youth should have alarmed many Americans. Indeed, in the 1950s some critics, most notably University of Illinois historian Arthur Bestor, denounced these trends, claiming that they had turned high schools into "educational wastelands." But educators gave little heed to such criticism.

Part of the reason for this complacency lay in the apparent success of the curriculum reforms, a success defined more by quantity than by quality. Between 1950 and 1970, the number of students in grades 9 through 12 more than doubled, from 6,397,000 to 14,337,000, from 76.1 to 92.2 percent of 14-17-year-olds. Citing these enrollment increases, defenders of the comprehensive high school, primarily school superintendents and professors in schools and colleges of education, declared that the institution was functioning well. Clearly, they argued, the relevant, less-demanding curriculum was attracting larger numbers of students and keeping them in school longer. As one education leader in Detroit put it, "We are trying to keep the dropout rate down and keep youngsters in school as long as possible by offering interesting, attractive, and constructive courses." They did not consider that the decline of the youth labor market, which had begun in the 1930s, may have been a far more powerful "push" on increasing high-school enrollments than the "pull" of easier courses and watered-down graduation requirements.

The percentages of student course taking in academic subjects continued to fall. Between 1928 and 1973, foreign language course taking across the country plunged from 9.5 percent to 3.9 percent. Mathematics dropped from 12.8 to 9.2 percent. Moreover, during these years, the number and percentage of students taking low-level math courses such as "refresher mathematics" increased.

Indeed, there were dramatic increases in the percentages of students taking less-demanding courses in all areas. Put simply, by the early 1960s, most students in American high schools were getting, at best, a second-rate education compared with that of the generation before them.

Slouching toward Anti-Intellectualism

Compounding the impact of these trends was the emergence of a new phenomenon related to the dominant presence of high schools in the lives of young Americans, the development of what sociologist James Coleman called "the adolescent society." In his now-classic 1961 study The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education (for excerpts, see p. 40), Coleman identified a series of problems that resulted from the separate society that high school had created for teenagers. Most troublesome, he said, was that within the new adolescent society peer groups often superseded adult authority in shaping behavior.

Not surprisingly, the young people who set the standards for their peers were those with athletic prowess, good looks, and winsome personalities, not those who devoted the most time and energy to doing well in school. In a sense, the rise of this important peer group dovetailed nicely with the changes that educators had introduced in high schools over the previous 30 years: namely, downplaying the role of academic subjects and promoting the subjects and activities that appealed to teenage interests and lifestyles. The confluence of institutional and cultural anti-intellectualism, which was incessantly reinforced by similar messages in films, television, and music, would bedevil American high schools for the rest of the century.

This drift toward increasing anti-intellectualism did not go entirely unchallenged. In October 1957, following the launch of Sputnik, criticism of high schools became front-page news, spurring a high-profile debate about problems of secondary education. Even though this debate coincided with the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), designed to stimulate interest in math, science, and foreign languages, the percentage of students taking foreign language and math courses actually fell slightly between 1961 and 1973.

Throughout these years, education leaders effectively defended the comprehensive high school, declaring time and again that demanding greater academic courses for all students would lead to a wave of dropouts and, thus, to greater education inequality. In 1959, another Harvard president, this one retired, James Conant, published a widely cited study that seemed to validate these views. Conant concluded that American high schools were sound and that the differentiated high-school curriculum was the key to secondary schools' fulfilling their democratic mission. The Conant report, The American High School Today, effectively ended the debate about the quality of American high schools for the next two decades.

Today it seems surprising that Sputnik and the NDEA had so little impact on education. But equally remarkable is the modest influence of the major social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite loud demands for greater education equality, access to first-rate college preparatory programs for large numbers of minority students remains an unrealized goal. Before the 1950s, most young black people, particularly those in the South, had few opportunities for any high-school education. But despite a series of unanimous Supreme Court decisions meant to reverse this trend, in the ensuing years large numbers of black students failed to gain access to the best programs the newly integrated schools offered. Indeed, in many large cities during the 1960s and 1970s, the problems facing minority high-school students actually worsened, as their schools became battle-grounds for such issues as busing and identity politics, issues that overwhelmed more routine efforts to improve the quality of education.

Given these developments, it was not surprising that academic course-taking patterns of high-school students nationwide barely changed between 1961 and 1973, increasing about 2 percentage points. A number of new education policies contributed to this stability in course taking and to the declining quality of high-school education. First, many one-semester courses, designed to be highly relevant, differed widely in rigor and content, ranging from potentially substantive courses in areas such as African American literature to trendy offerings like "Rock Poetry."

Second, school leaders began giving academic credit for various aspects of the extracurriculum, such as providing English credit for students working on the school newspaper or yearbook. Such actions further diminished the role that academic courses played in high-school education.

Third, educators began giving credit toward graduation for such courses as Consumer Math, Refresher Math, and Shop Math, watered-down material that had not previously satisfied a graduation requirement. In other words, even when the share of math course taking rose, the increases were coming largely from students taking less-demanding math courses, not algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or calculus.

Finally, but most important, during the 1960s and 1970s educators gradually shifted the onus of course and program selection away from guidance counselors and other education professionals and onto students and their parents. This policy greatly expanded student choice and clearly fit into the counterculture zeitgeist. It also enabled educators to duck accusations that they were responsible for reproducing inequality, since course and program selection now rested with students and their parents rather than with educators.

Back to the Future

By making choice the driving force behind high-school programs, as Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen noted in The Shopping Mall High School (1985), the schools came to resemble education shopping malls, with students searching for bargains (that is, courses that were easy, relevant, and satisfied graduation requirements).

In some ways, the 1970s mark the low point of high-school development in the United States. A small percentage of students got a reasonably good education, but most adolescents drifted through their high-school years unchallenged and uninspired.

The Reagan administration's 1983 manifesto, A Nation at Risk, gave voice to those who questioned this education pall. It also reintroduced several key ideas from the report of the Committee of Ten, which assumed that academic courses had greater education value than other courses. A Nation at Risk decried the "cafeteria style curriculum" of American high schools, rejecting curricular differentiation, the animating idea of Cardinal Principles.

By 1986, 45 states and the District of Columbia had raised high-school graduation requirements, 42 had increased math requirements, and 34 had boosted science requirements. These changes reduced the choices that students could make in their course selections and thus marked a dramatic shift away from the policies of the previous half-century.

They also produced the most substantial changes in student course taking since the 1930s. In 1982, for example, only 31.5 percent of all high-school graduates took four years of English, three years of social studies, and two years each of math and science. By 1994, however, the number of graduates who followed that regimen of courses had shot up to 74.6 percent. Even more impressive was the fact that the percentages for African American (76.7) and Latino (77.5) graduates were greater than for whites (75.5). These changes were positive steps away from curricular differentiation and toward greater curricular equality.

Unfortunately, despite these changes in high-school course taking over the past two decades, student achievement in core liberal-arts courses has not shown dramatic improvement, and American students have repeatedly fallen short on international comparisons of achievement, particularly in math and science. The most recent findings from the Long-Term Trend Reading and Mathematics Assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) illuminate this situation clearly. Despite substantially more high-school students taking more difficult mathematics courses between 1978 and 2004, the overall mathematics scores for 17-year-olds in that period remained unchanged. Similarly, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) recently released data comparing mathematical literacy and problem-solving skills for 15-year-olds in 39 developed countries: American students ranked 27th. As one commentator on the NAEP findings put it, we are facing "a deepening crisis in the nation's high schools."

The broad outlines of this crisis have been apparent for many years. High schools have been "selling students short" for decades, offering too many options and too many watered-down courses. They have sustained a culture of low expectations on both sides of the teacher's desk.

Reforming our high schools should begin by going back to the future. The vision for American high schools articulated by the Committee of Ten in 1893 must inspire the reforms for our high schools in the 21st century. Clearly, returning to a curriculum model akin to that of the Committee of Ten is necessary but not sufficient to improve the quality of high-school education. What else is needed?

What We Can Do

First, we must effectively address the education problems of schools from preschool through 8th grade. High schools rest on the foundation set in the early grades. If 9th graders enter high school reading at a 6th-grade level, their prospects for success in a challenging high school would be precarious at best. With its emphasis on improving reading and mathematics skills, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) can have a powerful positive influence on preparing young people for high-quality secondary education.

We must also ensure that students entering secondary schools know more than just reading and math. In a troubling example of unintended consequences, because of NCLB elementary teachers may be tempted to set aside units on history, science, or literature in order to create more time for reading and math instruction. The result of such actions will be disastrous for high schools, as students enter with little or none of the crucial background they need to master the subjects they will be required to take on the secondary level. Again, the elementary grades must provide the disciplinary foundations for future learning in core subject areas.

Teachers at all levels need additional preparation in the subjects that they teach and how to teach them. Beyond the fact that large numbers of high-school teachers are teaching subjects in which they have neither a major nor a minor, even teachers who do have strong academic credentials are often clueless about how to teach their subjects to students from diverse backgrounds and abilities. Historically, as we have seen, school leaders "solved" this problem by assigning supposedly less able students to the general or vocational tracks and watering down the courses they took. This process eliminated the need for teachers to do the hard work of developing methods that would make challenging content accessible to all students. Schools of education are equally culpable in this process, having shirked their obligation to do the kind of research that would aid administrators and teachers in implementing intellectually rich programs for all students. Programs to prepare new teachers and professional development programs for practicing teachers must address these problems if American education is to improve and thrive.

Finally, we must avoid reform efforts that hide curricular differentiation under an assumed name. This may be the legacy of the most popular high-school reform of the day: subdividing large high schools into small units serving about 500 students. There is certainly much to commend this idea, especially its effort to reduce the anonymity and alienation many students experience in high schools with enrollments of 2,000 or more. But recent research by sociologists Douglas Ready and Valerie Lee (of the University of Oregon and University of Michigan, respectively) found that the new arrangements simply re-created the differentiated curricula of the old system. Students now attended small schools within schools, each with a new name and mission, but the courses and education expectations were essentially the same as those of the tracking regime in the old, larger high school.

Curricular differentiation has proved to be a protean beast. The first step toward its defeat must be, as the Committee of Ten recognized more than 110 years ago, having all high-school students follow an intellectually rich liberal arts course of study. Given the social, political, and economic complexities of the modern world, high-school students need a broad, deep, liberal arts education that will enable them to meet the challenges of the future as informed, thoughtful adults. This means that American young people must graduate with first-rate knowledge, understanding, and skills in foreign languages, mathematics, the sciences, American history and civics, world history and cultures, and great literature from every part of the globe. People who advocate more vocational education in our high schools miss the most fundamental fact of the new world we are living in: today, the best vocational education is academic education.

Jeffrey Mirel is professor of educational studies and history, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907-81, and, with David Angus, The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890-1995.

BY JEFFREY MIREL

Carnegie Units

Defining a high-school education

There may be much speculation about the origin of the education species that is the American high school. Was it intelligent design or simply evolution? In fact, the DNA of modern secondary schooling was implanted as a seemingly unrelated education initiative. In the early part of the 20th century, Andrew Carnegie decided to establish a retirement fund for elderly college professors, gave $10 million to his Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to get the project going, and the rest is, as they say, history.

A College by Any Other Name

Henry Pritchett, first president of the Carnegie Foundation, wrote in the foundation's first annual report (1906) that "the most important question with which the Board has to deal [in creating the college pension fund] ... is that of determining what educational standard shall be set up: in other words, what is a 'college' ...?" College professors, Pritchett noted, frequently complained that high schools "do not furnish them pupils fitted to sustain high entrance conditions." Principals of high schools complained, "with equal truth, that they cannot keep students in high schools when they are allowed to enter colleges and universities after completion of half or three-quarters of their high school work."

The problem of where high school ended and college began was not a trivial one. In 1885, Charles Foster Smith of Vanderbilt University had attributed the scarcity of high schools in the South to the admission practices of the region's colleges. The colleges, he said, published requirements for admission, but rarely enforced them. "Since the boy is not required to prepare for college, he comes to college without preparation." Nor was the problem restricted to the South. Even the nation's most prestigious colleges were admitting half or more of their students "on condition," that is, deficient in preparation. In 1908, for example, students admitted "on condition," some as young as 14, constituted 49 percent, 53 percent, and 58 percent of their respective classes at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Add to this nebulous college entrance environment the challenge presented by the proliferation of four-year high schools, whose numbers skyrocketed from 2,526 in 1890 to 10,213 in 1910, and it is easy to see why the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation felt the need to define college: "An institution to be ranked a college must have at least six (6) professors giving their entire time to college and university work, a course of four full years in liberal arts and sciences, and should require for admission not less than the usual four years of academic or high school preparation, or its equivalent, in addition to the preacademic or grammar school studies."

Tucked into this declaration was the determination that both high schools and colleges be standardized as four-year institutions. But the foundation also felt compelled to define "high school preparation." And it settled on "units" of class time in a particular subject as the standard. "Thus, plane geometry, which is usually studied five periods weekly through an academic year, is estimated as one unit," they concluded. To solve the problem of a possible "discrepancy between the amount of work required and the time specified for completion of the work," the foundation determined exactly how many minutes of course time would be required for a given subject. In the end, 14 units of coursework would constitute "the minimum preparation which may be interpreted as 'four years of academic or high-school preparation.'"

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Money Talks

The Carnegie Foundation made the additional decision to require colleges, as a condition of participation in the new pension fund, to accept only students who had completed the designated number of "Carnegie Units." For most of the 20th century, the near-universal definition of a high-school education has been the completion of 14 to 16 units of study: the time-served or seat-time standard. It would be hard to overestimate the impact this definition has had on the structure and organization of America's high schools.

In 1954, the U.S. commissioner of education, Samuel M. Brownell, authorized a study that found the Carnegie Unit was being used "in almost every high school in the country." Why? "In brief," the report concluded, "it was a case of 'money talks.'" To receive pension funds from the Carnegie Foundation's program, colleges had to comply with the foundation's rules. The colleges, in turn, "compelled" the high schools to accept the new definition of college preparation. Thus the unit-credit system came to define both the structure and the meaning of a high-school education: a rigid schedule of subjects and classes, an emphasis on time served rather than amount learned, and a belief that once a student obtained the required number of graduation units, his high-school education was complete.

Barney Brawer is the principal of the Michael J. Perkins Elementary School in Boston. This material was adapted from "Defining and Requiring Academic Achievement," a 2003 study of the history and significance of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests.

by Barney J. Brawer

The End of the Secondary-School Surge (Figure 1)

High-school enrollment increased dramatically over most of the 20th
century. But after 1970 it leveled off and graduation rates started to
decline.

Note: Percentage enrollment is the total high-school enrollment divided
by the total population aged 14 to 17. The graduation rate is the number
of high-school graduates in a given year divided by the total number of
17-year-olds.
SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics

A "COMPREHENSIVE" Problem

THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN FANTASY AND REALITY

To say that improving high-school student achievement is like turning a supertanker around would be an insult to the speed and maneuverability of supertankers. Whether one looks at standardized test scores, at graduation rates, or at college admission test results, American high-school performance has hardly budged over the past three decades.

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This stagnation is not for lack of trying. We have poured more money into schools, hired an army of new teachers to reduce class size, expanded professional development, and retained more experienced teachers--everything that the teacher unions have in mind when they repeat their mantra that we know what works and just need the resources to do it. We have doubled per-pupil spending (after adjusting for inflation) over the past three decades. We reduced the student-teacher ratio in high schools from 21.7 students per teacher in 1960 to 19.8 in 1970, and, by 1999, to 14.1. The percentage of teachers holding master's or doctoral degrees has more than doubled, from 27.5 percent in 1971 to 56.8 percent in 2001. The average teacher in 2001 had 14 years of experience compared with 8 years of experience in 1971.

But none of it has worked.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the average 17-year-old today is no more proficient at reading or mathematics than his counterpart in 1970 (see Figure 1). Some progress has been made by our 9- and 13-year-olds, but the gains evaporate by the time these students reach the end of their K-12 experience. The average 17-year-old student's score on the NAEP reading test was 285 in 2004, exactly the same as in 1971. Math results are no different, going from a score of 304 in 1973 to 307 in 2004, a change that is not statistically significant.

This lack of advancement is more disappointing considering how low the achievement bar has been. Only about one in four of the high-school graduates who took the American College Testing (ACT) program's college-readiness test last year met the benchmarks in reading comprehension, English, math, and science. The organization, founded in 1959, called it a "College Readiness Crisis" last year; this year the scores were "unchanged.... Students graduate from high school ready or not." And according to the standards established by NAEP, they're not: 64 percent of 12th graders performed below the proficient level on NAEP's most recent reading test; more than a quarter read at less than what NAEP deemed a "basic" level. On the most recent administration of the NAEP math test, a striking 83 percent of 12th graders scored below the proficient level, and 35 percent scored below the basic level. On the most recent NAEP science test, 82 percent of 12th graders performed below the proficient level, and 47 percent scored below the basic level.

The gloomy picture painted by the ACT and NAEP is confirmed by high-school graduation statistics and college entrance test results. According to the U.S. Department of Education's Digest of Education Statistics, just 72 percent of students graduated from high school with a regular diploma in 2002, compared with some 77 percent in 1970. More alarming is the fact that almost half of the students who do graduate are essentially ineligible to go on to a four-year college because they have not taken the minimal coursework needed to apply to virtually any four-year institution. While SAT scores are not particularly useful for long-term analyses of high-school performance because they include only a limited and changing pool of students, they do tell us something about the elite group that does pursue higher education. Even among this population achievement has not been improving. SAT scores in reading dropped from 537 in 1970 to 507 in 2003. Math SAT scores have inched up from 512 in 1970 to 519 in 2003. The lack of improvement among the college-bound elite is more evidence that the stagnation in high-school achievement is not concentrated among the most disadvantaged students.

The problems with our high schools are chronic, widespread, and painfully obvious.

Doing What Doesn't Work

What is not so obvious is what to do to fix the problems. We have significantly increased per-pupil spending, hired an army of additional teachers, and greatly increased the formal training those teachers have received. In short, we have focused considerable energy on increasing the resources available for education. But we have not improved the motivation of administrators and educators to use those resources effectively. Attending to resources without attending to motivation is like filling a race car with fuel and then putting an infant behind the wheel. You just won't go anywhere.

The problem isn't lack of resources. The problem is that we don't think about high schools correctly. We lump them with elementary schools, part of the K-12 system, rather than with colleges, with which they have much more in common. By so organizing and conceptualizing high schools, we underemphasize the need to provide secondary-school educators with incentives that are more like the incentives of their closer relative, college. The high schools that we created in the 20th century--big, sprawling, "comprehensive"--are not like elementary and preschools. They are not natural extensions of families, and their teachers and administrators should not be expected to act as if they were members of a family.

If parents fall short in raising their children, we generally assume, it has more to do with resources, time, knowledge, or experience than with motivation. We similarly assume that teachers aren't motivated by external rewards or punishments, but by their love of the students. Such thinking is why elementary- and secondary-school reform focuses almost exclusively on resources (per pupil spending), time (class size), knowledge (professional development), or experience (teacher retention) and relatively little on incentives to make educators perform better.

Even if elementary schools can be run effectively like big families, it is unlikely that most high schools, with more than 1,000 students, could be. They are just too big, the kids are not cuddly enough, and the skills that have to be conveyed to students are too complicated. Unless they are made dramatically smaller, high schools have to be run more like professional organizations or businesses and less like families.

The Gates Foundation Strategies

This logic is why the new wave of high school reform efforts, led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (see "A Foundation Goes to School," p. 44), has focused on the disconnect between the reality of big, modern high schools and our fantasy of them as extensions of the family. Gates has addressed this disconnect with various strategies. For example, they have pushed to reduce the size of public high schools, in the belief that small high schools, like families, can succeed by developing a strong, shared sense of mission among faculty and students. In small high schools, the theory goes, the motivation of educators, like the motivation of parents, is buttressed by strong informal bonds between everyone. Whether this theory is producing results is unclear at this point as we do not yet have a large amount of rigorous evidence on the effects of reducing high-school size. But the strategy clearly is to make high schools as small as many elementary schools so that they will acquire more family-like qualities.

Another strategy, also promoted by the Gates Foundation, is to make high schools more like colleges. These "early-college" high schools do not coddle their students like elementary schools do. They have open campuses, they offer a broad set of electives, and they employ college faculty. For the most part, the Gates early-college initiative focuses on the motivation of students, hoping that greater autonomy and more challenging material will help keep them engaged and interested in school.

But the early-college idea also highlights the importance of altering the motivation of staff. Colleges devise explicit systems of rewards and sanctions to enhance motivation. Unlike public high schools, colleges do not pay faculty solely on the basis of years of experience and degrees held. Colleges generally attempt to measure the merit of faculty by tracking grant dollars generated, counting the number of publications produced, and administering teacher evaluations, among other criteria. Pay is determined, at least in part, by these performance evaluations. Faculty compensation in college, unlike public high school, is also influenced by market demand for those faculty members, so people in some fields are paid significantly more than others and outside offers are sometimes matched. While colleges, like high schools, offer their faculty members tenure, their evaluation of faculty productivity tends to be much more rigorous.

To be sure, colleges fall far short of optimal efficiency and operate in a regulated and subsidized environment that provides them with financial incentives to neglect students in favor of research. But the somewhat better attention to merit incentives in colleges has helped make our higher education system the envy of the world, while our K-12 public schools, almost entirely lacking external incentives, are not.

Focusing on Motivation

Families are not impervious to incentives, but those incentives are shaped by informal bonds more than by explicit systems of rewards and sanctions. Even modern organizations, such as businesses or universities, evoke familial incentives as part of their efforts to motivate staff, using terms like "our corporate family," sending out employee newsletters that read like family holiday letters, and going on "retreats" as if they were family vacations. Of course, businesses do not rely solely, or even mainly, on familial incentives; K-12 schools do.

Unfortunately, public high schools have barely begun to tap nonfamilial incentives to motivate their staff. Many high schools have begun to administer high-stakes tests, which collect some information on outcomes and offer some rewards and sanctions for productivity. But the measures of outcomes are limited, the rewards and sanctions are weak, and individual employees are largely unaffected by these incentives. Assigning a failing grade to a school as a result of high-stakes testing may be politically embarrassing, but it usually has no effect on school budgets and almost never has any meaningful consequences for individual teachers.

The lack of choice and competition among high schools is at the heart of the problem. In particular, if high schools have to compete for their students and revenues because of vouchers or charter schools, they will figure out how best to motivate their staff to improve quality and attract students. Some high schools will adopt their own high-stakes testing systems to measure and reward productivity. Other high schools may decide that they can motivate their staff best by reducing size and by increasing the familial incentives of their organization. The variety of arrangements to motivate staff to successfully compete is impossible to fully anticipate or describe.

The point is that the market incentives that vouchers and charter schools can bring to high schools will focus school leadership on the problem of motivation. Those leaders will no longer be able to maintain the fantasy of high-school educators floating from classroom to classroom like Mary Poppins because of their love of children while at the same time haggling over pay, benefits, and working conditions as if they were automobile workers. Either high schools will really have to embrace family incentives by becoming significantly smaller and more informal, or they will have to admit that they are large, modern organizations that require explicit systems of rewards and sanctions to enhance productivity. Either way, they need competition to force them to address the issues of motivation and improvement.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform, University of Arkansas, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is author, most recently, of Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe about Our Schools--And Why It Isn't So.

BY JAY P. GREENE

High Schoolers Tread Water (Figure 1)

While 9-year-olds seem to keep scoring higher in math and reading, 17-
year-olds have made almost no progress in three decades of testing.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics

THINGS ARE Falling Apart

CAN THE CENTER FIND A SOLUTION THAT WILL HOLD?

The year 2005 began with high schools taking center stage in Washington's continuing drama concerning education reform. President George W. Bush started things off in January, when he delivered a ringing address at a suburban D.C. high school about the urgency of reforming American high schools and offered a bold $1.5 billion plan for doing so. A month after the presidential call to arms for high-school reform, 45 governors and a host of education leaders and CEOs met in a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel for a summit devoted to the subject.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In his keynote address to that gathering, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates pronounced current U.S. high schools "obsolete" and said, "Even when they are working as designed, they cannot teach all our students what they need to know today." At the same conclave, the new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, declared that America "must make a high-school diploma a ticket to success in the 21st century." The summit concluded by adopting a five-part state "action agenda": restoring value to the diploma; redesigning the high school as an institution; strengthening the quality of high-school teachers and principals; holding high schools accountable for their results; and streamlining "education governance."

With all these powerful people talking high-school reform, it seemed that the planets had aligned to make high schools, the lost child of public education, the featured attraction on the U.S. education-policy agenda. But the universe then began to shift and the planets were knocked out of alignment. First, House Education Committee chairman John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio and longtime proponent of education reform, expressed doubts about the federal government's role in leading the high-school reform effort. "The current system," Boehner remarked at a late-May committee hearing, "isn't getting the job done. But that doesn't necessarily mean the solution to the problem should be driven from Washington." Another senior member of that committee, former Delaware governor Michael Castle, also a Republican, was blunter. "Frankly," he said, "there's political opposition to it, and it's not just Democrats. It's within the Republican Party as well." And on the other side of the Capitol a spokesman for Senator Mike Enzi, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, noted, "Senator Enzi has made several other education issues the first priority."

As if that weren't trouble enough, the president's $1.5 billion plan entailed shifting to his high-school reform plan funds traditionally spent on vocational education, a move that riled many members of Congress since "voc ed" remains popular back home.

What happened? Has the White House initiative been stopped at the starting gate? Is high-school reform a dead issue?

The Need Is Great, the Political Will Weak

As nearly everyone in education knows, something is wrong with our high schools. And, for the most part, the Bush administration's proposal seemed built on that consensus, much the same accord that brought us No Child Left Behind and the determination that schools need a regimen of standards, testing, and accountability.

"Out of a hundred 9th graders in our public schools," said Mr. Bush in his January speech, "only 68 will complete high school on time. Now, we live in a competitive world, and a 68 percent graduation rate for 9th graders is not good enough to be able to compete in this competitive world. In math and science, the problem is especially urgent. A recent study showed that American 15-year-olds ranked 27th out of 39 countries in math literacy. I don't know about you, but I want to be ranked first in the world, not 27th." (See Figure 1.)

The president proposed a series of programs to help high-school students graduate with "skills necessary to succeed." The plan included money to identify at-risk 8th graders and intervene in their academic lives "before it's too late." But the centerpiece was a call for tests in reading and math in the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades. "Testing at high-school levels will help us to become more competitive as the years go by," said Bush. "Testing in high schools will make sure that our children are employable for the jobs of the 21st century. Testing will allow teachers to improve their classes. Testing will enable schools to track. Testing will make sure that a diploma is not merely a sign of endurance, but the mark of a young person ready to succeed."

The plan seemed sensible enough. And it is possible, of course, that parts of the president's plan could reemerge when No Child Left Behind is reauthorized. At present, though, Congress seems to think it has done plenty to make over K-12 education and is loath to extend NCLB's scope at the very time that the ambitious statute is facing so many implementation challenges as well as so much opposition from states and districts. Indeed, the controversies surrounding NCLB have at least delayed, if not doomed, both the administration's version of high-school reform and any other bold federal entry into that territory.

Maximum Feasible Myopia

The real question, then, though perhaps born of necessity, is whether it's such a bad thing that responsibility for revitalizing U.S. high schools has been thrust back on states and districts, private funders, and diverse reform architects. Could the federal government's failure to mount a political consensus open the way to useful experimentation with various potential solutions?

Indeed, much experimenting is already under way across the land. And remembering the warning of the French political commentator George Bernanos may enhance the chances of finding useful solutions: "The worst, the most corrupting of lies, are problems poorly stated." In other words, if a problem is misrepresented or its definition is disputed, any given solution is unlikely to solve it to everyone's satisfaction.

A vivid American example of this policy perplexity was embodied in a famous 1969 book, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, by the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The title was a play on a key phrase in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (which launched LBJ's "war on poverty") calling for the "maximum feasible participation" of residents and groups affected by the legislation's centerpiece Community Action Program. Moynihan's point was that the program's architects didn't actually agree on what the problem was, so the legislation they created fell apart when the time came for its implementation. It was, if you will, a modern public-policy rendition of the tale of the blind men and the elephant, wherein each sightless man had a different notion of the essential nature of this beast depending on which part he was touching. Moynihan contended that the Community Action Program was doomed because the rush to legislate had led people to reach superficial agreement on the definition of the policy problem.

As America embarks on high-school reform, it runs a similar risk. The nation is awash in different solutions to the high-school problem. But mostly we are still grappling with trying to define the problem. Sure, from 30,000 feet we can reach broad agreement as to what's wrong. Nearly everyone shares the concern of the president and the governors that U.S. high-school students are not learning enough; that they're being surpassed by their peers in other lands; that too many are bored to death; that too many drop out; that few of those who graduate are well prepared for college and employment. And so on. From six miles up, we know we have a problem and can even reach a meeting of minds as to its most vivid manifestations.

Yes, there's a problem, several problems, in fact, and the rationale for high-school reform would seem compelling. But as we get closer to the ground, the picture loses focus. Is the problem with high school that it is not engaging students or that it is not academically challenging enough? Can we simultaneously reduce dropouts and beef up academic achievement? Will stiffer graduation requirements and more high-stakes testing cause even more young people to quit? Are these complementary goals, or are they trade-offs? Are these even the right questions?

One thing we do know is that if we get the answers wrong, we invite a new maximum feasible misunderstanding, and high-school reform will be declared a failure. Thus I sense that it's just as well Uncle Sam is not rushing in with a predetermined, nationwide strategy and that we're giving states, communities, and private organizations some leeway to work out different approaches. If we monitor and evaluate their efforts, we stand to learn more about what works for whom in what circumstances.

Knowing What's Wrong

How many options are there, really? Allowing for mixing and matching, I can identify at least six versions of the problem, each giving rise to different theories of action and strategies for solving it. The now-dormant White House proposals tapped into several of these, as did the summit communique released by the National Governors Association. At the end of the day, we will likely conclude that the high-school problem is actually a tangle of problems in need of a multipart solution. Well and good. First, though, all the blind men should come to understand the many-faceted nature of this particular beast.

Problem 1:

Achievement is too low.

Solution: Extend standards-based reform to high schools by making them accountable for their students' achievement and completion rates. A number of states have begun to do this, and the Bush proposal is focused here, bringing high schools under the NCLB umbrella, primarily via testing and public accountability. This is a familiar, government-driven, top-down, standards-based, institution-centered approach, already fairly well established in the primary and middle schools.

Problem 2:

Students aren't working hard enough, taking the right courses, or learning enough.

Solution: Since all they need do to get a diploma is go through the motions and rack up the course credits, no real reward follows from studying hard (save for the small fraction seeking entry to competitive colleges), and no unpleasantness results from taking it easy. We thus need to establish high-stakes graduation tests that students must pass to earn their diplomas. This, too, is a behaviorist, top-down, results-based, accountability-driven system, but this version bears down primarily on the kids rather than on their schools. About half the states have already put into place some form of statewide graduation test. Some also supply carrots along with the sticks via positive inducements such as college scholarships for those with B averages. The Bush administration suggested fatter Pell grants for those who complete a challenging curriculum.

Problem 3:

High school is a lockstep bore, and consequently too many kids turn off, tune out, and quit (see Figure 2). If they don't stick around (or come back), there's no way they'll learn.

Solution: Prevent dropouts and maximize completions by making the high-school experience more appealing: individualize it, let students move at their own pace. This was the thrust of a recent task force report in Ohio titled "High-Quality High Schools"; it was the point of the president's proposed $200 million Performance Plan Fund (part of the $1.5 billion initiative); and it's the essence of any number of private-sector initiatives. With it, sometimes, comes the idea of creating new education options for out-of-school youth and dropout recovery programs for those who have fallen by the wayside. (Indeed, we could identify seven reform strategies rather than six by bisecting this one and distinguishing between prevention and retrieval schemes.) The underlying theory of action is that, if young people like school more (and, presumably, succeed at it), they'll hang in there. Well-conceived specialty schools and programs can reengage young people who have already had it with formal education.

Problem 4:

The circa-1950s, one-size-fits-all, comprehensive high school is itself dysfunctional, an inefficient, outmoded vehicle for teaching young people what they need to learn.

Solution: Devise new institutional forms for delivering secondary education, using technology, modern organization theory, and outsourcing. Give young people choices among the formats: early-college high schools; smaller schools; schools within schools; charter schools; KIPP schools; high-tech high schools; virtual high schools; and more. Much has been tried on this front, and the innovations take many shapes, as do the schemes whereby young people and their parents can access the version that works best for them.

Problem 5:

The courses are too easy, pointless, and ill matched to the demands of the real world.

Solution: Beef up the curriculum. Broaden access to Advanced Placement courses and propagate the International Baccalaureate. Strengthen state standards. Revise the textbooks. Team up with colleges to create K-16 programs. Make college-prep the default curriculum. Blend higher-education's expectations with those of modern jobs, a la the American Diploma Project, and work backward through the K-12 grades.

Problem 6:

Academic work and intellectual activity are no way to the adolescent heart.

Solution: Since teenagers are animated by things with tangible rewards and sleeves-rolled-up engagement, we need to get practical. Focus on tech-prep programs, ventures that join high schools to community colleges, work-study, schedules that blend school with jobs, voluntarism and community service, and kindred ways of tapping into the "affective," pecuniary, and social sides of young people.

High School Is Different

To be sure, we could slice these strategies differently and combine them in any number of packages. And yes, with a bit of effort they can be loosely grouped under the two familiar headings that we know as standards-based and choice-based reform. But that may not be the most useful way to frame them. Indeed, it may invite people to slip into familiar ideological postures rather than to think closely about high schools.

The fact is that high schools pose challenges distinct from those of K-8. Their students don't really have to be there. Even where state compulsory attendance laws extend to age 17 or 18, our sky-high dropout rate (see Figure 2) proves those statutes are unenforceable. High schools are larger than elementary schools and there are fewer of them, which makes choice-based strategies harder. For every person who believes that the high school's mission is to supply all students with a solid liberal arts education, someone else is convinced that young people's differing tastes and aspirations should preclude uniformity of academic standards and curriculum. On a major national survey conducted in April 2005, for example, 76 percent of Americans opposed making college prep the universal high-school curriculum and instead favored "career/technical education to equip students who don't go to college with real-world skills." (Hence the continuing appeal of voc ed.) By the high-school years, moreover, achievement levels range widely: some students still need basic reading and arithmetic, while others crave university-level coursework and Intel science competitions.

Adolescents also have much on their minds besides school: money, sports, and socializing, for starters. More than a few have tangled with such adult-world problems as drugs, crime, and pregnancy. And many have scant use for authority (or even advice) proffered by grown-ups--their parents, teachers, or anybody else.

As if that did not present a sufficiently daunting picture for would-be reformers, lots of Americans don't really see a big problem with high schools in their present form, at least not with the schools they know best. Parents typically give high marks to their own children's high schools, institutions that also anchor many communities, provide Friday-night foot-ball games, and seem to be doing an adequate job of turning out graduates who go on to college, even if some must take remedial courses when they get there. The dropout rate means that the high schools' most acute failures largely vanish from sight. At the top, honors students fret not about boredom or weak achievement, but about the stress that attends all that cramming and homework as they compete for entry into high-status universities. And just about everyone who sticks it out can at least attend the local community college, join the military, or find an entry-level job of some sort. "What, exactly, is the problem with our high school?" ask the residents of River City, U.S.A.

Considering all the impediments to wholesale high-school reform and the absence of true consensus as to the nature and urgency of the problem, I conclude that diversity and experimentation are a reasonable way to proceed in mid-decade, rather than pressing for elusive agreement about a single national strategy. That doesn't mean I'm complacent about today's high schools. They are not, in fact, getting us where we need to go as a country. But neither are they going to be turned around from Washington, which lacks the political will to make this problem its own. Instead, let us welcome the mixing of strategies and matching of solutions, the combining of ideas and refining of programs. Let us try all six (or five or seven) of the aforementioned reform notions and any number of permutations and combinations of them and seek to determine what works best for whom in which circumstances. High-school reform may resemble welfare reform, where it was important that states had the freedom and incentive to try various approaches before the time was ripe for a national strategy.

Let us acknowledge, though, that a decentralized, piecemeal approach invites its own messy confusion, the more so if we have no common metrics by which to gauge progress, compare results, or define success from one place to another.

Multiple reform strategies cast the greatest light when they at least share measures of performance. For which purpose, let us return to 30,000 feet and suggest that the two essential sets of data for tracking America's progress or lack thereof in revitalizing the high school are objective test scores and graduation rates.

Neither, alas, is easy to come by nor itself the object of wide consensus.

Twelfth-grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), aka the nation's report card, are not even reported by state, though 4th- and 8th-grade results are, and have long been shadowed by doubts as to their accuracy, considering that many high-school seniors don't take the exams seriously. They do not, after all, "count" for anything in the student's own life. Other national tests used for college entrance--SATs, ACTs, Advanced Placement--are taken only by a subset of juniors and seniors. And of course none is taken by the horde of young people who don't complete high school.

Though many states have instigated graduation tests, these often have low passing levels and, in any case, are not readily compared from one jurisdiction to the next.

International tests such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are valuable for purposes of comparing U.S. student performance with their overseas counterparts, but these do not occur on a predictable cycle.

As for graduation and dropout rates, the National Center for Education Statistics has multiple definitions and measures; the Census Bureau counts "high-school equivalency" certificates along with actual, on-time graduates; and several independent analysts insist that the true graduation rate is far lower than federal data suggest, very different from state to state, often even different from what states think it is. (Fortunately, this may change over the next few years, as all but a handful of governors, declining to wait for Uncle Sam, announced in July 2005 that they would collaborate on a single, simplified graduation gauge.)

Thus it will be no small challenge even to monitor and evaluate U.S. high-school reform initiatives if we don't have measures that people agree on. And that's without resolving the policy paradox of whether achievement scores and graduation rates can realistically be raised at the same time, along with the level of student engagement, or whether those worthy goals tend to cancel one another.

At day's end, the multifaceted challenge of high-school reform seems to be a problem that needs to ripen before any comprehensive solution can drop from the policy tree. Americans hold disparate goals for high schools, conflicting priorities for strengthening them, and dissimilar yardsticks for tracking progress.

This is not to say the problem doesn't cry for a solution or that complacency rules the day. In a survey of high-school students released by the National Governors Association in July 2005, more than a third of respondents said their school had not done a good job of challenging them academically or preparing them for college; almost two-thirds said they would work harder if the courses were more demanding or interesting. A month earlier, the Educational Testing Service released a survey indicating that 51 percent of the general public think U.S. high schools need either "major changes" or a "complete over-haul," even if there's considerable dissonance as to what those changes should be. Furthermore, the imperative to make any changes may not extend to their own community high school.

That more and more people are discontented with today's high schools and their results is surely a good thing. This issue deserves to be on the national stage. But first it has to play in the provinces, in summer stock, and in off-off Broadway theaters, where actors, directors, investors, critics, and audiences alike can come to understand it.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior editor of Education Next.

BY CHESTER E. FINN JR.

Slow-Pitch Softball (Figure 1)

Although 15-year-olds from the United States scored near the bottom in
mathematics on the recent Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA) tests, the American test-takers ranked number one on the test's
self-esteem index.

"I get good marks in mathematics."

                      Percentage agreeing
                      or strongly agreeing

United States              72
Australia                  65
Canada                     63
Ireland                    60
Germany                    59
France                     48
Spain                      47
Korea                      36
Japan                      28

Mathematics Literacy

                      Average Score

Korea                     542
Japan                     534
Canada                    532
Australia                 524
France                    511
Germany                   503
Ireland                   503
Spain                     485
United States             483

Note: Scores were reported for 39 countries in PISA 2003. The above
figures depict the United States, which ranked 27th in math, and a
sample of eight countries with average mathematics literacy scores
higher than those of the United States.
SOURCE: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),
"Learning for Tomorrow's World--First Results from P15A 2003"

Note: Table made from bar graph.

Falling Behind (Figure 2)

The U.S. high-school graduation rate is well below that of most other
developed countries.

High-School Graduation Rate in Select OECD Countries, 2001

                               Percentage

Denmark                            96
Japan                              93
Poland                             92
Germany                            92
Finland                            91
Switzerland                        88
Czech Republic                     85
France                             85
OECD Average                       82
Belgium                            79
Ireland                            76
Slovakia                           73
United States                      72
Sweden                             71
Iceland                            70

SOURCE: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development,
"Education at a Glance 2003"

Note: Table made from bar graph.