The Ohio General Assembly recently passed and Governor Kasich approved legislation that allows students in the class of 2018 to graduate without demonstrating competency on state exams or meeting career and technical education-related requirements.
The Ohio General Assembly recently passed and Governor Kasich approved legislation that allows students in the class of 2018 to graduate without demonstrating competency on state exams or meeting career and technical education-related requirements. This means that there won’t be any assurance that those getting diplomas have learned much of anything. At a time when Ohio is trying to get reasonably serious about ending social promotion into fourth grade—via the Third Grade Reading Guarantee—voters and taxpayers should be outraged that it’s again reared its ugly head in connection with the promotion that matters most: exiting from high school into real life.
Why worry about social promotion? Consider an interview with Doug Lemov, the well-known author of Teach Like a Champion and co-founder of the Uncommon Schools charter network. Richard Whitmire recounts Lemov’s experience as a tutor at Indiana University:
One of the football players he tutored was a redshirt freshman who had gone to a high school in the Bronx. “He was a real gentleman, a decent guy in every way, but he was struggling academically. So I said, ‘Why don’t you write a paragraph about yourself,’ which he did. I took one look at it and thought, ‘Holy shit, he can’t write a complete sentence.’ I can still see it in my mind’s eye, on a yellow piece of paper written in black ink. There wasn’t a complete sentence in it. It was just unbelievable.”
Curious as to how the football player had been admitted, Lemov visited the athletic office, where he learned, much to his surprise, that the player was there on his own merits: He had good grades and good recommendations. So they admitted him.
“All of a sudden it hit me, that here was this decent kid who wanted to do the right thing, gentlemanly, never a troublemaker in class, and his high school teachers all wanted to do right by him because he was so talented, and nobody wanted to be the one to crap on his dreams by saying, ‘Actually you can’t write, so I can’t pass you.’” The sad result, of course, is that the player stood no chance to make it academically at Indiana University and eventually dropped out and returned to the Bronx.
“It was an epiphany to me about social promotion. Those teachers thought they were helping someone, but what they were really doing was making themselves feel better. In the end, they hurt this guy badly.”
Football is important in Ohio, too, but by lowering graduation standards, Buckeye policy makers think they’ve ensured that nobody will “crap on anyone’s dreams.” But they ought to bear in mind that some of the young people on whom they’re going to confer diplomas will now enter adulthood ill-prepared for its challenges. So far, this backslide on standards applies only to the class of 2018. Here’s hoping state leaders return to legitimate graduation standards for subsequent classes.
In early June, State Superintendent DeMaria shared with the state school board his recommendations for streamlining Ohio’s student testing regimen. Among the list of proposed cuts is the WorkKeys assessment, a job skills test that measures how well prepared students are for the workforce. Though other proposed cuts received more attention (and have since been finalized), the proposed elimination of WorkKeys has largely been ignored—perhaps because many Ohio policymakers aren’t sure what it is or even who takes it. Let’s take a look.
What is the WorkKeys assessment?
WorkKeys is an ACT-designed system that includes assessments, curriculum, and “skill profiles” for schools to use in building and measuring students’ workplace skills. Superintendent DeMaria specifically recommends the elimination of the assessment, of which there are three sections:
Who takes the assessment?
Only students interested in pursuing Ohio’s workforce readiness graduation pathway must take this assessment. Ohio currently offers its students three graduation pathways[1] to choose among, and the workforce readiness option requires students to earn both an industry-recognized credential in a single career field and a workforce readiness score on the WorkKeys assessment.[2] Students who opt for this pathway must still take the seven end-of-course exams required by state law—a form of “double-testing” that may be the root of the Superintendent’s elimination recommendation. The state of Ohio pays for students to take the WorkKeys assessment one time.
Are there benefits to keeping it?
Superintendent DeMaria’s recommendation to eliminate WorkKeys appears to be a reaction to recent pushback against the amount of time students spend taking assessments as well as the number of tests they take. But given that WorkKeys isn’t actually required for Ohio students, it’s nearly impossible to argue that eliminating it will significantly cut testing time. Eliminating or reducing other tests that affect a broader range of students may be a better option. Furthermore, eliminating WorkKeys would necessitate a law change that either eliminates or reduces the rigor of the workforce readiness graduation pathway. There are also a few additional reasons why Ohio may want to avoid scrapping this assessment:
***
WorkKeys is an under-the-radar assessment to be sure, but it’s also an important one—the only one we currently have that aims to gauge career readiness skills. Eliminating such a test communicates that the state only values the college half of its college and career readiness goal, and that any value that students gain from passing the test, such as a nationally recognized credential that can apply to multiple industries, isn’t prized enough to protect. That’s a bad message to send to students headed straight into the workplace and an illogical one for a state that needs a more prepared workforce.
[1] This refers to the graduation pathways permanently included in Ohio law and not the alternative measure that was recently adopted for the class of 2018.
[2] On June 1, ACT released a new version of the WorkKeys assessment. The State Board already plans to make the necessary modifications to align Ohio’s requirements with these changes, including score scale adjustments.
The New Teacher Center (NTC) is a nonprofit organization that aims to improve student learning via supports for beginning teachers. In 2012, NTC got a federal i3 grant to launch a teacher induction model that provides professional development, research-based resources, and online formative assessment tools for beginning teachers, mentors, and school leaders.
The NTC model has two goals: to develop first- and second-year teachers into effective instructors and to boost their retention, particularly in schools that are hard-to-staff or serve high-poverty student populations. Toward these ends, NTC deploys full-time mentors who are carefully selected and receive 100+ hours of intensive training. New teachers meet with their mentors weekly for at least 3 hours per month and work through an NTC-created suite of research-based tools that include classroom observation cycles. Mentor coaching lasts for two years.
SRI Education recently evaluated the NTC induction model by conducting randomized controlled trials in the Broward County and Chicago Public Schools. The evaluation used both quantitative and qualitative methods and considered two aspects in particular: program implementation fidelity and teacher and student outcomes. These effects were measured over a three-year period (2013-14 to 2015-16) for two cohorts of new teachers.
To gauge fidelity of implementation, SRI rated each district annually on key components of NTC’s model: 1) NTC supports, such as principal engagement and capacity building; 2) mentor selection and assignment; 3) mentor development and accountability; and 4) provision of high-quality mentoring. The evaluation found that all participating school sites implemented the model with high levels of fidelity.
To study impacts, SRI compared the outcomes of teachers who received NTC induction mentoring with those who received their district’s typical new-teacher supports. Impacts that were studied include retention into the third year of teaching; classroom practices as measured by the Framework for Teaching; and student achievement on state assessments in grades 4-8. The researchers adjusted for student, teacher, and school characteristics as well as district differences where appropriate.
The upshot: NTC teachers and control group teachers were retained at similar rates. Both groups also scored similarly on teacher practice, though the small sample size may have reduced analysts’ ability to detect positive or negative effects.
Effects on state test results, on the other hand, were positive. On ELA assessments, students in grades 4-8 whose teachers participated in the NTC model for two years outperformed the students of teachers in the control group by .09 standard deviations, which translates to a jump from the 48th to 52nd percentile. In math, students taught by NTC teachers scored .15 standard deviations higher, equivalent to moving from the 46th to 52nd percentile. Although there were no detectable differences in teacher practice outcomes, the frequency and duration of mentor-teacher meetings were positively correlated with the student achievement results.
Overall, the data seem to indicate that an induction and mentorship program like NTC’s may boost pupil achievement while also supporting new teachers. NTC is currently scaling its model and testing it in five more sites. Let’s hope the positive results continue.
SOURCE: Rebecca Schmidt, Viki Young, Lauren Cassidy, Haiwen Wang, and Katrina Laguarda, “Impact of the New Teacher Center’s New Teacher Induction Model on Teachers and Students,” SRI Education (June 2017).
As the term implies, “personalized learning” (PL) tailors educational approaches to an individual student’s needs, strengths, interests, and aspirations. This may sound abstract to many, but a new report paints a clearer picture of personalized learning as used in practice. RAND Corporation analysts examine PL implementation and student outcomes across forty U.S. schools receiving a Next Generation Learning Challenge (NGLC) grant. Most of these schools were less than three years old when RAND began its study in 2012, and thirty-one are charters. Together, the NGLC schools enroll roughly 10,600 students, primarily low income or minority.
“In its ideal form,” RAND analysts write, “PL allows for greater variety in what students are working on at any moment, while still setting ambitious goals for each student’s progress.” Researchers explore the strengths and challenges of PL implementation—how schools are working to meet these ideals—mainly via surveys of educators and students in NGLC schools. As a point of comparison, analysts draw survey data from a national sample of non-NGLC schools. They organize their findings around four marks of PL implementation: the use of learner profiles, personalized learning paths, competency based progression, and flexible learning environments. Here are some of the main findings.
Learner profiles refer to keeping close track of a student’s strengths, needs, and learning progress—and using those data to customize instruction. Surveys indicate that instructors in NGLC schools do receive more “real-time” information on student progress, often through tech-enabled platforms such as online grade-books or portfolios. For example, NGLC teachers say they get updated student data a few times a month, versus about monthly for non-NGLC teachers. They also report more extensive use of those data to personalize instruction, such as altering the pace or content of instruction.
Personalized learning paths encourage individual pupils to choose content or topics that fit their interests. Survey results, however, indicate that students in NGLC schools are not given quite as much flexibility as one might expect. For example, just 36 percent of students attending NGLC schools said that, most of the time, they have “opportunities to choose topics,” versus 27 percent nationally. Teachers report two major challenges to implementation of this practice. One is the large amount of time required to design and support personalized learning plans; second is a perceived tension between student choice around topics and pacing and the need to meet grade-level academic standards.
Competency based progression allows a student to make progress at her own pace and advance toward her goals after demonstrating mastery of a topic. RAND finds that NGLC teachers do report greater use of this practice; for example, 77 percent say they usually allow students to work at a different pace than the rest of the class, versus 59 percent nationally. They also seem more adamant that students understand a topic before moving onto the next. However, teachers in NGLC schools also cite concerns about pupils who don’t progress at an acceptable pace; they also report challenges explaining this PL practice to parents.
Flexible learning environments refer to the adaptive use of staff, physical space, and time to support personalization. Teachers at NGLC schools report more flexibility around learning spaces (e.g., movable furniture and open areas); more co-teaching with other instructors; more flexible scheduling; and more seamless integration of technology. They also report changing student groupings more frequently than their counterparts (29 percent of NGLC teachers altered groups weekly, versus just 4 percent nationally).
Though not without implementation challenges, NGLC schools seem to organize learning in some ways that differ from more conventional schools. But do those differences benefit students? Using NWEA test data and quasi-experimental methods, pupils enrolled in NGLC schools gain about three percentiles in both math and reading—a modest uptick—compared to their statistically similar peers. Those findings represent one-year gains, based on fall 2014 baseline exams and spring 2015 follow-ups. Among a subsample of schools with two years of NWEA data (also fall 2013 and spring 2014), researchers find students make incremental progress throughout both years. Students across the achievement spectrum appear to make comparable gains when attending NGLC schools. Interestingly, analysts also find suggestive evidence that NGLC charters outperform district grantees. Though not conclusive, this finding hints that PL practices might be better suited to the more flexible charter environment.
Personalized learning has generated a fair share of hype. Will it live up to these lofty expectations? It may or may not—and its fate likely hinges on implementation, which includes giving school-level leaders the resources and flexibility needed to implement PL properly. While PL has potential to “disrupt” education in a productive way, buyers must also beware of the potholes. For those wanting a smoother ride, digesting this report is a good place to start.
SOURCE: John F. Pane, et. al., “Informing Progress: Insights on Personalized Learning Implementation and Effects,” RAND Corporation (2017).
David Brooks's recent essay, “How We Are Ruining America,” has touched a nerve with a lot of people, Robert Pondiscio among them.
As Robert puts it:
There is a language of power. It is the language of privileged parents, affluent communities, and elite universities. It’s the language of David Brooks. But he’d do well to recognize that you don’t learn that language in those places. They don’t let you in until or unless you demonstrate command of it.
All good, and a dozen years ago, I'd have left it at that. The mission of education reform, I thought, is getting more poor kids and minorities into college, which offers first-generation access to the type of high-paying entry work I enjoyed at age twenty-two. It also brings political and cultural power.
Yet Robert also uses another term, the “language of upward mobility.” Getting that right, teaching more kids that language, is a different task today than it was in 2000.
Allow me to paint you a different picture of power.
As the summer temperatures climb, the outdoors beckon, and I find myself near waterside marinas. From the Cleveland-Toledo Lake Erie coast, to the Pittsburgh-to-Cincinnati Ohio River banks, to the shores of a hundred small lakes dotting the lands between, Ohio is filled with boats. Nearly half a million of them. Beautiful boats. Powerful boats. Luxurious, decked-out boats. Boats with husbands and wives and children and children's friends, skiing and tubing and sunning and relaxing.
It’s a picture of the power of relaxation, fun, and camaraderie. This is not a small form of power. I'd take it most days (if offered) over a “striata baguette” with a Yale law grad. Here, too, we find a powerful form of networking. Those gathered in such marinas not infrequently find connections to new, good-paying contracts. Or they help cement the trade relationships created elsewhere.
The price of admission to these centers of power is not cheap. From helping with a tank of gas for a friend's jet ski, to outright purchase, storage, and maintenance of your new Harris pontoon or Ski Nautique, cash is basically vacuumed from the pockets of anyone approaching marine recreation. More, these boats seem generally backed by a down-the-road, $40,000–$400,000 camper, and are pulled by full-sized, $40,000–$80,000 trucks.
It is to the logos on these trucks that I draw your attention. They rarely say “Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft LLP.” They say things like “Buxton Roofing,” “AM Communications & Installation,” and “Linex Truck Linings.”
The guys who drive these trucks (and they're still mostly guys) make more than good livings. They provide work for other people and incomes for families. They make life easier for end-consumers or for the next business or service along the supply chain. They're part of a continuous network of shops and services that make up most of our economy.
To Brooks, in his harried Acela corridor and TV-personality life, commerce is the restaurants where he meets sources. To me and these guys, it's the trucks that bring the menu ingredients; the service vehicles for the ciabatta oven, latte machine, and dishwasher; the data-cabling and server-farm power meters that supply Brooks's Wi-Fi and cell phone. It's the forge that hammers, presses, and punches the decorative metallic cylinders surrounding his Panera patio waste cans. It's the parts network for the transmission repair shop that keeps people like myself in a vehicle long after the 100,000-mile warranty has expired and the elite have moved on to the latest model car. It's the silo-installation crews who build storage/transfer solutions for the nation's grain, as well as for its polymer granules—as with the trash-bag production facility down the road that serves the refuse-gathering needs of the Carnegie Mellon University campus, among others.
When these guys aren't boating or running four-wheelers or hunting or at their kids' ball games, they're often at sports bars like Buffalo Wild Wings—which, within my adult experience, was an Ohio five-restaurant chain serving places like Columbus, Alliance, Canton, and Kent. Today it has 1,200 locations, adds $2 billion to the national economy, and has spawned a host of facsimile brands.
It will be they and their employees who buy the armfuls of raffle tickets at the athletic booster club steak fry next month. Theirs will be the high-dollar auction items sold at the annual scholarship chili dinner come late November. When funding for the high school baseball team is needed, it will be their names and logos on the 4x8 aluminum signs that hang the length and breadth of the home run fence. They will buy the named bricks, and much more, for the library expansion. The local newspaper keeps running on revenue from their ads. Their kids will actually pay tuition, maybe not at Princeton, but at Ohio State, Mount Union, Pitt, Wooster, and the University of Toledo.
Their wives will often get them to church, and the children will be given a lifelong—if they choose—tribe, a cultural inheritance that goes back more than two or three generations; and, if they're lucky, a formal framework for moral decision-making. In turn, the generous income of these trade-business owners will help sustain the local congregation into the next generation and its remote missions in this one.
In their retirement, if they don't themselves fill the leadership posts and boards of local community organizations, these hard-charging doers will be the go-to sources of support for the leaders who have titles.
So you'll forgive me, David and Robert, if I’m no longer overly concerned with the Cedrick Jennings of the Ivy League world or the imagined cultural shock of a first visit to Whole Foods. Harvard and Yale, once places of idol for me, now border on laughable. When near Pittsburgh, I pop into Trader Joes and buy a cheap can of Spanish-blend coffee, and if anyone looks askance at my threadbare sneakers, so be it. What my life is about now is giving more young teens the vocabulary needed to flourish in the F-150/Silverado/Buffalo-Wild-Wings world. That, friends, is the challenge of our time.
The phrase “Git-R-Done” enjoyed brief national attention a decade ago, but has since remained popular in this neck of the woods.
"Git-R-Done,” to the outside world, implies a simple rusticity that is rapidly evaporating from our workplaces. When you take a new Ford Explorer to a mechanic, his diagnoses may well require a test harness more complex than those employed on an F-15 aircraft in 1990. The farmer's soybean-field tractor now bears any number of sensors and communications links, with the human interface including a seventh-generation quad-core processor and complex user-navigation structure. A small, modern production line? Well...
For too long, where we have designed or measured systemic vocabulary development, it's been too focused on college prep. Changing that focus is the work at hand. Increasingly, terms like actuator, impeller, fatigue life, carbon fiber, and production rate make their way into every corner of the nation. They join words commonly known in earlier generations, words like spanner, vice-grips, auger, tap and die, cotter-key, jig, awl, C-clamp, jumper, and ball-joint.
To their credit, America’s teachers have come to understand how disconnected the traditional curriculum has become for many teens. Project-based learning, design thinking, and even social-emotional learning are the pedagogical results. While these often lack rigorous validation, it behooves us to be a little tolerant when they talk of teaching teens workplace “skills.” Vocabularies of power may be what they really intend.
Microeconomics, business, organization, entrepreneurship, leadership— these subjects also have vocabularies of power that filter down to the sons and daughters of those who run sole-proprietorships. The more a teen can speak these languages, the more we do the yeomen work of preparing young adults.
Ed Jones leads the Hackable High Schools initiative. He is bootstrapping a Statewide Experiment in Customized Teen Learning, an effort to test new, open sourced curricula under Ohio’s Credit Flex law.
The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
At the end of June, Governor John Kasich vetoed a provision in the state budget bill that would have changed school grading calculations for purposes of evaluating the performance of Ohio’s charter school sponsors. Keep in mind that sponsors—as they should be—are evaluated in part on the basis of how well the charter schools in their portfolios are doing on state report card metrics. At issue here was the weight that the Ohio Department of Education places on student growth—or value added—relative to other measures. The General Assembly, seemingly unhappy with the current, bureaucratically derived framework for sponsor evaluations, had wanted to increase the weight on student growth from 20 to 60 percent. That change would have applied to the “summative” (or “overall”) A-F grades of charter schools when applied to the evaluation of their sponsors.[1]
Transitioning sponsors towards a growth-centered system was a positive move by the legislature, and it’s disappointing that the governor vetoed the provision. Growth measures consider individual students’ academic performance over time and gauge a school’s impact on student achievement. They differ from status measures, such as proficiency rates, which are “snapshots” of student performance at a point in time. But why does growth deserve heavier weight—and not only for sponsors but for all schools?
Ohio’s current grading system doesn’t effectively gauge the performance of high-poverty schools. The present formula heavily weights measures that correlate with student demographics—things like proficiency and graduation—and the inevitable result is that almost all high-poverty schools receive D’s and F’s. For instance, upwards of 90 percent of Columbus City schools would have been assigned those grades had the state issued summative letter grades for 2015-16. In effect, this type of grading system views every high-poverty school as “low performing,” despite the fact that dozens of high-poverty schools are helping their students make up ground.
This has a direct impact on charter sponsors, especially those that authorize schools in high-need communities. Last year, all of Ohio’s thirteen largest sponsors—those with four or more schools, located mostly in poorer urban areas—received a D or F on the academic portion of their evaluation. That doesn’t necessarily mean those sponsors are doing a bad job. Rather, their grades were largely driven by their schools’ D’s and F’s on proficiency based metrics. Because of these low ratings—substantially an artifact of their schools’ demographics—sponsors may be less inclined to open promising new schools in impoverished areas or to renew the contracts of existing schools. The ultimate losers, of course, are needy children denied the opportunity to attend excellent, life-altering charter schools.
The unintended consequences of the current formula are hardly limited to sponsors. They also include: a) failing to inform low-income families about the academic quality of various school options—an inevitable result of schools in their communities getting nearly identical ratings even when one may be producing more student growth than another; b) discouraging investment in high-performing (as measured by growth), high-poverty schools; c) subjecting high-growth schools to invasive interventions; and d) discouraging effective educators from working in Ohio’s highest need schools if they think the state will label their schools as failures. None of these consequences does much good for families and children living in Ohio’s poorest communities—yet they result from a school grading system that’s biased against high-poverty schools, be they district or charter.
The governor explained his veto on grounds that a growth-centered accountability system would “hold those schools [i.e., charters] to lower standards than traditional public schools.” He wrote that “lowering those standards—even in a seemingly narrow way as this provision—undermines this progress [i.e., having uniform statewide accountability].” Although Kasich is correct that a different weighting system for charter sponsors would deviate from the overall accountability system, it surely wouldn’t be the first time: Already the summative ratings of sponsors’ schools figure into their evaluations, whereas districts receive no overall rating, much less an evaluation on quality practices or compliance with laws and regulations.
The governor’s veto message also strengthens the misperception that focusing on growth “lowers standards.” While it may seem counterintuitive, focusing on growth can heighten accountability for all schools and offers additional reasons why Ohio lawmakers should move the main accountability system to a more growth-oriented model.
Under a growth-centered accountability regime, some high-poverty schools would earn overall C’s and maybe B’s. Some may think that such summative grades reflect “lower standards,” but in fact they better signal the positive impact schools have on student learning (A’s on value added), while also acknowledging that their pupils continue to lag behind (D’s and F’s on proficiency-based metrics). Under the current weights, the signal on status measures is far too strong and overwhelms the information on growth. A better balance is badly needed.
In the budget bill, lawmakers undertook a worthy fix to the sponsor evaluation system, yet the governor overruled them. What happens next is critical: Both branches need to work towards a more balanced approach to grading districts, schools, and sponsors. They should push for needed changes in the state’s clunky and unfair sponsor evaluation system. Better yet, they should reweight the summative grading calculation for all schools—district and charter—to put more emphasis on student growth.
[1] All districts and individual schools—district and charter—will begin to receive summative ratings with the 2017-18 school year. Charter sponsors have been evaluated based on Ohio’s summative rating formula since 2015-16.
Ohio policy makers just dismantled the high school graduation requirements for the class of 2018. This retreat harks back to the days of social promotion and state-sanctioned low expectations and should prompt some soul-searching as to what exactly we think young people need to be prepared for life after high school.
I’m all for high standards that are taken seriously by all concerned and that have real-world consequences. The point, after all, is to boost achievement, cause more learning by more young people, cause diplomas to mean something, and ensure that many more of our future citizens will be up to the challenges ahead.
But it’s also possible to demand too much. Witness the Chicago Public Schools: in addition to meeting basic high school graduation requirements like earning 24 credit hours in core subject areas and completing additional obligations such as service learning and consumer education, a new proposal requires high school students in the Windy City to prove that they have a “post-graduation plan” that includes a job or acceptance into the military, college, or a trade program.
Ohio’s plan is akin to providing high school graduates with flotation devices. Who cares if they can actually swim in the real world, so long as they, their parents, and their teachers feel comfortable that they’ve gotten in the water and tried. But if Ohio is guilty of endangering its graduates with a false hope that they’re ready to stay afloat in the world of college or the workforce, Chicago is threatening to drown them with a surfeit of expectations, including some that go well beyond the capacities and expertise of public schooling.
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Chicago’s proposal will go into effect in 2020. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not wrong when he says, “You cannot have kids think that 12th grade is done,” and when he points out that increasing academic rigor leads to improvements in graduation rates. (Ohio lawmakers: please pay attention.) But the augmented requirements are wrongheaded—and at least one policy expert has questioned whether they’re legal.
Start with the fact that students should earn what they’ve worked hard to earn—a fact that puts me in rare agreement with teachers’ union president Karen Lewis: “If you’ve done the work to earn a diploma, then you should get a diploma.” When Ohio superintendents and policy makers said it was unfair to change the rules mid-game, they were referring to changes in the score one must earn to be deemed proficient, a raising of the bar that the state determined years ago was the right policy move. In Chicago’s case, the rules are quite literally changing before kids’ (and educators’) eyes. Doing the work, proving you’re proficient, and earning the necessary credit hours won’t be enough in Chicago—you’ve also got to prove to the public school system the merits of your life plan.
Why is this the Chicago Public Schools’ damn business? The role of the K-12 system is to prepare young people for life after high school and to expand opportunities, not strong-arm young people into taking those opportunities.
What about students who won’t have it figured out by June? They fall into several categories, some laudable, some verging on the irresponsible. They could be students who:
Sure, it’s good to emerge from high school with a clear path to follow, and teachers and counselors ought to help with this as best they can. But require a plan? Approve a plan? No. Chicago’s new policy leaves room for the district to grant waivers from the post-grad plan requirement, but one can imagine the value judgments that are apt to affect waiver decisions. The policy also seems to overlook the fact that disadvantaged students—a large percentage of Chicago’s—face barriers to employment such as racial discrimination.
The school board promised to provide additional college and career coaches for counseling, which is a great way to provide extra support, but it seems that just eight such coaches (for a district nearing 400,000 students) will be deployed. Perhaps the school system should get its own priorities in order before demanding evidence that students have theirs in good shape.
The sentiments behind Chicago’s graduation proposal are good (and certainly better than Ohio’s recent decisions), and it’s great that city leaders are laser-like about raising the bar. This time, however, they’ve gone overboard.
