Freshmen at Chicago’s public high schools today have a terrible statistic to live down. New research shows only 6 percent of their predecessors managed to earn four-year college degrees by their mid-20s.
The odds get worse for male black and Latino 9th graders. Only about 3 percent graduated from four-year colleges within six years, according to a study from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research. The national average for all students: 64 percent.
This failure to launch has been the experience of students who entered the system at a particularly ignominious moment in Chicago public school history. Former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett in 1987 declared Chicago’s schools to be the “worst in the nation.”
The alarming figures come amid a flood of recent attention to America’s problematic high schools. On the agendas of Oprah Winfrey, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others: Why do so many secondary institutions fail our teenagers so spectacularly?
Our economy increasingly depends on college-educated professionals. Put another way, if young people don’t have a college degree, they’re financial toast. High school dropouts will, on average, have annual earnings of $22,000 a year. By contrast, young people with bachelor’s degrees can expect to earn, on average, $50,000 a year.
Those sobering facts have provoked a discussion about how high schools must change. The consensus: more rigorous classes. A tougher, required curriculum tied to state standards. Better-trained teachers. Smaller and more alternative types of schools. Better college-prep class offerings.
The nation has been on an education reform bender in the last decade. But so far that effort has largely targeted elementary schools, the main focus of the federal No Child Left Behind law. High schools have remained in the shadows.
The lack of scrutiny has allowed many high schools, particularly those with lower-income students, to maintain a blurry focus. Many can’t decide whether to concentrate on preparing all kids for college or instead teaching vocational skills to help them find a job. Many schools haven’t answered the fundamental question: What must our students know by 12th grade?
One increasingly influential education non-profit makes a point of addressing that question by talking extensively to colleges and businesses. Washington, D.C.-based Achieve Inc. then partners with states–22 so far–to help realign their high school curricula to what industry and university leaders say students need to know. Makes sense. Gov. Rod Blagojevich should make Illinois the 23rd state to sign onto this movement. It would be an important step in showing Illinois is serious about high school reform.
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And reform is an urgent need. Half of Chicago freshmen drop out before the senior prom. Why? Many are bored. Unchallenged. Unconvinced that an entire class spent on proper comma placement is remotely relevant to their future as a music recording engineer or software salesman. (Dropouts, of course, will find out what real boredom is like when they wind up in monotonous, dead-end jobs.)
Students need math teachers with a knack for conveying the everyday relevance of differential equations. They need English teachers who can make Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter come alive in young imaginations. That’s not easy when so many high school educators teach outside their specialized fields, or when few, if any, financial incentives attract the best teachers to the most challenging neighborhood schools. In too many of those classrooms, students who have just finished reading, say, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” are instructed to reflect on it not in written essays, but by assembling a collage.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan has been trying a different approach to find good teachers: aggressive recruitment. Those efforts seem to be paying off. The number and quality of people applying to teach in Chicago’s inner-city schools, both elementary and secondary, has exploded. Three years ago, 9,000 applicants vied for about 1,300 jobs. This past year, 17,000 applicants sought 1,700 Chicago Public Schools teaching jobs. More than 40 percent of those hired in the last year have master’s degrees, Duncan says, adding, “I was stunned by that. It’s by far the largest and the best pool of teacher applicants we’ve had.”
Better, many of those applicants are career-changers, attracted to Chicago’s increasing opportunities for earning alternative teaching certification on the job. Career-switchers bring experience and reality from the professional world. It’s that much easier for those fresh arrivals to counter skeptical student questions about relevance with convincing answers.
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How should a high school be structured?
Some things we know. High school students need personal attention from adults. They need to connect. And yet typical high school teachers will see 150 students in a day. Smaller schools provide one answer, but simply dividing a large school into a four-pack of small ones does not.
The four-pack still has too many moving parts. Chicago’s newest, non-selective high schools already are showing promise–in better attendance, in pass rates of Advanced Placement tests, graduation rates, ACT scores and college enrollment. Most of those new schools, many of which are independent charters, opened in smaller, self-contained facilities in the last few years.
Then there’s the school day. Traditionally, American high schools broke the day into six periods. In the last two decades, many schools added a seventh period. Then an eighth.
That didn’t translate into a longer school day. Only shorter classes, and more of them. Sure, more periods allow students to take more courses. But the net effect has been ankle-deep–not neck-deep–instruction, particularly in courses critical to students’ professional futures: math, reading and writing.
The emphasis must be on a more intensive, rigorous, core curriculum that’s common among all high schools. Elementary schools have done a good job taking to heart state standards and setting specific academic expectations for their students. High schools have been slower to figure that out. The result is that by junior and senior year, many kids get to pick most of their courses. And which courses do they tend to choose? Usually, the Mickey Mouse path of least resistance. Nearly two-thirds of Chicago Pubic Schools graduates take three or fewer honors classes.
Beginning in 2002, the San Jose (Calif.) Unified School District toughened its core curriculum requirements. Since then, the socioeconomically diverse district has shown steady improvement in advanced level course-taking, grade-point averages and standardized test scores, without increasing its dropout rate.
It will take similar creativity and hard work to improve that shameful percentage of Chicago high school freshmen who go on to earn college degrees.
But it can be done.
