Five keys can lead to high school
reform, lower dropout rates

by Lew Armistead
L.A. Communications

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(A photo from our 2006 Summer Leadership Institute.)

   
High school leaders seeking to reform their schools face five challenges, according to a new report, Meeting Five Critical Challenges of High School Reform, prepared by MDRC. The report looked at recent research on high school reform and was released during a Washington D.C. briefing in January hosted by the Alliance for Excellent Education.

“We are facing a dropout crisis in our nation, and it’s a problem of crisis proportions,” said U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) during the release. “We now know the reasons for the dropout problem better than ever, and our challenge is to study this information and spread the knowledge.”

The five of the challenges deal with changes that should be made in high schools—

• Creating personalized learning environments;
• Assisting students who enter high school with poor literacy
  and math skills;
• Improving instructional content and pedagogy;
• Preparing students for the world beyond high school; and
• Stimulating change and sustaining high performance.

The report also called upon policy makers, educators and others to build “knowledge about what works, what does not work and why.”

“High school reform has moved to the top of the education policy agenda, commanding the attention of the federal government, governors, urban school superintendents, philanthropists, and the general public,” the report reads. “All are alarmed by stubbornly high dropout rates, by the low academic achievement of many high school students, and by the large numbers of high school graduates who are required to take remedial classes in college.”

High schools with the greatest problems are concentrated in about 50 large cities and 15 primarily southern and southwestern states with the majority of their students being African-American or Hispanic, according to the report.

The report focused on three initiatives to reform high schools—Career Academies, First Things First, and Talent Development—currently used in schools in selected communities.

Challenge 1—Creating a Personalized and Orderly Learning Environment

The first key to reform cited in the report is “creating a personalized and orderly learning environment.” Having a setting where students and adults know each other well and adults show concern for students’ “well-being, intellectual growth, and educational success” will motivate students, the report indicates.

The report indicates that small learning communities “make students feel known and cared about by their teachers” and result in students developing a feeling that teachers care about their well-being. However, these communities can create challenges for principals in scheduling classes, and while improving school climate, will not, by themselves, increase student achievement.

Challenge 2—Assisting Students Who Enter High School with Poor Academic Skills

A “double-blocked class schedule” is useful when assisting students who enter high school with poor academic skills, according to the report. It also cites semester-long, intensive “catch-up courses” to strength ninth graders’ skills in reading and mathematics and longer class periods as positive steps.

“Little is known about how best to assist and prevent dropping out among those students who struggle the most in ninth grade,” the report reads. “While Talent Development increased the rate of promotion to tenth grade, those students in Talent Development schools who were required to repeat a full year of ninth grade were more likely to drop out of high school than their counterparts in other schools. Different grouping arrangements and modes of instruction may be needed for such students.”

Challenge 3—Improving Instructional Content and Practice

Teachers working with schools that have extensive disadvantaged populations are frequently less knowledgeable about their subjects than their counterparts in more affluent schools, the report stated. It called for development of “well-designed curricula and lessons plans” that these teachers could use in lieu of relying upon them to create their own curricula “reflecting the themes of their small learning communities.” The report indicated that creators of First Things First anticipated teachers would blend the theme of their small learning communities into their curricula, but those teachers said they had neither the time or training to do that.

The report recommended that quality professional development for teachers was important and that some of it should include “teachers working together to align curricula with standards, review assignments for rigor, and discuss ways of making classroom activities more engaging.”

It also reported that if administrators hope that teacher meetings will focus on instructional reform, they must set that expectation

“Researchers’ observations of teachers’ meetings in small learning communities revealed that, without specific direction about how to spend their time together, teachers talked mostly about matters unrelated to instruction (such as discipline issues, individual students’ personal or academic problems, or planned small learning community field trips or parties.”

Challenge 4-- Preparing Students for the World Beyond High School

The report cautions that adolescents in low-performing schools required special help in preparing for better-paying jobs and post-secondary education. Three specific recommendations came from the research at the Career Academies—

•Earnings impacts for young men in Career Academies appear to be linked to career awareness activities and work internships during high school;

•The potential benefits of partnerships between high schools and employers can be more fully realized when these partnerships are more structured and when schools can designate a full-time, non-teaching staff person to serve as a liaison with employers; and

•It may be necessary to improve the academic component of Career Academies in order to raise students’ achievement on standardized tests and help them secure admission to college.

Challenge 5—Stimulating Change

Creating lasting change requires continuing attention, and the report presents five “perceptions and judgments of program developers and researchers” involved in the report—

•Creating effective change demands an investment of personnel resources.

•In deciding whether to adopt a comprehensive reform model or add new components to existing programs, school and district administrators should consider the adequacy of what is already in place and the capacity of local personnel to envision and implement change.

•Strong support of the initiative by the school district helps to ensure effective implementation and the reform’s continuing existence.

•It is important for policymakers and administrators to avoid jumping from one reform to the next; instead, they should stay the course until initiatives have been put in place long enough and well enough for their effectiveness to receive a fair test.

•It is important to have high ambitions but also reasonable expectations about the size of impacts that reforms can produce.

Copies of the report are available through the MDRC Web site, www.mdrc.org.

As part of the release of the ‘Six Critical Challenges’ report, MDRC announced selected organizations that provide information on high school research reform—

•MDRC, www.mdrc.org
•American Institutes for Research (AIR), www.air.org
•Consortium for Policy Research in Education, www.cpre.org
•SRI International, www.sri.com
•Research Triangle Institute, www.rti.com
•Mathematics Policy Research Institute, www.mathematica.org
•MPR Associates, Inc., www.mprinc.com
•National High School Center, www.betterhighschools.org
•Center on Comprehensive School Reform and   Improvement,  http://www.csrclearinghouse.org
•Comprehensive School Reform Quality Center, www.csrq.org
•National Centers for Career Technical Education,
  www.nccte.org

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