Many states are struggling to revise their high school graduation requirements, sometimes up, sometimes down. Indiana is home to perhaps the premier struggle today, but it’s not alone. Election day may find Massachusetts jettisoning its two-decade-old requirement that students pass the (eighth-grade-level) MCAS exam before graduating. Idaho is in the midst of an overhaul. Rhode Island recently raised the bar. Ninth graders in Kansas face new requirements. My home state of Maryland is moving—at a snail’s pace, some say—to install the ambitious “blueprint for the future.” Meanwhile, Colorado appears to be on the brink of lowering its passing scores for students who opt for standardized tests in lieu of traditional graduation requirements. And so it goes.
Much is also going on behind the scenes, where debates are heated and multiple tensions are tugged back and forth. The most basic is the perennial issue of how hard it should be to earn a diploma. If too hard, some kids—potentially a politically unsustainable number of them—won’t get this important credential. If too easy, few kids will be well prepared for what follows, whether that means community colleges, selective universities, blue-collar trades, sophisticated technical jobs, the military, whatever—let alone for good citizenship, competent parenting, cultural engagement, and personal finance.
Then, however, comes the next complication, which is that “well prepared for” doesn’t mean the same thing for young people headed from high school into, say, construction work, a plumbing apprenticeship, a chef’s job in a five-star restaurant, an open-to-all college, an Ivy League university, or the Air Force. How can a high school—or a state or district setting graduation requirements—possibly prepare thousands of dissimilar young people (who themselves arrive in high school with widely varied degrees of readiness, not to mention capacity and motivation) for the expectations and prerequisites of hundreds of differing post-graduation options?
Twenty or so years ago, we at Fordham joined with the (much-missed) Achieve organization and Education Trust to create the American Diploma Project (ADP) and a network of states pledged to prepare their students for both college and career. We concluded that they all needed to learn essentially the same things—and this went on to have considerable influence on the Common Core State Standards that followed a few years later. But the truth is, in retrospect, we were viewing the high school world through a college-readiness lens, in part because it was a lot easier to find out what college readiness means—at least readiness for credit-bearing work in open-enrollment state colleges—than to smoke out the skills and knowledge that are essential across the endlessly variegated world of work.
Now we live in a world of heightened equity concerns and greater sensitivity to injustice, unequal access to various goods and services, and a disposition in many places to deny differences that—whatever their source—may actually exist in our young people. We also live in a fast-changing economy in an ever-more-competitive world. Making all efforts to work out the “right answer” to “what’s high school supposed to accomplish” more fraught and politically charged than ever before.
Most such efforts nowadays settle on one (or more) of three strategies:
1. “College for all.” This is a nobly aspirational and utterly unrealistic goal, but it’s pursued by an odd coalition of equity hawks; student-hungry colleges; educators who went to college themselves and want their own kids to do likewise and so cannot imagine otherwise (or recommend otherwise without feeling hypocritical); and politicians fearful of saying “let’s send 70 percent of young people to college.” (The feared response: Which 30 of young Americans don’t you care about?) All these folks know and often acknowledge that not everyone will actually matriculate to and complete college, but they do believe that closing off the possibility of college too soon—before kids have even graduated high school—is a form of lowering expectations, usually in ways that are biased by race and/or class.
The reality is that not quite half of young Americans today end up with college degrees. In 2022, reports the Lumina Foundation, among adults ages twenty-five to thirty-four, 39.7 percent held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Another 8.9 percent had associate degrees. That makes 48.6 percent. Set aside the worrying fact that some possess degrees with little or no connection to decent-paying jobs and focus only on degree attainment. Perhaps the country—and its young adults—would be better off if we pushed the proportion with college degrees closer to 60 or 70 percent, which would be a very heavy lift in its own right. We’d still have 30–40 percent without college degrees. Then what? And is it really true that we’re doing a service to those 30–40 percent by making them sludge through college-prep classes, all the way through twelfth grade, rather than doing something more constructive with their instructional time?
2. “College and career.” I was part of the hardworking commission, ably led by Brit Kirwan, that developed Maryland’s “blueprint for the future,” which the legislature subsequently adopted (though it isn’t yet fully paid for and is a long way from being fully implemented). It’s got a lot of moving parts, but the high school part contemplates multiple “pathways” once everyone meets—by tenth grade is the goal—a high standard of readiness in reading and math. In short form, it reads like this:
The College and Career Readiness Pillar sets a new College and Career Readiness (CCR) standard that prepares graduates for success in college and the workforce by ensuring they have the knowledge and skills to complete entry-level credit-bearing college courses and work in high-wage and high-demand industries. The Blueprint aims to have all students meet the CCR standard by the end of their tenth grade year, develops CCR-Support pathways to support students in meeting the standard, enables students to enter a Post-CCR pathway that builds on the student’s strengths, develops a Career and Technical Education (CTE) system that is aligned with industry’s needs, and ensures that prekindergarten through twelfth grade curriculum, standards, and assessments are all aligned with the new CCR standard.
Tons of loose ends there, starting with the fact that the state hasn’t set the CCR standard yet (it’s working with an interim version), the fact that reading and math aren’t all that’s needed for subsequent success, and the fact that getting everyone to a uniform high standard by tenth grade is reminiscent of NCLB’s pie-in-the-sky promise that everyone would be proficient by 2014. (To be fair, the Blueprint recognizes that some students will take longer and that many will need extra help.)
3. College or Career. A handful of reformers, including my friend and colleague Mike Petrilli, want high schools to ease up on the traditional load of “Carnegie Units” that they require for graduation, most of them loosely tied to college-prep, and create space for a lot more heavy-duty CTE, apprenticeships, and the like that offer serious workforce preparation in a wide array of fields for kids who don’t intend to go to college or for whom college—college completion, anyway—is not a realistic possibility. This would be more akin to the “dual education systems” of Germany, Switzerland, and a few other lands that have developed technical education and apprenticeships to a high level.
What they’re recommending—a close cousin of “college and career” à la Maryland’s Blueprint, but apparently with lesser demands when it comes to a common standard of attainment—is probably the most realistic about American adolescents but possibly the least realistic about contemporary American politics, as well as the capacity of U.S. high schools to deliver something that few of them have done successfully since the old days of “tracking” kids through the “comprehensive” institutions that the late Ted Sizer characterized as shopping malls.
If I have to choose among these three options, I’ll stick with the Maryland version, mindful though I am that making it happen would take decades of sustained effort.
Yet all three approaches are too narrowly occupational. They neglect the schools’ concurrent responsibility to meet America’s need for competent citizens, not just people who earn livings. None of these reformist visions deals with the need for young adults to be culturally literate, to be knowledgeable voters, to be good neighbors, great parents, and adept at managing their personal finances. It’s not that these outcomes cannot also be cultivated by good schools. It’s that the reformers, policymakers, and wonky sorts who debate the mission and outcomes of high school seldom bother to mention them.
Education serves both public and private functions, particularly at the “compulsory” level that is the K–12 enterprise. And both the public and private functions go far beyond performing a job, whether that job is making computer chips, building roads, giving physical therapy to the disabled, teaching physics, writing lawbooks, or driving buses. Yes, it’s important to earn a living, preferably at something one likes and is good at. That’s important both for one’s own and one’s family’s self-sufficiency and for the nation’s prosperity. But what about all the other qualities we seek in adults? And what’s the high school’s responsibility to develop, inculcate, and inspire those qualities?
A one-semester random civics course or psychology course or economics course doesn’t do it (and most of those are electives, whatever the school.) Yet when we agonize and argue over the college-career balance and try to formulate (and then revise) graduation requirements that we hope get that balance right, we seldom think about the other qualities that also need to be balanced. And today we’re not doing very well on that front, either.
