• The Preparing America's Future High School Initiative
• The NAEP 2000 High School Transcript Study Report
• Why Content Counts
• Building for Success After High School
• References

The Preparing America’s Future High School Initiative

In October 2003, Secretary of Education Rod Paige launched the Preparing America’s Future High School Initiative and asked the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) to coordinate the Department’s work on the initiative. In the same month, OVAE sponsored a national high school summit for policymakers, educators, and leaders, and followed up with a series of regional summits in spring 2004. The regional summits gave state-level teams the opportunity to work together on creating high school improvement plans. Outreach and technical assistance work continues with the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, the Council of the Great City Schools, and many other organizations to ensure that high school transformation is a priority for all education stakeholders. A second national summit was held on December 2–3, 2004.

Educators and policymakers are becoming more aware of the enormous challenges students face after high school graduation. The fast-paced global economy and dynamic labor market put a premium on U.S.-based jobs that require education and training beyond high school. Consequently, there are fewer opportunities for gainful employment among youth with low-level skills. For example, in 2003, 44 percent of persons ages 16–24 with less than a high school diploma and not currently in high school were neither enrolled nor working, compared with 9 percent of those with a bachelor’s or higher degree (U.S. Department of Education 2004, p. 132, table 13-1). Given this challenging environment, every U.S. student must leave high school well prepared for the next step in their life—whether that is to enter postsecondary education, start an apprenticeship, or immediately enter a career. However, in 2001, 11 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds were not enrolled in high school and had not earned a high school diploma or alternative credential (Kaufman, Alt, and Chapman 2004).

Leaders in education, civic and community organizations, business, and government are working with youth and their families to help youth face these challenges. They are working to create a new kind of high school for the new century—high schools that are compelled by a vision of having every youth complete high school ready for the next step in a successful life. In the high schools of the future, the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for some must become a thing of the past.

The NAEP 2000 High School Transcript Study Report

The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricula and Achievement, 1990–2000 provides critical support for the Preparing America’s Future High School Initiative and comes at a time when the “millennial generation” is entering high school. This generation rivals that of the baby-boomers in size, due to a combination of high fertility rates, increasing immigration, and declining infant mortality (Howe and Strauss 2000). In addition to a high degree of racial/ethnic diversity, the “millennials” have come of age in an educational and economic environment that is information-rich and given to a fast pace of technological and organizational change.

In terms of formal schooling, many of our schools are still organized around an industrial model that categorizes students as “college bound” and “non-college bound.” In contrast, we know that our economy and society have become more complex and demanding, and, as President George W. Bush has said, all of our high school graduates must be ready both for jobs in a workforce and for higher education.

What this means for high schools and for youth is reflected in the principal message of the NAEP 2000 HSTS report: content counts. The more academically intense a student’s secondary school curriculum, the more likely it is that positive outcomes will follow. While the report spends a great deal of time looking at comparative grade point averages, we know that grades are less of an outcome of secondary school education than the academic momentum provided by coursetaking. The outcomes most relevant to that academic momentum are (1) college entry, persistence, and degree attainment; and (2) for those students heading directly into the workforce, documented competence in both the knowledge and communication skills necessary to function in increasingly technical occupational environments.

Why Content Counts

Reading and mathematical competencies provide gateways to other subjects—and they must be cemented during a student’s high school education. These competencies are inextricably linked: a youth who cannot read fluently and comprehend what he is reading cannot read math problems either. A student who has difficulty reading cannot search the Internet, understand technical manuals, or study the new processes needed for training or further education. These understandings, these links between topics and areas of study, cannot be grasped without the preparation that a rigorous academic high school curriculum brings.

Occupationally oriented students need high levels of competence in reading and mathematics to compete. As an example, students enrolled in a construction class are given the blueprints of a proposed building (including foundation footings, window measurements, plumbing, electrics, etc.), construction cost data books, local wage rate adjustment factors, and environmental regulations and, working in teams, challenged to come up with a cost estimate. These students will need geometry, algebra, and, in some cases, applied trigonometry. They will need to be able to read and interpret regulations and factors bearing on wage rates, overhead, and profit. They will need to be fluent in the use of spreadsheet software. They will need to know enough physical science to select the proper materials. Real-world workers need a content-rich education—content does count.

And content counts even more in the fast-growing sectors of the labor market: mid-level technical work. Whether in medical labs, architectural firms, law firms, or software support centers, technicians must “work at the empirical interface between a world of physical objects [and events] and a world of symbolic representations” and “transform aspects of the material world into [those] symbolic representations” (Whalley and Barley 1997, p. 47).

Technicians help communicate the results to professionals—who, in turn, must be able to understand and act upon the information provided by the technicians. Proficiency in mathematics provides a student the capacity to communicate through symbolic representation; advanced computer skills provide the tools of transformation; and between the two lies the interpretive structural knowledge of science and/or history or social science.

A recent National Assessment of Vocational Education (NAVE) report (Silverberg et al. 2004) that uses NAEP 2000 HSTS data (in conjunction with past NAEP transcript data) shows that public high school graduates who complete an occupational concentration (defined as three or more courses in a single occupational area) take fewer academic courses than their nonoccupational peers. For example, in 2000, 51 percent of occupational concentrators fulfilled the “new basics” academic curriculum,* compared to 60 percent of other students. However, this level of academic coursetaking represents an improvement over the decade of the 1990s: In 1990, these percentages were 19 percent and 46 percent, respectively. Thus, while all public high school graduates increased their academic coursetaking on average, occupational concentrators increased their academic coursetaking more than their nonoccupational peers.

Building for Success After High School

There is no question that what students bring to this high-demand technical world requires a solid grounding in what the NAEP 2000 HSTS report calls the “core” disciplines, a grounding that will maximize the choices open to students after high school.

Recently, over 60 percent of high school graduates have continued their education immediately after high school (Snyder 2003, p. 223, table 184). For the high school class of 1992, over 75 percent of those with a standard high school diploma had been enrolled somewhere in the post-secondary system by the end of 2000 (U.S. Department of Education 2003, p. 133, table 22-1). This finding, from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), sounds impressive, but consider other data from the same study.

Eight and a half years after they graduated from high school, one out of eight postsecondary entrants from the high school class of 1992 had quit by the time they earned their 10th credit. And of those who earned more than 10 credits, over one-third had earned no credential at all—no certificate, no associate’s degree, no bachelor’s or higher degree (Adelman 2004).

While there may be other reasons why students drop out of college, the academic momentum they bring forward from high school has a greater influence on degree completion than any other precollegiate or demographic factor (Adelman 1999). It is for that reason that the Preparing America’s Future High School Initiative advocates and supports the State Scholars Initiative (www.centerforstatescholars.org) and similar initiatives among states and local school districts that encourage students to tackle rigorous courses.

During the coming years, states and local school districts will continue to pursue improvement strategies at all levels—including high school—to help realize the vision of the No Child Left Behind Act. We are already seeing evidence, through policy changes being made in a number of states, that the “curricular tracks” left by the millennial generation as it marches through high school will be different from the tracks of previous generations of U.S. high school students. We fully expect that future administrations of the NAEP High School Transcript Study will document the extent to which educators and decisionmakers on all levels took action—action to make sure high school students graduate prepared for the next step in their lives—whether it is further training, careers, or postsecondary education.

References

Adelman, C. (1999). Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns, and Bachelor’s Degree Completion. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Adelman, C. (2004). Principal Indicators of Student Academic Histories in Postsecondary Education, 1972–2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Howe, N., and Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Vintage Books.

Kaufman, P., Alt, M.N., and Chapman, C. (2004). Dropout Rates in the United States: 2001 (NCES 2005–046). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Silverberg, M., Warner, E., Fong, M., and Goodwin, D. (2004). National Assessment of Vocational Education: Final Report to Congress. U.S. Department of Education, Office of the Under Secretary, Policy and Program Studies Service. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Snyder, T. (Ed.). (2003). Digest of Education Statistics 2002. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2003). The Condition of Education 2003 (NCES 2003–067). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2004). The Condition of Education 2004 (NCES 2004–077). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Whalley, P., and Barley, S.R. (1997). Technical Work in the Division of Labor: Stalking the Wily Anomaly (pp. 23–52). In Barley, S.R., and Orr, J.E. (Eds.), Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

*The “new basics” curriculum consists of 4 years of English and 3 years each of mathematics, science, and social studies.