Although elementary schools have been the beneficiaries of much of the school reform attention in the last several years, high schools are now increasingly getting their due.
As the bridge between school, work, and higher education, high school is the crucible where many of education's most pressing issues—high dropout rates, the achievement gap, school violence, and an array of social problems—are most in danger of boiling over. Urban school districts, in particular, wrestle with how to transform high schools.
Nowhere has that need been more critical than in Philadelphia. This summer, Paul Vallas, CEO of the School District of Philadelphia, told a gathering of educators, policymakers, and politicians at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., about the challenges of reforming Philadelphia's 48 high schools and vocational-technical schools.
"Philly is clearly a challenged district. It's 85 percent minority. It's 85 percent low income," Vallas said at a presentation sponsored by the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education. "Four years ago, underprivileged children had test scores that were barely in the double digits—about 11 percent of children scored proficient or above."
Arriving in Philadelphia in July 2002 from the top spot in Chicago, Vallas didn't have the time or patience for lofty theorizing. "I'm a program-and-initiative guy," he said. "Figure out what works, figure out how to finance it, and figure out how to bring it to scale."
Improvement, Room for More
The results have been noteworthy. Schools and curricula have been restructured, infrastructure is on the mend, and test scores are up. "I've probably stolen every good idea out there," he joked. "This is not about vision. This is about best practices. This is about trying to do more with less."
As the district works with Philadelphia's School Reform Commission, which oversees city schools under a state takeover plan, Vallas said its high school students are starting to experience the benefits of a far-reaching transformation. Test scores tell part of the story.
Preliminary results of the 2005–06 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams showed a record fourth consecutive year of growth in math and reading scores. For 11th graders, that meant a 3.8 percent increase in students scoring "advanced/proficient" in math and a 2.6 percent increase in that category in reading. There were corresponding declines in the percentage of students scoring "below basic." Improvement was greatest among black students.
But the total number of students achieving advanced/proficient scores was still just 26.9 percent in math and 33.2 percent in reading. There's clearly a long way to go. "While we're satisfied with the growth, we're not satisfied with the level of performance," Vallas said at a press conference announcing the test results.
Why High Schools Fail Kids
The process of transforming Philadelphia's high schools began with identifying what was wrong with them. City educators found four leading problems:
- Lack of academic readiness. The first nine years of school weren't preparing students for the last four. "Kids come to high school simply unprepared for high school," Vallas said. That leads to high dropout rates. "When I arrived, we had 22,000 freshmen and only 8,000 seniors," Vallas said.
- Poverty's legacy. Poor kids have a hard time believing that education can literally pay off. "There is a perception that college will never become a reality," Vallas said, which makes staying in school seem unimportant.
- Student boredom. "High school has remained relatively unchanged for the last four or five decades, while society has changed radically," he said. In addition, "academic failure leads to boredom."
- Negative school climate. "Big high schools are intimidating places. Violence, intimidation, bullying, and the impersonal nature of schools create an environment that undermines the learning process," Vallas said.
Pathways to Reform
Vallas said that five strategies drive Philadelphia's high school reform efforts.
- Standardized curriculum. He said adoption of a rigorous managed instruction program was the most significant change Philadelphia has implemented. The program aligns the entire curriculum, from preK through 12th grade. It improves high school performance because "every grade is in alignment with what the next grade is doing," Vallas said. Kids now enter high school with more of the prerequisite skills and knowledge they need. "The whole objective is to standardize your curriculum and instructional models, align them with state standards, and then make sure teachers are teaching to those models," he said. Data-driven assessments allow teachers to regularly monitor student progress and "intervene early enough to make a difference," if need be.
- Curriculum enrichment. Every Philadelphia high school now offers advanced placement courses, with four times more students participating than in 2002. Ten high schools operate on the International Baccalaureate system. "This ensures that our students aren't in academically segregated schools," Vallas said. Curriculum enrichment often means more time in class. Vallas said his district's extended-day and summer-school programs are among the most comprehensive in the nation. "Time on task is critical," he said.
- Dual-enrollment opportunities. Philadelphia takes advantage of the 86 colleges, universities, and technical schools in the area to dispel the notion that poor kids can't achieve a higher education. Seniors can take undergraduate courses for high school and college credit in academies housed on higher-education campuses, said Vallas. Students pursuing career and technical education can tap similar programs at tech schools and with local employers.
- Smaller schools. In 2002, Philadelphia had 38 public high schools enrolling an average of 1,500 students each. Vallas said plans are on track to more than double the number of high schools by 2008 and reduce the average student body per school to fewer than 800. Vallas would prefer 500. In the latest round of assessments, Philadelphia's high schools with enrollments under 500 had 19 percent more students achieve advanced/proficient scores than did its bigger schools. To reach its goal of more, smaller high schools, Philadelphia is closing down 37 middle schools as part of a districtwide realignment to a K–8 and 9–12 system. "I'm not a big fan of middle schools," Vallas asserted. "It's just tumultuous to thrust a kid from being one of 50 5th graders into a middle school where he's one of 400 6th graders." Eighth graders in traditional middle schools were the only group whose performance did not improve on last year's state tests.
- School choice. Many of those new high schools will be charter schools. "Philadelphia is the school choice capital of the world," said Vallas. "When children have options, they become much more enthusiastic. Because for many of these kids, they have never had any kind of choice in any aspect of their lives."
Is it working? Depending on who's counting, Philadelphia's 2005 high school graduation rate stood somewhere between 55 and 68 percent. That's solidly in the middle of the pack of large urban school districts but miles ahead of the rate of approximately 36 percent in 2002.
Vallas said he believes the district is on the right track with reforms that help ensure that more high school students make it through all four years.