The gap in vocabulary for children growing up in poor households compared to their higher-income peers is well documented in research, especially for the youngest students just entering school. But shouldn’t the start of formal education begin to mitigate that gap? Research has shown that, unfortunately, initial gaps tend to persist, leading to a steep uphill climb by the time students are “reading to learn” in fourth grade and up. A group of researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas and San Diego State University recently studied whether the pernicious effects of socioeconomic status (SES) might negatively affect not only base vocabulary size but also the typical processes of word learning, which would serve to increase a child’s vocabulary going forward.

They recruited a group of 68 students ages 8 to 15 to take part in an experiment that required participants to use the surrounding text to identify the meaning of an unknown word. Each exercise included three sentences, all with a made-up word at the end. For example: “Pour some water in my raub.” This was the last of a three-sentence triplet designed to lead a reader to that “raub” means “cup.” All of the words comprising the context were high-frequency words typically acquired by age 8, but half of the triplet sequences were geared to give less obvious build up to the correct answer. The goal was to identify whether vocabulary, reading skills (both decoding and reading comprehension), working memory, and/or SES status correlated with success in identifying the unknown words. Through this experiment, researchers found that SES was negatively related to success in this task. Poor students did significantly worse than did their higher-SES peers. Reading skills and working memory were not found to be related to success. Some caveats related to this study include its small n-size and a high proportion of bilingual participants with varying levels of exposure to English.

This study provides support for the so-called Matthew Effect, which posits that students who enter school with a large vocabulary have an ongoing advantage over students who do not. The usual response to this is call for expanded pre-K and richer content in the earlier grades, but the students being studied here are well past that age. Luckily for them, there is plenty of research showing successful vocabulary-building interventions for middle schoolers who arrived with deficits. This study includes no data on the educational history and experience of any of the participants. Any extensions of this research should take into account the amount and quality of the education children have received because good schools matter, especially for students growing up in poverty.

SOURCE: Mandy J. Maguire, et. al., “Vocabulary knowledge mediates the link between socioeconomic status and word learning in grade school,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (February 2018).

In a recent blog post, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham posits three possible types of personalization in personalized learning—children learning at their own speed, pedagogical tailoring, and individualized content. I have sought out all of these variations for my children over the years and, as Willingham notes, they are not mutually exclusive. But neither are they equally important. Let me make the case, as a father of two high school girls, that personalized pacing is a must-have, personalized pedagogy is a nice-to-have, and personalized content is largely to be avoided, at least until the end of the K-12 experience.

Personalized pacing and pedagogy

My children’s experience at The Metro School, a 6-12 STEM-focused early college school in Columbus, shows that students learning at their own speed is the prime mover of successful personalized learning (PL).

Metro’s model generally compresses what would be year-long courses in traditional schools into one semester. Course material is divided into discrete units and subunits, with each having clear goals for students and teachers and clearly connecting to the next. It moves fast, the expectations are high[1], and there is little downtime. Students’ progress is assessed regularly along the way, usually by teacher-created tests, giving teachers clear feedback about the challenges students are experiencing. Difficult-to-grasp concepts can be reinforced somewhat in future lessons, but Metro students are generally required to remediate their previous work while continuing with new material. More on this in a moment.

Willingham and others suggest that such a model sounds messy for teacher and student, but it is here that pedagogical tailoring comes in. Approaches to remediation must be varied: student-driven efforts to find and correct errors (test corrections, report revision, etc.), the same material taught in a different way by another teacher or a tutor, watching a Khan Academy video and doing sample problems, etc. Remediation can take place as homework, in a study hall, or after school in office hours. Whatever works to make the material understandable to students must be available. At Metro, pedagogical tailoring is not a distinct version of PL but just another tool in the same box.

Even with pedagogically tailored remediation baked in, however, fast-paced PL won’t work perfectly for every student in every subject, as my children can attest. But that is not a reason to reject the approach. Consider: The students who pass an accelerated class at the end of the semester move on (to another class, another teacher)[2], leaving, say, the sixth grade math teacher with only those students who still need help. By stating clearly what students must know and be able to do to succeed in the next math course and by employing ongoing assessment and remediation during the regular course to determine specific proficiency gaps, the teacher can concentrate her post-course remediation where it is needed. A rigorous, focused “recovery week” should be enough to boost most students’ skills up where they need to be. And even if a student is so far from proficiency that he would benefit from repeating the entire course, it’s still only one additional semester—ultimately the same amount of seat time as in a traditional sixth grade math class. The clear goals and unit/subunit breakdown allow teacher, student, administrator, and parent to know exactly where the child needs to concentrate her efforts in order to become proficient.

Contrast this approach with most traditional schools in which a student earns a “D” at the end of a full year of sixth grade math. If such a school would dare to hold him back, he would repeat the entire course again over another year. Perhaps there would be additional tutoring, perhaps not. If he takes the course again and finishes with a “C,” he has improved, but he has taken two years to do so and he still may not have proficiency enough to be successful in the next math course for which he is already “late.”

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to math at Metro. It also works for English, social studies, and science, too. Assessing and addressing students’ proficiency gaps from beginning to end of every course and having remediation time and methods immediately available provide the needed backstop to keep students moving forward even at high speed and even if they have incomplete mastery along the way.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of prep work involved in building a PL education model. All teachers in a department must be on the same page as to what their incoming students must know and be able to do to succeed in their courses; assessments must accurately define the required level of proficiency all along the continuum; and administrators must make sure that remediation practices are thorough and rigorous while causing the least interference with overall forward progress. But once that infrastructure is in place, PL looks pretty much like regular teaching and learning. Students and parents must understand the acceleration and remediation processes, but the basic pedagogy is wholly recognizable. The various lessons and approaches need not be invented anew every year. New teachers will need to get up to speed and additional approaches can always be workshopped and added to the rotation, but if you've got three or four reliable ways to teach sixth grade math or freshman biology concepts, that's probably all you'll ever need.

Personalized content: Proceed with caution

As for the “individualized content” concept, in my experience, its usefulness is far more limited than the others. My daughters attended a Montessori school from age three through the end of first grade. Montessori education is a tried and tested version of the individualized content concept. Children are free to choose their activities from the classroom materials and those activities are often multi-disciplinary. It allows students to spend a lot of time on subjects and activities of interest (making calendars was a huge favorite for both of my girls) but it also allows for procrastination and outright avoidance of topics of lesser interest, as Willingham and others fear. That’s where my family hit the wall with Montessori education—math avoidance. For me and my wife, that was a no-go: We were okay with our kids picking whatever they wanted from the buffet, but they still needed to eat their vegetables, too. When preschool was over and the stakes got higher, we left for a more traditional private school where math was never optional.

Interestingly, as our daughters are currently finishing up their high school requirements early (thanks to the acceleration described above), the opportunity to reintroduce individualized content has arisen: higher level elective classes, college credit-bearing classes, student-interest driven research, community service projects, student-led theatrical productions. Self-tailored and largely self-directed work, with an advisor to oversee inputs and outputs, this content is less traditional and more an exploration of future paths they could take in college and in life. Having achieved the “goal” of high school (i.e.—graduation) early, the stakes are lower for them than in preschool–the vegetables having been consumed, as it were–my daughters can take better advantage of the last two years of high school in fully personalized learning.

To summarize: the basis for successful PL is an accelerated course model with solid structure and frequent assessment of mastery. Most students can learn material successfully at a faster pace than in a traditional school. Those who need more time should get it, along with additional teaching methods based on the students’ individual needs. Once basic education goals have been met, individualized content can be deployed to take the place of readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic, and the rest.

A note about technology

In my experience, technology is an adjunct to personalized learning, not the center of it. Perhaps it’s not surprising that tech billionaires interested in education would lean heavily toward this as the prime driver of personalization, but these tools are only as good as the knowledge of the user. Giving kids access to Quizlet, Prezi, Google docs, and Grammarly is valuable and may help some students engage more with the material, but software cannot educate a student in isolation. Coding is an important course that kids can take, but it’s not a way to learn English or American history. The ways that, say, literature have been traditionally taught are still rock solid—vocabulary, reading, analysis, writing papers—even at an accelerated pace. On the teacher side, Curriculet and Newsela are good reading applications and Schoology is a great platform for tracking gaps in proficiency—but it still takes great teaching to actually fill those gaps. My children can attest that laptops and tablets are valuable and one-to-one technology programs in schools should certainly be expanded, as should home internet access. But the personalization part of PL is inside the student, not inside the machine. “Kids on computers” is what you may see from outside the classroom window; inside, you will see that kids are learning the material at their own pace and in the ways that make sense to them.

My children have been inside those classrooms. It works.

***

Professor Willingham ends his piece by asking, “is personalized learning worth pursuing?” and suggests that more research on the topic is required to answer that question. Chan/Zuckerberg seems to agree and is proposing a rigorous R&D plan to engineer PL for the future. That’s fine—and those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute would be happy to participate. But personalized learning has already proven its worth to me and many others. My children have thrived and I have seen the model I described work for students who were grade levels behind in math or English as well as d for students who would be considered gifted. I love this model and am gratified that others in education reform are starting to discover it. My children are living examples that PL works and allows students to achieve quantifiable growth and proficiency in subjects across the board.

[1] Metro employs “mastery grading”, in which students must reach at least 90% on most assignments or their work is “incomplete” and must be remediated up to 90%. This is not a requirement for successful PL, but is a good fit for acceleration of this type. With seat time eliminated as a determination of course completion, the proficiency bar can be set as high as we dare.

[2] Metro holds an intersession between semesters to facilitate remediation and elective courses, but the details are too complicated to go into here. Suffice it to say that deviations from a traditional school calendar are clearly required for an accelerated course model.

1. Can you stand a couple more media hits on Fordham’s Back to the Basics report? Me too! First up was a really good write up I missed upon release of the report last Thursday. It hails from the Xenia Daily Gazette and gives a summary of the report followed by reaction from a number of officials from local school districts. Seems that everyone read and seriously considered the report, even if they disagreed in part or in whole. Nice. (Xenia Daily Gazette, 12/7/17) Gongwer’s coverage from Friday was a little more perfunctory, but we appreciate it just the same. (Gongwer Ohio, 12/8/17)
    
2. The PD’s Patrick O’Donnell has been pretty quiet in recent weeks, but he was back with a vengeance this weekend. What’s he been up to? Crunching the number on both out-of-school and in-school suspensions at schools and districts across Northeast Ohio and around the state. He seems none-too-pleased with the patterns upon which he is reporting. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 12/10/17) I don’t know if it was to cheer himself up or simply to show the other side of the coin, but Patrick also reported on 108 schools across the state who were last week awarded medals for “leading the way” in adopting Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), a proactive and positive school culture and disciplinary system. He should be given Bites Bucks for that…a reward which I just invented. Kudos also to the principal of Harvey High School in Painesville for the reference to Johnny Rotten. Punk is, indeed, dead. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 12/10/17)
    
3. Meanwhile, editors in Cleveland were busy as well—opining strongly against proposed changes to the state’s voucher programs. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 12/10/17)
    
4. Some budget changes are in the cards for the Dayton Preschool Promise program next year. Not cuts, but reprioritization. More money will go to support increasing the number of providers rated at 3 or more stars than will go to support tuition assistance for the students who utilize those providers. So, more money for adults than for kids. But the group’s goals remain the same. (Dayton Daily News, 12/10/17)
    
5. We finish up today with a look at the SWAG (Students With a Goal) afterschool program in Akron. It is independent of the school district and is funded by local churches and philanthropic organizations, who also provide volunteer staffers. SWAG has been going strong for five years and has expanded beyond just a place to do homework and get a snack. Its volunteers are now working with program graduates as they navigate college. Nice. (Akron Beacon Journal, 12/10/17)

1. In case you missed it, Fordham released a new report yesterday, offering up a redesign of Ohio’s school report cards to be fairer to schools and clearer for parents. Media response was generally pretty good. First out of the gate was statewide public media, who connected our report to a thematically similar national report released by the Data Quality Campaign earlier in the week. (WCBE-FM, Columbus, 12/7/17) The Blade has a very thorough overview of the report and talks to local district officials about it and about the issue of how complex current report cards are. Nice. (Toledo Blade, 12/7/17) Ditto for the Dayton Daily News, who also reached out to the Ohio Department of Education to get their take on our report. ODE said they “appreciated our input” on the topic. To which I say, “You are very welcome.” (Dayton Daily News, 12/7/17)
    
2. As noted earlier in the week, outgoing Columbus schools supe Dan Good seems to have a lot to say in his waning days at the helm. I came out of this piece with the main impression that he was reporting incidences of in-class profanity are down by 20% in the district due to soothing paint color choices in classrooms. But a second read indicates there may be a bit more to it than that. (Columbus Dispatch, 12/7/17)
    
3. One of the folks aiming to replace Good is Akron City Schools supe David James. Until that eventuality occurs, James apparently has his hands full in Akron. Turns out the elevator has been out in one of his district’s two admin buildings for a few days so he’s decided it’s time to ditch both buildings and shell out nearly $10 million to buy a new place. Hey supe, you have seen Columbus’ administration buildings, haven’t you? (Akron Beacon Journal, 12/6/17)
    
4. Some old pals got together this week to file a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of the Youngstown school board in their ongoing lawsuit against the legislation that brought a CEO-style Academic Distress Commission into that district. Hopefully those old pals passed the hat too, ‘cause the CEO plans to keep the financial spigot for litigation turned off. (Youngstown Vindicator, 12/8/17)
    
5. Speaking of lawsuits, the Ohio Supreme Court this week denied ECOT’s request for injunction or expedited appeal of its pending legal case against several arms of state government regarding the findings of an attendance audit. Justice will instead move at its typical pace. (Columbus Dispatch, 12/6/17)
    
6. Here’s a bit more on Lorain schools CEO David Hardy’s administrative reorganization plans, which are moving forward quickly. Lots of new jobs, new titles, and revamped departments. Lots of applicants so far too. What’s he looking for in a successful candidate: “a mindset to roll up their sleeves and figure it out.” Well said, sir. Now, about that interim superintendent position… (Elyria Chronicle, 12/8/17)
    
7. Finally this week: lunch. Students from Jones Leadership Academy participating in the Young Executive Scholars program got a lesson in business lunch etiquette this week. They were taught how to make the best first impression and network while eating with grace and poise. I’ll bet J.D. Vance would approve. (Toledo Blade, 12/7/17)

Former California state superintendent Bill Honig recently wrote a blog post criticizing the recent Fordham study that we coauthored, Rating the Ratings: An Analysis of the 51 ESSA Accountability Plans. Although we respect his opinion, we take issue with two of his arguments.

First and foremost, Honig accuses us of incorrectly assessing California’s approach to measuring student achievement, and claims that our alleged mistake was the result of “sloppy staff work.”

We are happy to admit when we’ve erred, as with our inaccurate analysis of New Hampshire’s plan, but in this case we beg to differ.

An important part of our process was corresponding with each state’s education department to ensure that our ratings were correct. We did this in every instance, including California. That’s for a sound reason: State ESSA plans are often opaque and confusing, and we wanted to be careful not to mischaracterize them. Yet when we shared our draft review with the California Department of Education, all we got back was an angry note about our “superficial and inadequate process.” We requested, yet again, confirmation that we were accurately describing California’s accountability system, but we received no further response.

In particular, Honig thinks we should have given California credit for looking at student achievement at more than the proficient level. That the state does this, though, is hardly obvious from the plan. The most relevant section of California’s document says, “Proficiency is measured by looking at a student’s Distance from Level 3 (at each grade level), which compares how far above or below students are from the possible scale score to achieve Level 3 (Standard Met) on the administration of the Smart Balanced Assessments. Currently, ‘Status’ [the state’s term for achievement, as opposed to growth] is determined using the average of these distances...”

Clear as day, right?

Yes, perhaps this could be interpreted to mean that California is using a performance index of some kind that gives students different amount of credit for achieving at, for example, “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced” levels, but that’s far from the plain meaning of that sentence. That sentence has no plain meaning. It could as easily mean that the state is using this method to determine whether each student is or isn’t proficient, and nothing more. This ambiguity is why we asked for California’s confirmation that we got it right.

Nevertheless, if the California Department of Education contacts us and explains why the state should have received credit for the way it measures student achievement, we will of course amend our report. Until then, we cannot confidently find in those words the assurance we would need before accepting Honig’s contention.

We also take issue with his critique of our call for states to make student growth count for half of school ratings. He claims:

Fordham’s fix is terribly flawed. They want growth in student test scores in math and reading to be at least fifty percent of the total grade of the school. If growth is emphasized to the exclusion of status (the actual performance level), then schools which have historically produced students scoring at high levels are mistakenly identified as mediocre or worse. Imagine a school with low-income students who after considerable effort has reached a high plateau of performance and maintained that level for several years. They would unfairly look mediocre or worse on a measure heavily weighted to growth.

There are a number of problems with this paragraph. For starters, we want growth of any kind—not just math and reading—to count for 50 percent of a school’s total grade. We state this clearly multiple times in the report. And his more substantive point of contention is misguided at best. Is he suggesting that there are schools serving grades K–8 in which students have already maxed out their knowledge of subject matter? And what “plateau”? A student entering any grade can—and obviously should—learn more in that grade, and an assessment can and should measure that growth, which is the growth for which we’re advocating. Yes, it’s possible for a student to hit a “ceiling” on a deficient test if they are super high achieving, but California uses Smarter Balanced, a computer-adaptive test that is designed to avoid that problem in all but the most extreme cases. So what’s Honig’s worry?

We have a few more beefs with Honig’s review, though they tend to be more of the honest-disagreement variety. We don’t think an elaborate California-style data dashboard, with color coded ratings against dozens of indicators, will give parents and the public a clear understanding of whether a school is excellent, terrible, or somewhere in between. We see California’s approach as a dodge, and not worthy of being labeled an accountability system.

California’s officials, past and present, are of course free to disagree with the assumptions and principles that drove our analysis. What we can’t allow them to do is disparage the quality of our work, especially when we took every effort to make sure we got it right and our error—if indeed there is one—is properly laid at the door of the California Department of Education. 

One of the things that makes the topic of discipline disparities so difficult is that it’s hard to untangle students’ behavior from adults’ responses. As Matt Barnum put it in a recent Chalkbeat article, “black and poor students have substantially higher suspension rates than white and more affluent peers. Figuring out why is tricky. Is it because certain groups of students behave differently, or because teachers and administrators respond differently to the same behavior?”

That’s the essential question, because different answers will lead policymakers and civil rights investigators to pursue radically different strategies. So which is it?

Before we get to that, let’s try a thought experiment regarding the achievement gap, one I also ran past Barnum. African-American twelfth-graders are 2.6 times likelier to score below the proficient level on the NAEP reading exam than are white students. Yet no one but an extremist would chalk up the entirety of that achievement gap to racially biased teachers. To be sure, bias plays a role, as studies are finding that teachers tend to have lower expectations for children of color. Systemic inequality is certainly a factor as well, given that children of color are more likely to attend schools with lower funding levels and weaker teachers.

But almost everyone would acknowledge that some portion of the achievement gap—probably a large portion—is due to out-of-school factors. That’s been clear since the Coleman Report, and strong evidence is found in the fact that signs of this achievement gap start as early as two or three years of age. Tragically, children of color are significantly more likely to be raised in poverty, without fathers in the home, and by adults with relatively low levels of education themselves. All of these factors, on average, make an impact on academic achievement from a very early age.

So an explanation for the achievement gap might look something like this:

Now let’s return to the question of discipline disparities, mindful that African-American students are suspended at about three times the rate of white students. Would anyone claim that the entirety of the gap is due to racial bias in the system? Actually, that’s what many people on the left do claim, and that was the basis for the Obama Administration’s 2014 Dear Colleague Letter on the topic, which gave the Office for Civil Rights (and Justice Department) the authority to investigate school districts based on racial disparities in discipline rates alone. As Arne Duncan said at the time, “racial discrimination is a major problem today,” and disparities are “not caused by differences in children.”

Really? Isn’t it likely that at least some of the suspensions gap stems not from racism or variations in discipline policies but from differences in student behavior—differences driven by poverty and the other out-of-school factors mentioned above? Consider, for example, that when high school students themselves are asked whether they’ve been in a fight at school over the past year, 5.2 percent of white students say yes, versus 11.4 percent of black students. (See Table 13.2.) So if blacks are 2.2 times more likely to be involved in school fights, and 3 times as likely to be suspended, one could conjecture that differences in behavior make up close to three quarters of the suspensions gap.

More evidence comes from the recent study out of Louisiana. Scholars were able to find a racial discipline gap of more than two to one. But like other analyses, they could only track the rates of discipline; they could not observe the underlying behavior.

So they did a clever analysis, looking at fights that pitted white students against black students, checking to see if students participating in such fights received similar penalties. What they found was that black students were 1.6 percentage points more likely to receive a longer suspension than were white students.

Put these two findings together, and they indicate to me that 1) educator bias is playing a role, but 2) it’s probably a small role (1.6 percent in the white/black fight analysis) versus a very big gap (black students suspended at 200 percent the rate of white students).

Now, let me be clear: Only an ideologue would claim that racial bias explains none of the suspensions gap—and that would be a misreading of the Louisiana study. Other analysts have found small variations depending on the race of the teacher.

But just as much of the racial achievement gap can be explained by out-of-school factors, so too, I suspect, can much of the racial suspensions gap be explained by differences in behavior that are driven in large part by those same background factors. Consider Tom Loveless’s findings from California, for example, that students from single-parent families were twice as likely to be suspended as other students. Because black students in the Golden State are about three times as likely to live in single-parent homes, this out-of-school factor explains a big part of California’s racial suspensions gap.

There’s also strong evidence, for example from this recent Arkansas study, that much of the suspensions gap happens between schools rather than within them. In other words, high-poverty, high-minority schools suspend a lot more students than lower-poverty, lower-minority ones. Whether this is because of differences in behavior or differences in how discipline is meted out is hard to know; it’s probably some of each. And it’s not unfair to surmise that most of these “Suspensions Factories,” as I’ve called them, are mediocre-to-abysmal schools in general, with weak cultures that are struggling to maintain order.

So the suspensions gap pie-chart may well look something like this:

If this picture is even close to accurate, and discipline disparities are driven more by disparities in student behavior than by teacher and administrator reactions to student behavior, it has major implications. It means those of us (myself included) who want to reduce discipline disparities should be focusing more of our efforts on addressing student misbehavior, via better teaching, better counseling, stronger attention to character, more engaging environments, and stronger relationships among kids and between kids and adults in a school. It also means that civil rights officials should be incredibly careful about jumping to conclusions based on raw discipline data. (Though they should absolutely investigate specific complaints of discrepant and discriminatory treatment because of students’ race or other protected status.) What we shouldn’t do is make it hard or impossible for educators to use suspensions as one tool in their discipline toolbox, or embrace what amounts to quotas on student discipline, which could result in under-disciplining some groups of students or over-disciplining others.

We also need to develop smart, realistic approaches to dealing with so-called Suspensions Factories. If indeed many of these are schools with weak cultures, merely telling them to reduce suspensions is likely to make things worse. (If they even follow the mandates—our new study on Philadelphia discipline reform by Matthew Steinberg and Johanna Lacoe found that many of these schools simply ignored the new rules.) Such schools need massive amounts of help in order to transform into orderly learning environments that don’t have to resort so much to exclusionary discipline. Policies that don’t have a mechanism for providing such support—like the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter—should raise red flags for everyone.

Making progress on this difficult issue is predicated on acknowledging an uncomfortable truth, one that can easily be demagogued: On average, due to a host of factors beyond their own control, including poverty, fatherlessness, and trauma, poor children of color are more likely to misbehave at school than are their peers. And starting with the facts makes it much more likely that we will find our way to some real solutions.

At its November meeting, the State Board of Education reopened the debate over Ohio’s graduation standards. To facilitate this discussion, the Ohio Department of Education unveiled a concept paper that set forth various options. Among them was a route to graduation that would permit students to receive diplomas under alternative criteria such as satisfactory GPAs, attendance rates, capstone projects, internship or work hours, and several other possibilities. Dubbed the “alternative knowledge demonstration pathway,” this proposal would extend such options to the class of 2019 and beyond.

This may sound familiar. Rewind to earlier this year and recall that state policymakers approved alternatives such as these in lieu of meeting achievement targets on end of course exams (EOCs) or the ACT/SAT, or earning industry-recognized credentials and demonstrating workforce readiness[1]—the three “original” pathways under Ohio’s updated graduation standards. Such alternatives were extended only to the class of 2018, the first cohort expected to meet the new requirements.

As state board members ponder once again the direction to take on graduation requirements for succeeding classes, they should keep the following points in mind.

1. Remember the board’s own vision statement declaring the aim that “all Ohio students will graduate well prepared for success.”
   

   
   The original three graduation pathways—the two exam-based options and the industry credentials pathway—adhered to this vision by challenging students to demonstrate readiness in clear ways. Specifically, the EOC and ACT/SAT achievement targets are set in ways that signal to institutions of higher education that graduates are ready to embark on advanced coursework or technical certification programs. Meanwhile, the credentialing pathway (more on this below) is designed so that students seeking to enter the workforce will be primed to advance quickly in their careers.

   The proposed alternative options unfortunately fail to impart much confidence that students following those paths will be ready for life after high school. Does completion of a single capstone project—of who knows what quality—mean young people are ready for the rigors of post-secondary education? Or the armed services? Or a technical career in advanced manufacturing or healthcare? Maybe or maybe not. More likely, however, is that these alternatives will be used as last-ditch efforts to shuffle students out of the K-12 system and into adulthood—not exactly following the board’s vision of readiness for all students. In fact, if the board pursues yet again the “alternative knowledge” approach, it should revise its vision statement to read more honestly:

   The State Board of Education’s vision is for all Ohio students to graduate from the PK-12 education system with the knowledge, skills and behaviors necessary to successfully continue their education and/or be workforce ready and successfully participate in the global economy as productive citizens. Ultimately, all students will graduate well prepared for success.

2. The alternatives options are open to gaming and manipulation.
   
   

   Schools may be tempted to game the options in ways that don’t benefit students. This could take various forms, including artificially inflating—even retroactively changing—course grades to ensure that students meet the GPA threshold; approving a capstone project of dubious quality (Does standing on your head count? Making 100 sandwiches for the homeless?); or fudging data on school attendance or the number of hours in an internship/work experience. Ideally, state policies would incentivize schools to do right by all of their students—encouraging them to help youngsters reach higher achievement levels and/or gain competencies necessary for employment. Instead, the alternatives will pressure educators to excuse and then promote students who have not yet met academic or career-ready standards—a shameful practice that one teacher recently called unethical.

3. The exam-based pathways require students to demonstrate knowledge and skills in core academic subjects.
   
   Despite all the grumbling over state exams, it must be emphasized that Ohio’s high school EOCs assess students’ knowledge and skills in key content areas—math, English, science, and U.S. history and government. It should be non-negotiable that Ohio students exit high school able to read, write, and do math, while also possessing a basic knowledge of science and the history of this nation and its government. Yet the alternative graduation options suggest that competency in these subjects is replaceable by things like capstone projects or internships and part-time jobs. Unfortunately, completing work experience is no substitute for literacy; rather it should be seen as a complement that builds on pupils’ core academic abilities.
    
4. Don’t discount the industry credentials pathway.
   
   

   The board may justify alternative graduation standards on the grounds that some students struggle to meet the exam-based pathways (EOCs or ACT/SAT). That’s a reasonable concern. But the solution isn’t to create eleventh-hour graduation workarounds. Policymakers would serve students better by emphasizing the rigorous credentialing pathway as a legitimate way to earn a high school diploma and ready themselves for the workforce and/or higher education. Pupils pursuing this pathway also stand to benefit: As a Fordham study reveals, CTE students are more likely to graduate high school and generate higher wages as young adults when compared to their closely matched peers. 

   How does this pathway work? It asks young people to earn a passing score on the WorkKeys assessment and to attain twelve points in the industry-credentials system. Designed by ACT, WorkKeys gauges students’ workplace readiness in math and literacy; under the credentials requirements, students earn certifications in various competencies (e.g., six sigma or safety practices in oil and gas extraction). Importantly, students must accumulate certificates in a particular career field such as manufacturing, healthcare, or agriculture to meet this requirement. This encourages CTE students to gain expertise in a chosen career field instead of aimlessly seeking certificates across various fields.

   State leaders should also be encouraging educators to have frank conversations—as early as ninth or tenth grade—with students and parents about post-secondary goals and how they can meet them. Struggling students may indeed resolve to pursue EOC or ACT/SAT pathways, or perhaps they’ll see credentials as a more viable option (or pursue both concurrently). To be certain, this shouldn’t lead to “tracking” of young people into the substandard vocational programs or suggest that pursuing credentials closes doors to higher education. To address concerns such as these, the board should keep a close eye on the rigor of the industry-recognized credentials system (which they are charged with overseeing). State leaders and educators can also communicate to students and parents that choosing the credentialing route does not rule out college matriculation—something most young people aspire toward—either directly after high school or later in life. 

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Earlier this year, the State Board of Education undermined rigorous graduation standards by pushing for questionable alternatives that lawmakers later ratified. In the coming months, that same board (and the legislators who may again follow its lead) has a chance to redeem itself by rebuffing proposals to enact low-level alternatives for future graduating classes on a more permanent basis. The board’s stated vision is to ensure students leave ready for success after high school, whether college or career; this time around, it shouldn’t flinch.