A Core Curriculum for All Students

Inexorably, the aspirations of American high school students rise: more and more young people want education and training beyond high school. Indeed, nearly three-quarters of our high school graduates now go on to two- or four-year institutions within two years, and others follow within a few more years. This is good news, because today’s economy makes postsecondary education or training essential to anybody who wants a decent foothold.

Unfortunately, we have a way to go before our high schools and colleges meet the rising aspirations for skills and knowledge. The now-familiar statistics are sobering:

• Although elementary schools have grown more effective over the past two decades, the value added by secondary schools has declined.

• While achievement problems are by no means unique to low-income and minority students, their problems are much more severe. At the end of high school, African American and Latino students have skills that are indistinguishable from white students at the end of middle school.

• About half of all newly enrolled college students must take some form of remediation; nearly one-third never make it to the sophomore year of college.

• Only about half of the students who enter college complete a postsecondary degree within six years. The numbers aren’t pretty for any student group, but they are worst for students who are black, Latino, or from low-income households.

The single most important thing we can do to help students succeed after high school is to provide a challenging high school curriculum. Why? Because the biggest contributor to success in college isn’t a student’s SAT or ACT score, nor is it GPA or rank in class. Rather, the single best predictor of college success is the quality and intensity of a student’s high school curriculum.

The relationship of high school course-taking to college success is clearest in mathematics. Research from the U.S. Department of Education shows that high school students who complete math higher than Algebra II (for example, trigonometry or pre-calculus) earn a college degree at twice the rate of those whose high school math curriculum was less rigorous.

Differences in high school course-taking across subjects may explain much of the lower college completion rates of African American and Latino college freshmen. The variation in overall graduation rates for college freshmen
from different population groups is alarming. But most of those differences disappear among students who have completed a robust college-prep curriculum.

Benefits beyond College Success

College preparatory courses do not benefit just students who know they are college bound. A growing body of evidence shows that such a curriculum has benefits for virtually all kids.

All kids? Many Americans, including many educators, doubt that all young people are capable of learning subjects like algebra. All Japanese kids, maybe. Even all Russian kids. But for some reason, not our students. These views are dead wrong. All students benefit from taking high-level courses, regardless of their academic record prior to enrollment.

Researchers have looked closely at what happens with different types of students when enrolled in different high school curricula. Their analysis, summarized in Figure 1, found that even students who enter high school in the lowest quartile of performance post higher gains in college- prep courses than in the vocational courses in which they typically enroll.

These findings are mirrored in the experience of the Southern Regional Education Board’s High Schools That Work Initiative (HSTW), a schoolwide reform model created primarily to improve achievement among vocational students. When efforts to raise standards in vocational courses did not produce desired across-the-board gains, participating schools were encouraged to take these socalled work-bound students and place them into collegeprep courses for part of the day. HSTW schools that enroll large numbers of such students in high-level courses are raising student achievement and increasing the overall percentage of program completers—even though vocational track students have traditionally been among the lowestachieving and at the highest risk of failing.

Teachers often hesitate to place low-achieving students into tough courses for fear it will set them up for failure. Yet we’re learning that low-achieving students are typically no more likely to fail in more difficult classes than they are in the watered-down ones where we often warehouse them. Indeed, when bottom-quartile students are placed in a low-level English course, nearly half—47 percent—fail. Put the same students in a college-prep English course and failure rates decline by about half.

Skeptics worry that a high-level curriculum will force more students to drop out. This does not seem to be happening in El Paso, Texas. A recent national study reports that graduation rates in this high-poverty, largely Latino district are 14th highest among the nation’s 50 largest school districts—a group that includes such affluent suburban communities as Fairfax County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland.

The experience in the San Jose, California, school district has been similar. San Jose changed its placement policy in 1997 to require all students to complete the curriculum required for admission into California’s two public university systems. In 2002, the first students under the new policy graduated with impressive results. San Jose students’ progress in reading and math outpaced the state average, with African Americans and Latinos posting the greatest gains. Between 1998 and 2002, test scores for African American 11th graders in San Jose rose seven times as much as their peers’ scores statewide. Most important, dropout rates did not increase, even as the more rigorous and demanding curriculum became the default.

Better Job Preparation

A college-prep curriculum contributes to another important goal for many students: success in finding and keeping a well-paying job. In today’s economy, the skills and academic abilities needed to find and succeed in a job are merging with those needed for college. Manufacturing, for example, has for many years been the occupational haven for youth who leave high school without a diploma. In 1973, 51 percent of factory jobs were held by dropouts; by the year 2000, only 19 percent were. The proportion of factory jobs held by individuals with at least some college tripled and their wages held steady or dropped only slightly, while the real wages of high school graduates and dropouts in manufacturing fell.

Good jobs in manufacturing can pay over $40,000 a year and tend to require four to five years of postsecondary education or apprenticeship. The skills required to get into these programs often include mastery of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, chemistry, physics, or statistics. It’s not just in manufacturing, either. In unpublished research conducted for the American Diploma Project, the National Alliance of Business surveyed officials from 22 fields about the high school–level skills they believe are most useful for their employees to bring to the job. The employers unanimously cited the need for strong reading ability, mathematical reasoning, and problem-solving skills. Indeed, the list generated by employers looked almost exactly like the lists subsequently generated by college faculty from across the country.

The knowledge and skills that today’s young people need to succeed in the 21st century far exceed those that were enough for their counterparts a mere generation ago. The only prediction we can confidently make about future jobs is that they will change—and change yet again. Even those youngsters who go directly to work after high school will likely find themselves needing more training and education at some point in their working lives. So our eyes—and our energies—must be focused on ensuring that they leave high school with the foundation they need to access that additional learning, as well as to participate fully in family and civic life. A common college-prep curriculum is the shortest path toward meeting that goal.

Patte Barth is the editor of Thinking K–16, published by The Education Trust, a child advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Kati Haycock is director of The Education Trust.

This is an edited excerpt from Double the Numbers: Increasing Postsecondary Credentials for Underrepresented Youth by Richard Kazis, Joel Vargas, and Nancy Hoffman.