Rebuilding the High School

The classic American public high school is a large brick building where lockers line hallways, classrooms hold rows of desks, and maybe 1,500 kids shuffle between classes on everything from calculus to cooking - the jocks, the geeks, the college-bound, the soon-to-drop-out. It's an American institution that was born in Boston, where The English High School opened in 1821. English has moved half a dozen times over the years and now sits in Jamaica Plain, and notables from financier J. P. Morgan to actor Leonard Nimoy have passed through its halls. But today, both in Massachusetts and across the nation, educators and business leaders are coming to the conclusion that the comprehensive public high school born of the 19th century, when few students went to college and manufacturing jobs abounded, must be brought up to date - and fast.

The state Division of Unemployment Assistance estimates that between 2000 and 2010, the Massachusetts economy will have produced about 300,000 new jobs, half requiring at least a bachelor's degree. But our high schools are still not preparing the majority of students for college, according to a 2005 Manhattan Institute study sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and publicized widely by the National Governors Association. Nationally, according to the study, 34 percent of US students graduating with the class of 2002 had completed the minimum course work required for admission to a four-year college, including passing four years of English, three years of math, and two each of science, social science, and foreign language. In Massachusetts, the number was 38 percent overall, 43 percent for white students, 29 percent for African-American students, and 14 percent for Hispanic students. (Other groups in the sample were too small to be counted.)

And that's not to mention the dropouts. Nationwide, 29 percent of students who enter high school don't graduate; in Massachusetts, 25 percent of all students - 19 percent of white students, 41 percent of African-Americans, and 54 percent of Hispanics - drop out.

On the state level, high schoolers' standardized test scores in English and math are improving dramatically. About 90 percent of the class of 2006 - up from 81 percent at this time for the class of 2003 - has already passed the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam, required since 2003 for a diploma. (MCAS is administered for the first time in 10th grade, then again as students who have not passed approach graduation.) But the tests are not rigorous enough for what's needed for many jobs. New MCAS science testing requirements have been established and will begin with the class of 2010, but according to experts, that is not good enough.

"There's a universal belief that high schools need fixing," says Massachusetts Education Commissioner David Driscoll. "We want to get started now." In his State of the State address this year, Governor Mitt Romney declared that improving the state's troubled urban schools was "the civil-rights issue of our generation" and called for a new wave of reform.

Recently, there was a ripple. The National Governors Association announced in February that it would award grants, also paid for by the Gates Foundation, to 10 states to explore high school reform. Around the same time, the Massachusetts Department of Education opened its new Secondary Support Services Unit and asked Stafford Peat, a senior administrator in the state's technical and vocational education unit, to write a grant proposal. Last month, the department won a two-year, $2 million grant.

The Secondary Support Services Unit is a single office on the edge of a sea of dark-gray cubicles in the Malden headquarters of the Department of Education. Peat, an affable man of 58 with a round face and a salt-and-pepper mustache, dedicated 30 years to shaping a curriculum leading toward college or technical school for students who would otherwise have ended their education at 12th grade. Technical and vocational jobs today require a better grasp of skills traditionally considered academic than was the case 20 years ago, but increased rigor for every student is needed, says Peat, who has taught at Fitchburg State College, in high school, and in middle school.

"I think we're all very aware of the changes that have been taking place in our economy over the last 10 years and that are projected to change further," Peat says. "And that in order to have a living wage, you are going to have to have some kind of postsecondary experience." On a purely practical level, and to avoid jobs going to other states and overseas, schools should better match what students are taught to the expectations of colleges and employers in growth industries such as high tech and healthcare, he says. "There's a concern among business and industry leaders about where skilled workers are going to come from."

In addition to his work with other people's kids, Peat has a more personal connection to school reform: three children who attended a suburban public high school in the 1990s, though he declines to say which one. He says they "left high school ill-prepared for the rigors of the world," having been tracked into the wrong courses and never advised how to work toward career goals.

Peat chuckles when considering the dimensions of his task. There are more than 300 high schools in Massachusetts with nearly 300,000 students enrolled. His funding is chicken feed, the equivalent of about 0.2 percent of the state's annual K-12 expenditures. "Right now," Peat says, "we're building a foundation."

But he does have support. In writing the grant proposal, Peat worked with the governor's office, the Board of Higher Education, and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. His agenda asks for a more rigorous curriculum across all subjects, with particular attention to math, science, and English; would create a "K-16" system by better coordinating the state's elementary and secondary schools with its higher-education system; looks at closing the achievement gap between white and minority students; and calls for enhanced tracking of student and school progress.

Even with a big budget, making these changes wouldn't be easy. Many education specialists trace the push for school reform to the Reagan administration's 1983 report "A Nation at Risk." The report called for school accountability and higher standards, and reforms have been attempted. These "started with elementary schools, then moved to middle, then moved back to the elementary schools," says Peat, "because it was so hard" to make change. That meant creating programs for early education and looking at the effectiveness of experimental pedagogy. High schools, traditionally focused on academics rather than the child-development issues that elementary and middle schools see as part of their responsibility, have for the most part continued unchanged.

Today's push to revamp high schools comes from educators, business leaders, and politicians who are aware of the country's fading manufacturing economy and the need for students to be better prepared to compete for high-skill jobs. The new federal focus on accountability - funding is tied directly to scores on standardized tests - emphasized in the No Child Left Behind law has stirred up the reform debate, and the $739 million invested by Bill and Melinda Gates for "redefining the American high school" hasn't hurt, either. "For the first time in my memory," Peat says, "this is higher education talking about high school reform, the governor's office talking about high school reform." What the Secondary Support Services Unit lacks in cash and staff, it may make up for by leveraging the momentum for high school reform.

In urban areas around the state and the country - New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is a vocal advocate, as is Bill Gates - the hottest idea in high schools is breaking large schools into smaller ones. Lawrence High School is a recent example. Its massive yellow-brick building was erected at the turn of the last century, just blocks from the now-dormant textile mills that crowd the Merrimack River. Behind the hulking 19th- century facades, both city and school are eager for revival. In recent years, city leaders have encouraged renovations of the mills and have coaxed high-tech businesses into them. Inside the high school, next to the security desk, hang colorful drawings of a $110 million campus of six independent, career-themed high schools into which Lawrence's 2,500 students will be divided after construction is completed late next year.

Lawrence students already attend "learning communities" of only several hundred students, themed academies such as Science and Technology. Lawrence created the system after high rates of failure, dropouts, and absenteeism led the school to lose accreditation in 1997 from the agency that evaluates New England schools. Accreditation was restored last fall, with the agency citing increased test scores, a shift "from teacher-centered to student-centered" instruction, and support among teachers, parents, and local businesses for the school's restructuring efforts.

Small-school advocates argue that a more intimate setting is good for kids, particularly in urban schools. Lorena Rivera, 16, a rising junior in Lawrence's Health and Human Services Academy seems to agree as she eats lunch in the cafeteria. Rivera's sisters went through the old Lawrence High School, before the academies, and they had counseled her to go elsewhere. "They thought I'd end up in trouble or pregnant," Rivera says. In a better-funded, better-run, smaller school, Rivera wakes up "looking forward to going to school every day."

Downsizing is also underway in Boston, which this fall will break up the public high schools of West Roxbury (about 1,300 students) and Hyde Park (about 1,100) into seven academies of 300 to 400 students each, following such conversions in South Boston and Dorchester.

Defenders of big schools, including Bob Weintraub, headmaster of 1,900-student Brookline High School, say they offer advantages, too: a wider array of courses and what Weintraub calls "intellectual and social fresh air." Students at Dorchester's Academy of Public Service spend their days with a few hundred other teenagers. One of them, Stanley Duplessy, 17, a rising senior, says, "Sometimes it's not good to know everybody and have everybody know you."

Even small-school advocates say that the approach won't improve outcomes without other fundamental changes. "There's no magic," says Wilfredo Laboy, superintendent of Lawrence public schools. You can't "just reduce the size and do more of the same. You don't get transformation that way."

Peat agrees. Remaking big into small schools is expensive, he says, and there are simpler ways to address many problems, from getting more kids in advanced-placement classes to offering them internships. In November, Peat will hold the first of many statewide public brainstorming sessions with superintendents, principals, teachers, parents, and business leaders to identify "what models are working," he says, and to explore the lessons of completed and nearly completed projects like the one in Lawrence. "Let's create as many good models as we can," Peat says.

Over the next two years, Peat will oversee the creation of a more challenging "Curriculum for College and Work Readiness," to be devised by a team of educators from K-12 and higher education, as well as business leaders. His office will also work with the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education as it compares the state's core curriculum frameworks with college-level placement and proficiency exams. And Peat's office made sure Massachusetts rejoined the American Diploma Project, a curriculum reform program founded by a group of governors and business leaders in 1996, by getting Intel Corp. to pay the state's dues for the next two years.

Like Peat, the diploma project's advocates believe that a high school diploma no longer guarantees that the recipient is prepared for either college or the world of work. Last year, the project analyzed MCAS and five other state high school exit exams and found the tests measured achievement on the eighth- or ninth-grade level, such as pre-algebra and basic reading comprehension.

The project recommends that states establish standards that match 11th- and 12th-grade work. This means advanced algebra and complex geometry, along with logic and analysis in English. Plus, every bench mark is joined with workplace tasks or actual college assignments meant to help teachers answer the old classroom lament: Why do we have to learn this? Students can see, for instance, that algebra helps a nurse calculate how much insulin a diabetic patient needs and that logic is necessary to write an essay on Nietzsche in a college philosophy class - or to evaluate the merits of a loan request as a bank officer.

In Massachusetts, the state's only uniform graduation requirements, established by the Legislature, are that students pass MCAS and that high schools teach US history and physical education. Of course, graduation requirements and MCAS are hot topics. Rather than fight his way through Beacon Hill or Washington, Peat wants to set up local carrots that will entice schools and students to follow a new track to a better education. He wants to develop a new algebra II exam, for example, to be given to every student in the state. But there are no plans to make it - or mastery of the new curriculums his office is developing - a requirement. Peat says that his proposed outlines of course work and bench marks would serve as a "companion document," one that schools would only be encouraged to adopt.

The encouragement would come from opportunities to get a cheaper postsecondary education by increasing the links between the state's K-12 and higher-education systems. For example, Peat hopes to revive Massachusetts's dual-enrollment program, cut in 2002, so that high school students can enroll in college courses for free and earn credit. And over the next two years, he'll help develop a "K-16 data link" to join the now-separate data systems of public schools and universities.

Another issue is that guidance counselors are spread too thinly across the state, averaging one for every 440 high school students, according to a 2004 report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. (The national average is not much better, at 1 to 407.) One proposed reform is a Web-based academic planning tool that gives students as well as their parents, teachers, and advisers course recommendations and timelines, SAT prep help, and internship information. Students need a track, says Peat, where they "understand what they need to do to follow that pathway and where it's going to lead them." If a student wanted to be a doctor, the program would make sure she knew to take advanced placement chemistry. North Carolina built a similar system that costs $5 million, Peat says.

Indeed, money will influence the speed and scope of any high school reform efforts, especially in the state's struggling, poorer districts. The bulk of state education dollars are in what's known as Chapter 70 aid to school districts where money collected through local property taxes is deemed inadequate by the state to pay for schools to teach within set curriculum frameworks. In the 2006 budget year, the state plans to spend a total of $3.78 billion on K-12 education, $3.23 billion of which will be Chapter 70 funding, an increase of 3 percent from last year. Adjusted for inflation, that number is still 6 percent below 2002 funding.

A pillar of Peat's plan to close the so-called achievement gap between well- and under-funded districts is to increase the number of low-income students taking advanced placement courses by using federal grant money. AP programs used to get $450,000 a year from the state for fee reductions, teacher training, and academic support such as tutoring; the Legislature cut the program entirely in 2001.

Other items on Peat's wish list include summer courses and after-school tutoring for struggling students (funding was reduced from $50 million to $10 million in the 2004 budget year, then increased to $14 million for 2005) and efforts to recruit good teachers and principals with performance-based incentives and more opportunities for professional development. He is looking for privately funded grants for other initiatives.

Norma Shapiro, a school-reform advocate and president of the Council for Fair School Finance, doubts that the state will ever take projects like Peat's beyond the exploratory stage, due to lack of funds. The Boston-based organization recently helped 19 school districts sue state officials for more money, though they lost the case. School systems that can't afford the personnel or equipment needed to meet existing education standards shouldn't be expected to meet more rigorous standards without additional help from the state, Shapiro says. As with new programs like Peat's, she says the education department is "trying to do everything with grants and contract work. So they can only do experiments."

To be sure, while the broad vision of Massachusetts's new high school reform agenda has been sketched out by Peat and his collaborators, the details have yet to be determined. "The foundation really has a great deal to do with setting up state-level expectations," says Peat. He's optimistic as he prepares for this fall's conference bringing leaders together to talk about reform. The session, he says, "will be the first of many.

Chris Berdik is a freelance writer in Dorchester. E-mail him at rcberdik@yahoo.com.