Helping High Schools Achieve
A Conversation With Michael Cohen
“Not everyone can trace what they’re doing now back to what they did in high school,” says Michael Cohen, “but in many ways I can.” That’s apropos since Cohen, the president of Achieve, is now one of the most vocal national advocates for making the high school experience more rigorous and relevant. Under Cohen’s leadership, Achieve launched the American Diploma Project, a growing network of states committed to improving preparation for college and 21st century careers. Cohen says he became interested in public policy as a New York City high school senior, when he took a course in Problems in American Democracy. His teacher helped him land an internship in the Manhattan office of then–State Senator Bobby Kennedy. After that auspicious beginning, Cohen went on to hold influential education policy positions in the Clinton administration, the National Governors Association, the National Institute of Education, and the National Association of Boards of Education. A skilled multi-tasker, Cohen talked to Northwest Education while driving home from his Washington, DC, office.
Q: The American Diploma Project is currently working with 31 states to align high school standards with postsecondary and workplace skills. What are the common threads in that work?
The states have all committed to a highly focused policy agenda that has to do with aligning the expectations for what students will learn in high school with the knowledge and skills they need for postsecondary education and access to decent jobs. They’ve committed to doing four related things: align the standards they set, particularly in mathematics and English, with the demands of postsecondary education and the workplace; develop a curriculum that’s aligned with those standards; include in their high school assessment system at least one set of assessments that actually measures whether students meet those standards; and use those assessments to provide students with clear, actionable information as to whether they’re ready to succeed after high school.
What kind of help do states want in accomplishing those goals?
First, they want the cover and credibility that comes with being part of a larger national effort, rather than just doing something entirely on their own. This is difficult work; it’s better for states to be able to say, “look what others are doing.” Second, they want an outside source of friendly pressure to make sure they stay focused on the agenda and keep moving forward. Third, they want the ability to network with and learn from the experience of other like-minded states. And fourth, some of them want some very specific kinds of assistance that Achieve can provide.
You mentioned this is difficult work. What makes it so hard from a policy standpoint?
It’s one thing to say at a general level that we need to prepare kids for a rapidly changing world. But, to the extent that our rapidly changing world involves both employers and the postsecondary system, many states need help in figuring out how to engage those sectors along with the K–12 system to actually align expectations. Another thing that’s difficult is that the knowledge and skills students need to succeed after high school is—in most cases—more demanding, more challenging, and more rigorous than what states require now for a high school diploma. Any time you change the expectations or raise the bar, there are political challenges. So, being part of a larger effort, sharing inside information and strategies with other states, can be quite helpful.
You’ve said there’s more impetus for change now than at any time since the publication of A Nation at Risk, back in 1983. Why is that?
First of all, there’s mounting evidence that significant percentages of high school graduates are not well prepared for what they do after high school. Depending on where and when you look, about 30 percent of first-year students in postsecondary education are required to take remedial courses. They’re not ready to do credit-bearing work; they have to go back and take courses that are essentially repeating what they arguably should have learned in high school. As that evidence has become more and more public, state legislators and others have seen it and understand the costs associated with that remediation—both to the students involved and to the state treasury. That’s one impetus for change. Second, it turns out that if you talk to recent high school graduates, 30–40 percent will tell you they don’t think they’re well prepared for what they’re doing, whether they’re in the workplace or in college. And, of course, surveys of employers routinely say that they think young people right out of high school lack critical skills.
Once you focus on those kinds of data, there are pretty strong reasons to think something’s not going right in how we prepare young people as they graduate from high school. Add to that the growing recognition that we basically have a 70 percent graduation rate—and those kids [who drop out] aren’t particularly well-prepared, either. So, the magnitude of the problem turns out to be even bigger.
What advice do you have for individual schools or districts looking to retain kids and to make the high school experience more meaningful—or is this something that needs to be tackled at a higher level?
In the best of circumstances you have bottom-up and top-down pressure. If you are a high school in a state that isn’t doing the kinds of things I’m talking about, there are a number of great starting points. One is to find out what’s happening to your high school graduates. That could be anything from surveying them to tracking some of them down and bringing them back a year or two after they graduate to ask them what worked and didn’t work in their high school career. You could also get data from the postsecondary institutions most of your students go to on how well they’re succeeding there. Some of this information is easier to get than others, but the general point is to pay attention to your students and your recent graduates and listen to what they’re telling you about their high school experiences.
I would also argue that—like the San Jose Unified School District—schools should encourage as many students as possible to take what San Jose calls the “A–G” curriculum: the courses that University of California requires students to take for admission. In order to do that, you have to provide support to your teachers. Many of them will need to upgrade their content expertise and maybe their pedagogical skills to teach [the courses] to a larger number and a more diverse set of students. And, to start this at ninth grade you have to look back to middle school and make sure you’re giving students the help they need all the way through. Also, look at the courses you’re currently offering. Eliminate those that aren’t rigorous and push kids into either college prep or career/technical education courses that really do incorporate a rigorous curriculum. You can do that without waiting for the state to mandate anything.
Another thing worth looking at is the movement to create small schools or theme-based schools with a special focus. That’s a fairly complicated thing to do, and do well. But where there are large comprehensive high schools that lose a lot of kids along the way, it’s worth considering those kinds of strategies to improve preparation, increase the graduation rate, and have kids take a more rigorous curriculum. That approach wouldn’t be appropriate in rural communities that already have small high schools, and it might not be a panacea in some of the wealthier suburban communities. But, if you look at what’s happening in New York City—which made a concerted effort to replace large, often failing high schools with a number of smaller, focused high schools of choice—many of them have substantially increased the graduation rate and are getting more kids to succeed in postsecondary education.
For more information about the work of Achieve, see www.achieve.org 