To Fix Public High Schools, First Get Clear About What We Are Trying to Achieve

Educators have been working for decades to improve American public high schools, but as Chester Finn, President Emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, points out in a recent article, these efforts have yielded few across-the-board improvements. At Success Academy, we know how hard it is to create great high schools: we have spent the past four years designing a high school from scratch that can compete on the world stage, but also work for disadvantaged students, who often require additional support to be prepared for the range of challenges — academic and social-emotional — they will encounter in college and beyond.

Finn points out several underlying issues that have made it difficult to successfully reform American high schools. One particularly significant problem he identifies is the lack of clarity about the end goal of high school: What does “college and career readiness” really mean?

From the moment we began building our high school, that end goal was crystal clear. For us, college and career readiness mean:

1. Academic preparedness to tackle the kind of sophisticated and rigorous reading, writing, analysis, and problem-solving that students will encounter at selective colleges, and later, in the workplace.
2. The ability to independently navigate — through time management, help-seeking, self-awareness, and persistence — the low-support environment that students experience on college campuses, and later, in the workplace.

Everything about our high school is designed backward from this two-fold definition: The academics and grading policy that are calibrated to college-level tasks and expectations; the free time and choice built into the schedule, to give scholars the opportunity to independently manage their time; the range and depth of extracurriculars to allow scholars to discover passions and talents; the summer programs and internships that provide experiences in navigating unfamiliar and diverse environments; and the intensive counseling, that builds self-awareness, the confidence to ask for help, and a repository of knowledge about what to expect in college and beyond. (Visit our High School Virtual Tour for more information about our high school design.)

Building a great high school is incredibly challenging. The only possible way we can get it right is to remain stringently guided by the north star of true college and career readiness, which forces us to maintain rigorous honesty about how well we are preparing students. High school educators across the country must similarly embrace an honest definition of readiness, and constantly evaluate their program — and their students’ progress — against it. All of us must be ready to completely rethink any aspect of the school design — the curriculum, the discipline system, the teacher training — that is failing to support students in the manner that college, and the competitive global economy, require. Only through vigorous self-reflection, radical honesty, and a determined willingness to change when necessary, can we provide the kind of high school education that every child in this country needs and deserves.