As expected, in last month’s election, voters in Massachusetts supported a union-backed ballot initiative to kill off the Bay State’s longstanding graduation exam. At around the same time, New York state officials released a timeline for eliminating the even-longer-standing Regents exams as a requirement for earning a high school diploma. With the number of states requiring students to pass exams in order to graduate now down to the single digits, this feels like the end of an era.
In that spirit, I recently dusted off a (digital) copy of Ready or Not : Creating a High School Diploma That Counts, published by Achieve, The Education Trust, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute exactly twenty years ago. How far we’ve come—or fallen—since then! At the time, standards-based reformers worried about the eroding value of the high school diploma and wanted to make sure that all students graduated “college and career ready.” (This was meant to supplement the No Child Left Behind act, which brought much-needed accountability to America’s schools, but left student accountability on the cutting room floor.)
At the heart of the “American Diploma Project” (ADP) strategy was a set of standards in English language arts and math that strongly influenced the Common Core, which came in 2010, along with the expectation that states would ensure that students met these standards by requiring them to pass exams to prove their mettle.
That was not to be. Soon after the release of the ADP recommendations, Bush Administration officials issued regulations requiring states to incorporate graduation rates, measured in a common way, into their No Child Left Behind accountability systems. The law of unintended consequences kicked in, with the focus shifting from “beefing up the value of the diploma” to “getting everyone across the finish line.” Our national graduation rate went from 79 percent in 2010–11 to 87 percent in 2021–22.
Sometimes that stemmed from positive practices, such as the adoption of early detection systems for students who were off-track. But just as often it resulted from school districts embracing dubious credit recovery programs and other schemes to inflate their graduation rates.
And speaking of inflation, grade inflation in high schools only grew worse during this period, too, before going bananas during the Covid era.
It’s probably never been easier to graduate from high school in America than it is today—the opposite of what the ADP folks imagined.
Any semblance of standards has collapsed at the higher education level, too. The ADP report worried greatly about high school graduates ending up in remedial education once they got to college. The solution that higher ed came up with: Just get rid of the “remedial” courses and place students in credit-bearing, so-called “corequisite” courses instead. That worked for some of the higher performing of the formerly remedial students but was a disaster for the lowest performing ones, who should never have been admitted to college in the first place.
Desperate for students, colleges and universities more recently started embracing “direct admissions” policies whereby students are welcomed to campus without even filling out traditional applications. The impulse makes sense—let’s remove some of the red tape that keeps qualified young people, especially first-generation college students, from applying to and matriculating to college. But alarmingly, most of the time students are admitted on the basis of grades (or their derivatives, like GPA or class rank), rather than objective measures like test scores. Which is a real problem in an age of grade inflation! Then there’s dual enrollment, which is also filling seats (especially in community colleges) and offering students college credit, but without any of the quality control mechanisms that make programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate so rigorous.
Where to go from here
On one level, none of this is surprising. Holding the line on standards is tough work for elected officials, who have not exactly been in an eat-your-broccoli mood lately. It’s all sugary cereal, all the time, as my friend Rick Hess wrote recently. And we’ve created incentives that encourage leaders in K–12 and higher ed to follow the path of least resistance. Superintendents and high school principals crave the positive accountability ratings that come from keeping students on the rolls, even if their engagement in school (or lack thereof) makes them look an awful lot like what we used to call dropouts. And college administrators are desperate to put butts in seats.
It’s also true that the previous paradigm—encapsulated nicely by the ADP—came awfully close to embracing a “college for all” mindset. The argument was that all kids needed the same reading, writing, and math skills in order to succeed in college or career, but that was interpreted as arguing that all students should do more or less the same thing all the way through twelfth grade. And in reality, that has meant almost everyone doing college-prep (if often a watered-down kind), with a dash of CTE sometimes thrown in on the side.
Now the pendulum has swung and policymakers, policy wonks, and the public are closer to agreement that high school students should get to spend more of their time on real career and technical training if that’s what they want. Yet our graduation requirements—especially our course requirements—haven’t yet changed to make this shift easily doable. States such as Indiana are trying to address this but remain mired in old debates about “college or career readiness” versus “college and career readiness.”
So here’s a modest proposal: Let’s get the gang back together again—I’m thinking of a bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs—and work on figuring out a rational set of high school “pathways” policies going forward, with a particular focus on graduation requirements, à la ADP. My own hope is that they would aim to:
- Ensure that all students master core academic knowledge and skills by the end of the tenth grade. Those who demonstrate such mastery (ideally via end-of-course exams) can then choose among a set of high-quality pathways (more on those below). Those who don’t would keep working on it—but wouldn’t be denied high school diplomas either.
- Allow juniors and seniors who have passed the exams to choose from several pathways, including preparing for selective colleges and universities; preparing for nonselective colleges and universities; preparing for technical programs at the higher education level; or preparing to enter the world of work immediately, including the military.
- Address rampant grade inflation in high schools and beyond.
- Ensure that all postsecondary options (including technical and community colleges) set and enforce admissions standards.
- Work toward closing the funding gap between career and technical education (at the high school and postsecondary levels) and traditional higher education.
This would look a lot like where Maryland’s Kirwan Commission landed, though whether the Old Line State actually succeeds in putting such a system in place remains to be determined.
This still might be too much broccoli eating for today’s political environment. Cynics will say that governors and state education chiefs won’t want to expend political capital trying to fix America’s broken high schools and devalued high school diplomas. So, I say to governors and chiefs, prove them wrong!
