How to not build a better high school

I have a lot of respect for Jay Mathews. Mathews, a well-known education reporter who regularly writes for The Washington Post and Newsweek, has boatloads of experience and often finds interesting angles and teases out stories that would not otherwise be told. His work is also instructive in that he tends to be the voice of the mainstream, and the majority of Americans likely believe what he writes. Thus, I think it is of critical importance to deconstruct Mathews' long feature article in this week's Newsweek, "How to Build a Better High School."

Mathews' thesis is that schools need more Advanced Placement (AP) and International baccalaureate (IB) programs, because these challenging and rigorous courses are the avenue to achievement and more specifically, college. I couldn't disagree more; if special AP and IB classes are needed to establish some modicum of rigorousness in our high schools, then reform efforts must focus on what has gone terribly wrong with the standard curriculum. Moreover, high school should not be simply a halfway house to college; all students need to be armed with the critical thinking skills to have the opportunity to succeed in whatever venture they choose (college included). Catering to multiple-choice standardized tests and inherently rote-learning methodologies simply to improve the quality of a college application is a disgrace of an education. Finally, AP and IB programs enjoy a self-selecting population; poor students who have had an inadequate education since day one aren't going to be in AP classes, they are going to be dropping out of high school. The high school crisis is directly tied to the elementary school crisis, and efforts to improve our high schools must understand the direct causality.

With these introductory remarks in mind, let's take the article paragraph-by-paragraph.

How to Build a Better High School
By Jay Mathews

May 16 issue - Morgan Wilbanks was in for a series of shocks when he transferred to the Jefferson County International Baccalaureate (IB) School in Alabama at the beginning of his sophomore year. The little-known school near Birmingham, which tops NEWSWEEK's list of America's Best High Schools, is on the leading edge of a growing movement to make secondary education much more rigorous. Wilbanks, then 16, found himself taking tough courses right from the start. In his Advanced Placement (AP) European-history class, teacher Jeffrey Clayton gave startled students this initial assignment: memorize the map of Europe and be able to draw every country, along with 10 capitals, 10 rivers and 10 bodies of water. And that was just a warm-up. Clayton and other teachers told Wilbanks that he would be tackling nearly a dozen similarly demanding courses before he received his diploma. A few of the school's 325 students fled, preferring a less strenuous life at a regular public school. But Wilbanks, looking back this month a few weeks before graduation, says it was a "great experience" that prepared him well for the University of Alabama—where he'll major in chemistry and aim for medical school.

First thoughts: When your lead example of rigorous coursework is geographical memorization, that's worrisome. Most people probably think that is rigorous, of course, but it's not; it's difficult, perhaps, but dumb. It's dumb because in ten seconds on Google I can call up a map of Europe (I call this the Google Effect). More than that, the information is unimportant -- three, five, ten years from now, Jeffrey Clayton isn't going to remember a thing about the 10 major rivers of Europe (nor does he need to -- who cares about them on their own merit?). This is a perfect example of routinized learning, which contrasts starkly to my ideal of critical thinking learning, which would teach the geography through the lens of having Jeffrey understand why the 10 major rivers of Europe are important, and how they connect to events in world history, etc.

Parents and even some educators might cringe at the idea of turning adolescence into a forced march toward college. What about time for fun, football games and memories of life beyond test scores? But even the most relaxed among them agree that something needs to be done to reform the American public high school, a 184-year-old institution that has been as resistant to change as a teenager ordered to clean his room. U.S. high schools generally score low in international comparisons. Unlike elementary and middle schools, high schools haven't made significant gains in reading achievement and have been erratic in math. Almost a third of all students—and half of blacks and Hispanics—fail to graduate. This dismal performance has captured everyone's attention. "There is a growing consensus behind high-school reform," said U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. "Never before have so many groups—governors, business leaders, children's advocates—been so united on the need to act."

I will readily grant Mathews' premise in this paragraph; the American high school is in disrepair. However, his vague defense of its "forced march toward college" purpose is important. There is a feeling that every student needs to go to college. This is not true -- every students needs the opportunity to go to college. What this means is that primary and secondary education must impart upon all students the "toolbox" of skills such that come 12th grade they can make what decision they want and be successful at it. For many, this will involve college; when 50% of black and hispanic students aren't graduating high school, the equality of opportunity clearly does not exist. But high school should be a self-contained education in and of itself -- allowing students the democratic ability to fulfill their potential, college or no college. When high school becomes simply a factory for college students -- which means in practice a factory for successful college applications -- the entire institution loses its focus. To quote John Dewey: "Education is a process of living...not a preparation for future living."

United on the need, perhaps, but not on a course of action. The Bush administration, as part of its No Child Left Behind program, wants more accountability from high schools by requiring them to give annual tests in core subjects and show regular improvement in their results. At the National Education Summit in February, governors and business leaders focused on aligning the high-school curriculum with the demands of college and work. One of the speakers at that summit was Microsoft's Bill Gates, who called high schools "obsolete." He has made another approach, smaller schools, a major target of his philanthropy, with $734 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation going to support 1,500 new high schools with more personal attention. It's a tough sell, Gates says, in part because breaking up big schools "really messes up the football team."

No comment needed; a good reporting of current positions.

As a college degree becomes ever more essential in the workplace, much of high-school reform centers on getting as many students as possible ready for higher education. That's what the NEWSWEEK List tries to measure by ranking schools based on participation in AP and IB tests written and graded by outside experts. In these courses, students prepare for the demands of college and can earn college credit if their scores are high enough. NEWSWEEK omitted schools with strict academic admission standards that exclude average students. Although there's much debate about the value of standardized tests and AP in particular, NEWSWEEK's List is based on the conviction that no other standard works as well to measure a high school's success at challenging all students to perform at a high level. AP is the better known of the two programs and is used all over the country. IB is less common. It's a series of college-level courses and tests, similar to AP, originally designed in Geneva for the children of diplomats and international business executives preparing for baccalaureate exams but now used in a range of U.S. schools to energize students.

Here's the intriguing, though flawed, thesis paragraph. The critical idea is that "standardized tests and AP...measure a high school's success at challenging all students to perform at a high level." The connection that must be unpacked is between tests and performance; more precisely, the idea that performance on a standardized test is reflective of learning. This clearly is not the case. Standardized tests -- even the vaunted APs -- are dominated by multiple choice, a form of question which is undeniably fact-based. Just look at these review notes for the AP History exam prepared by a student at Thomas Jefferson H.S. for Sci/Tech, one of the best high schools in the nation. There is little in there that actually has to do with history. There are plenty of facts, to be sure, people and places and events and laws and court cases, but history is about trends, about conceptualizing the ebb and flow of populations and societies and seeing how they inform and indeed explain ours today. This is not learning, this is cramming bits of information into kids' heads and asking them to regurgitate it for an external reward. Even though the APs often include essay sections, they are just as formulaic. We must constantly ask ourselves: What is the goal of education? Are our evaluation methods in sync with those goals? When we speak of "performance," do we mean learning, or arbitrary outcomes?

There should be rigor in our curriculum. It should challenge students every day. But the idea that we need special classes to push the intellectual envelope -- special classes which are disproportionately taken by those with higher incomes (PDF) -- is abhorrent to the entire concept of common schooling. You want to fix American high schools? Eliminate the need for APs as anything but their intended purpose as advanced college-prep courses for the truly extraordinary student -- because standard classes should be so good that they blow the current AP classes out of the water. How well schools do on their APs is a measure of many things, such as the relative wealth of their population, how good the students' primary education was and how well kids can remember factoids for a scantron, but it does not determine rigor, at least not the authentic rigor we should be demanding of our schools.

Some new small charter schools, like the BASIS school in Tucson, Ariz., and the Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, Calif., require all students to take AP courses. The Bard Early College High School in New York City and other similar schools enroll high- school juniors in full college programs. But even with energy and creativity behind high- school reform, it won't be easy to change things. The vast majority of high-school students are following a pretty leisurely path. One of the largest studies of teenage behavior, the 400,000-student survey of college freshmen by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported that only 34.3 percent of incoming college freshmen in 2004 said they did six or more hours of high-school homework a week, down from 47 percent in 1987.

Do you remember what high school homework was like? Worksheets, memorization, textbooks. I wouldn't so much call high school "leisurely" as "incompetent." We teach a curriculum which has no bearing to real life and one that students cannot relate to their own experiences (do you honestly have to wonder why an inner-city poor kid doesn't see the value in memorizing the Calvin Cycle?). We treat kids with no respect, offering them no input into their own education, instead dictating their education, regimenting their days and forcing them to take a pass just to go to the bathroom. We test them, and test them, and test them some more, implicitly telling those who don't do well (probably because they come from less-than-ideal circumstances) that they cannot and will not amount to anything. The institution of high school is fundamentally out of step with the recipients of its supposed fruits, and we scratch our heads dumbfounded as to why anyone would drop out and join a gang. For many students, high school isn't leisurely; it's hell.

And not everyone applauds efforts to raise those standards, especially the NEWSWEEK List's emphasis on AP. Critics say requiring advanced courses stresses kids, dilutes quality and doesn't always make them readier for college. Patrick Welsh, an author and AP English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., favors challenging students, but contends that taking AP tests is only one tiny measure of whether a school is stretching students. "You have image-conscious public-school officials so intimidated," he says, "that they're putting as many kids as possible—and I am not talking about average kids who are willing to do the work—into AP courses so that they can get a higher ranking on your index."

Again, there is the assumption that high school exists purely to get kids to college, not to give them critical thinking skills and the opportunities that affords. Lest you think the two are equivalent, consider the importance of SATs, GPA and APs to college admissions -- three things which are not significantly chained to authentic learning.

A few private high schools have discarded AP altogether. Bruce Hammond, director of college counseling at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, N.M., has found a dozen schools, including his own, that have rejected, or are about to reject, AP in favor of designing their own courses. Many teachers agree that instead of focusing on a standardized curriculum like AP, they should concentrate on making lessons exciting, well taught and linked to students' lives. "The troubles that arise in high schools are precisely an extension of the lack of intellectual vigor—forget rigor—in the elementary-school curriculum and pedagogy," says Deborah Meier, founder of a small East Harlem high school that succeeded in motivating low-income students by emphasizing discussion and writing.

Amen, Ms. Meier.

But superintendents, principals and many teachers in districts that have increased their commitment to college-level courses say even with their shortcomings, AP and IB are the most effective ways to take a demanding curriculum to the widest range of students. The tests have an incorruptible high standard, since a teacher cannot dumb down the final exams, and some AP and IB courses appear to be better than the college courses they substitute for. Luther Spoehr, lecturer in education and history at Brown University, says the AP American-history course "is one of the last places where students can get a survey course that really insists that they try to understand change over substantial periods of time." Jon Reider, guidance counselor at San Francisco University High School and a former Stanford admissions officer, believes that because of smaller classes, better student motivation and more-experienced instructors, "calculus is almost always better taught in high school than in college."

It is only useful to have an "incorruptible high standard" if the standard itself is legitimate. As previously discussed, this is simply not the case. I do not for an instant deny the potential usefulness of AP classes; in concept, getting exposure to college-level work in high school is a fine idea. But yet again, the point must be hammered home: If an AP course is the last bastion of rigor (and a poor one at that), energy must be centered on repairing the standard curriculum, not circumventing it. AP courses can then be truly advanced, instead of advanced memorization.

The message is getting out ... slowly. This month, 1,173,000 students are scheduled to take 2,050,000 AP tests. That's double the number of students and triple the number of tests since 1995. Still, the new total of AP test takers is only about 15 percent of high-school juniors and seniors, and some studies suggest that may be one reason that so many students who start college find they do not have the academic muscles to survive and get a degree. University of California researchers Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices, for instance, reported last year that 54.9 percent of California students who took the SAT in 2002 had not taken advanced classes in high school, including AP, IB or honors courses.

I would submit that the reason so many students who start college find they do not have the academic muscles to survive is because of crippling, fundamental problems with pedagogy starting from elementary school onwards. Not because the kids aren't taking enough AP courses. When 30 percent of incoming college students take at least one remedial course, we need to be looking elsewhere for the cause. This is like suggesting that inhabitants of a leaking boat should take swimming lessons.

That's a major problem because some large studies, such as an analysis by the National Center for Educational Accountability of Texas state-college data, suggest that even students who do poorly on AP tests have significantly higher college-graduation rates than those who do not take AP tests at all. In public schools where average parental income is low and minority students are numerous, enthusiasm for AP and IB has never been greater. "Only 17 percent of our parents have attended college," says Brian Rodriguez, the AP coordinator at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., "but AP has had a tremendous impact here, as we regularly send kids to Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Berkeley and UCLA who never would have had a chance to go there even six years ago."

What does it say about a system when you need special classes on top of normal ones in order to get to next level? And of course students who take APs are going to do better in college: They are receiving a better education on average. The archetype of a student who takes an AP class is one who is not low-income and generally had a decent schooling from the start. Is there any doubt that such an AP-taking student will do better on average than those who don't take the test, the ones who are more likely to be low-income and from a poor learning environment? While Mathews' example of Encinal H.S. is inspiring, it is certainly the exception rather than the rule.

Raising expectations clearly inspires many students. Sharon Alford, a junior at the Jefferson County IB School, looked at the regular high school in Cullman, Ala., when her father, a Methodist minister, was transferred there in 2003. Cullman High had no AP courses, and though it started AP chemistry the next year, and plans on adding more courses, that was too late for her. So at 6:30 a.m. each school day, Alford climbs into the family's white Ford Explorer, with her mother at the wheel. She finishes her homework while chewing on a Pop-Tart or cereal bar during the hourlong drive to Jefferson County IB. On the ride back in the afternoon, she tries to nap. Adults who hear of her two-hour commute to and from high school are astonished. Her friends make fun of her. But, she says, her response is always the same: "I really, really wanted to go there." It's just the first stop on a journey that she hopes will someday take her as far as she wants to go.

A wonderful anecdote, but Mathews himself is admitting Sharon Alford is extra-ordinary. Raising expectations does indeed inspire many students, but think many could be inspired by fixing the education system at its core. Think about if expectations were in line with a truly democratic ideal of opportunity, rather than institutional hoops one jumps through to acquire a piece of paper with a seal. Think about if we taught kids how to think, rather than what to think. How to learn, rather than what to learn. Allowed their education to mold around their interests. The journey should be open to every child, regardless of background, race, income level or anything else. AP classes are not the answer, Mr. Mathews, and neither is leaning on standardized tests. There's only one solution, and it's as daunting as it is urgent: giving our children a real education.
- posted by Elliot H. @ 6:35 PM