How do you judge a high school's effectiveness? Graduation rates don't mean much: It's easy to raise the graduation rate by lowering standards.
High schools should receive funding to track and support their graduates and be held accountable for their post-diploma success, write Pagee Cheung and Arthur Samuels, co-founders and directors of MESA Charter High in Brooklyn. Do graduates qualify for jobs or job training? Do they succeed in college?
Their school, which graduated its first class in 2017, soon realized its graduates' families were struggling to help them navigate college or figure out how to qualify for a job with a future.
MESA now offers a post-secondary success counselor, and runs a “13th grade” workshop "to help alumni who are out of school and unemployed either re-enroll in college or a high-quality job training program," Cheung and Samuels write. Over 18 months, "we have helped dozens of alumni transition from poverty-wage, dead-end jobs to preparation programs that will lead to a financially sustainable, personally satisfying career."
But alumni support costs money, they write. If the state provided funding -- perhaps to support students for two years after high school -- schools should be required to report what percentage of alumni are enrolled in college, in a trade program or employed in a "good job" two years after receiving a diploma. (New York state defines a "good job" here). “Measure the outcome you actually care about, and fund schools to provide it” shouldn't be a radical idea, they argue.
The essay is part of Fordham's annual Wonkathon, which this year is asking for ideas on reinventing high schools.
Consultant Christi Martin also proposed focusing on student outcomes. Some states are moving in this direction, she writes.
Texas awards outcome bonuses to districts based in part on college enrollment. Louisiana commissioned a Mathematica study that evaluates the “promotion power” of its high schools. The report assesses a high school’s impact on the long-term success of its students (including success in the job market). Massachusetts recently published a new report that clearly presents employment and earnings of high school graduates (at the district level for now). The state board is contemplating implications for accountability.
Jobs for the Future is pushing what it calls the Big Blur, a single funding system for education, training and career development for 16- to 24-year-olds.
There are a lot of bad ideas here. Instead of test scores or missions that are meaningless to them, most youth need access to apprenticeships sooner rather than later, while the truly capable remainder, in schools whose levels could therefore suddenly become genuinely high, could access two years of college level instruction for free during Secondary 11 & 12, thereby becoming verifiably qualified for university, with little danger of subsequently dropping out with non-dischargeable debt, the reality facing millions of American young adults who are being pushed towards higher education without ever having become highly competent in even the minimal skills Americans expect.
How about all students have access to University prep? NY needs to open more seats for the capable, instead of offering study halls or remedial level. SUNY 2 yr colleges should be free, including transportation, to students whose high schools refuse to offer sufficient seats in AP or DE at their level of instructional need.
How about the schools get the students to do better on the standardized tests, then we worry about jobs after high school.
K-12 schools are not responsible for ensuring their graduates get jobs. K-12 schools are responsible for teaching specific subjects to students during school hours. I'm all for standardized testing to see if that's being done well, but even such testing isn't done well (no results for months, no impact on students, etc). Let's have the schools focus on what they're supposed to focus on, find an effective way to measure that, and leave after-graduation concerns to others. Schools have experienced enough mission creep as it is.
--mrmillermathteacher