High School for the 21st Century

McGraw-Hill Research Foundation
Policy Paper

A HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

By
Jordan Goldman, Founder and CEO, Unigo.com
Gerry House, President and CEO, Institute for Student Achievement
Jeff Livingston, Senior Vice President, Career and College Readiness,
McGraw-Hill Education

“High school is a valuable time in the life of young adults. It should be the time when they
acquire the skills and knowledge they’ll need to succeed at whatever they choose to do. It
shouldn’t be just four years of proms and football games.” -- Jeff Livingston

“We don’t know what the future is going to bring, so the best way to prepare our students is to
help them become independent thinkers and learners.” -- Gerry House

“Imagine if no one went to college at all -- that everyone had to leave high school and go
right out into the world? What would people need to know to survive and do well? That’s how
we should be preparing our high school students.” -- Jordan Goldman

Introduction

On September 29, 2010, the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation hosted its first day-long
Innovation in Education summit at McGraw-Hill headquarters in New York City. The
Foundation, a non-profit organization founded with support from The McGraw-Hill Companies,
brought together education experts and entrepreneurs from different areas to discuss the critical
challenges facing U.S. education today and offer innovative approaches.

The three of us were invited to participate in a panel titled “What is the Purpose of High
School?” -- a question that is being asked often lately by educators, parents, teachers and high
school students. The question itself is an indictment of sorts; it suggests that we, as education
professionals, may not have a satisfactory answer. At the very least, it implies that different
people will have different answers. It’s very clear, however, that answers are desperately needed.
Consider these comments in the February 2011 Harvard Graduate School of Education report,
Pathways to Prosperity: “The American system for preparing young people to lead productive

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and prosperous lives as adults is clearly badly broken. Millions of young adults now arrive at
their mid-20’s without a college degree and/or a route to a viable job.”

We were surprised to discover that, despite coming from three very different sectors of the
education community, we shared a broad, basic consensus about the primary purpose of high
school. The purpose of a high school education, we decided, is:

To prepare all high school students for whatever comes next in their lives --
regardless of whether that involves study at a four-year or community college,
attendance in an occupational training program, finding a job or volunteering
for service in the military -- by teaching them to apply critical thinking and
knowledge to solve problems and work collaboratively with others.

The real question, we agreed, is not “what is the purpose of high school,” but “are high schools
delivering on that purpose?” Based on both statistical data and overwhelming anecdotal
evidence, the answer, sadly, is “no.” Consider that:

 An unacceptably high number of U.S. high school students drop out before graduation,
about one in every three based on most recent data;i

 The United States now ranks as low as 18th among developed nations in high school
graduation ratesii;

 A Pentagon report released in 2009 found that as many as 75 percent of young people age
17 to 24 are not fit for military service, with 25 percent of those not fit because they lack
a high school or general equivalency diploma (GED);iii and

 The most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test results,
released in December 2010, had U.S. students ranking 17th in Reading, 23rd in Science,
and tied with Ireland for 32nd place in Math.iv

Even many of those who do manage to graduate from U.S. high schools today are nevertheless ill
prepared for either college-level study or the job market. Statistics show that:

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 Twenty-five percent of college freshman in the U.S. drop out before the end of their first
semester;v

 One out of every three college freshman in four-year institutions needs remedial classes
(nearly one out of every two -- 45% -- in two-year colleges)vi; and

 Many U.S. employers report they cannot find enough employees who possess the basic
skills necessary for the jobs they want to fill.vii

Obviously, high schools in the U.S. could be doing a better job of making students ready for
whatever they choose to do with their lives. But what, exactly, should be done to help make high
school in the U.S. more relevant and effective?

During our panel discussion, and in a series of informal talks held afterward, we established four
core areas where we believe U.S. high schools could and should begin to take strong steps to
change their approach. We did not agree completely on the relative importance of each of the
steps described below, but we did concur that each was, by itself, an important component
toward creating the kind of U.S. high school system that would better prepare our students for
success in the 21st century.

We believe U.S. high schools need to:

1. Develop a New High School Curriculum that is More Flexible, Responsive and
Relevant to Student Needs -- With U.S. students falling behind those from other nations
in academic achievement, everyone agrees the nation needs more rigorous education
standards (no one suggests lowering them). But a truly effective curriculum would also
focus on developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Schools need to be
more responsive in providing students with the specific knowledge, training and life
skills they will need for success in a 21st century workforce, and students should have
more autonomy and flexibility in designing their own courses of study based on their
future career interests.

2. Make Better Use of New Technology -- high schools must do a better job of
incorporating the latest digital and online educational tools when it comes to both

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teaching their students and assessing what they’ve learned. This includes: Taking
advantage of the potential in online courses; adopting new Internet-based instructional
and assessment platforms; and recognizing the power of social networking tools such as
Facebook and Twitter. Educators have so far viewed social networking as more of a
distraction than an aid to education. But we must reach students where they live, and
students today live in a high-tech, mobile and inter-connected social media world -- at
least, they do until they walk into their high school buildings.

3. More Professional Development for Teachers in How to Use Education Technology -
- Teachers are currently not adequately trained in their college education programs in the
latest digital teaching technologies and adaptive learning tools, nor are they provided
with the level of ongoing professional development on the job that would enable them to
generate, collect and use ongoing formative assessment data to focus their instruction and
respond more quickly to individual student needs.

Finally, we all agreed strongly that the most important thing we could do to make high school
more effective in preparing our young people would be to:

4. Completely Re-imagine High School from the Ground Up to Meet the Education
and Training Demands of a New Century -- High school was originally designed to
meet the needs of a 19th century industrial economy. And it succeeded at that beyond
anyone’s expectations. Universal secondary education helped to make the U.S. an
economic powerhouse in the 20th century. Today, in the 21st century, we need to look at
the institution of high school with fresh eyes and embark on a course to make it relevant
once again. We should re-examine our previous notions of what high school is and does
-- and how it does it -- and design a new paradigm that will seek to do a much better job
of providing the knowledge and skill sets our young people will actually need to navigate
and succeed in an inter-connected, global economy.

The undeniable fact is that if we were designing our system of high school from the ground up
today, it would almost certainly not look the way it does now. High school, as an institution, has
changed very little since it was pioneered in the U.S. in the latter part of the 19th century. But the
world has changed a great deal.

The Development of the U.S. High School -- How it Got That Way

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“Today’s workforce demands employees with new skills, such as the ability to work
collaboratively across cultures and adapt quickly to changing technologies. Yet the U.S. high
school persists in being run on an agrarian schedule, organized along the lines of a factory.”
-- Jordan Goldman

The U.S. was the first nation to offer every young person the opportunity to obtain a free public
secondary education. By 1910 only nine percent of people in the U.S. had finished high
school,viii and yet the U.S. was already ahead of all other nations in terms of post-elementary
enrollment rates.ix By 1935, 40 percent of U.S. citizens had finished high school,x and less than
a decade later the U.S. could boast having the best educated workforce in the world.xi

Up until the end of World War II, the overriding goal of most U.S. high school students was
simply to graduate. Employment opportunities then were largely to be found in factories,
offices, on sales teams or the farm. A high school education was considered adequate
preparation for performing entry-level duties in any one of those sectors.

A college education was reserved for the select few who planned to pursue professional careers
in medicine, science, law, public policy or education. Only about ten percent of graduating high
school students went on to post-secondary study until the mid-1940s,xii when the GI bill sent
thousands of returning World War II veterans off to college, fueling yet another period of
economic expansion in the U.S. in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Starting in the late 1960s, the millions of Baby-Boomer children of the WWII generation began
to view college as their natural next step after high school, and by the 1970s a college degree was
seen by most people in the U.S. as the key to obtaining – not just a job – but a career.

The idea that getting into college was the primary purpose of a high school education took hold
during this time and continues to color our approach to high school today. Unfortunately, high
schools tend to focus on making their students “college-eligible” as opposed to “college-ready.”

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U.S. High School Today -- Who is Being Left Behind?
“We have to look at high school now with fresh eyes and ask: ‘who are we serving and who
are we leaving out?’” -- Gerry House

A 2009 Deloitte LLP survey found that 48 percent of high school students believe the chief focus
of their school is to prepare them for college, and 42 percent of their parents agree. Interestingly,
only nine percent of teachers in the study felt the same way. And while 96 percent of low-
income students questioned said they would “definitely” (70%) or “probably” (26%) attempt to
go on to college, only about one in four (27%) believe they are “very prepared” to handle
college-level course work.xiii

The result of viewing high school as little more than a stepping stone to college is that U.S. high
school students planning to continue their education after graduation can now be divided broadly
into three groups:

1. Those who have known almost since birth that they are destined to go to college. Many
of these students are from upper-income families where one or both of the parents have
college degrees. Students in this group generally do well in college because high schools
have prepared them with college-level courses through advanced placement (AP) classes,
the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, or other college-prep curricula available to
the highest performing students.

2. The second group comprises lower-income students -- often urban minorities from the
inner-city “dropout factories” as well as rural young people of all ethnic groups-- who see
post-secondary education and career training as their ticket out of poverty and into the
middle class. To the surprise of some people, these students often do very well after high
school because they are highly motivated to succeed.

3. A final, very large group includes students who are capable of earning passing grades in
high school, but who do not qualify for the advanced classes. They are often from
middle- or lower-middle income families -- sometimes the first in their families to attend
an institution of higher learning. They go to college because, after all, that is supposedly
the entire purpose of high school. They also go because all of their friends are going.

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The students from this last group are usually neither very prepared for college-level work nor are
they particularly motivated. They view college as “high school grade 13,” and they are the
students most likely to drop out their freshman year, leaving them both unprepared for a 21st
century job market and beginning their adult lives already saddled with debt from student loans.

Why Stay in High School if the Focus is on College and You Know You’re Not Going?
“When we talk about kids who drop out, we tend to talk about them as people who don’t know
any better -- ‘Gee, aren’t these kids making a terrible mistake?” But maybe we’re talking
down to them. Kids drop out of high school when they stop having a reason to come. Give
them a reason to come -- give them some training that will actually put them on a path to
making a decent living -- and they’ll be there.” -- Jeff Livingston

Focusing almost exclusively on preparing for college ignores the needs of those students who
have no plans to pursue a college education -- either because they lack the academic ability, the
financial means or because their teachers have not sufficiently encouraged or motivated them to
apply.

These students -- many from inner-city and minority backgrounds -- see very little reason to
remain in high school, particularly if they have already become parents themselves or need to
help their own parents economically. High school simply does not appear relevant to either
their current lives or to the kind of future they can imagine for themselves. And the number of
high school students dropping out early is trending upwards again after a short period of decline.

High school graduation rates hit a peak in 1969, when 77 percent of students earned diplomas,
and have been lower ever since, falling to 65.7 percent in the 1996-97 school year. Efforts to
reverse the trend caused graduation rates to climb back to 70 percent for the 2003-2004 school
year, before beginning to slip downward again.

In 2006-2007, the last year for which official figures are available, the high school graduation
rate fell to 68.7 percent, down from 69.2 percent the year before.xiv The rate is expected to

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continue its downward trend, with an average of 7,200 students dropping out of high school
every day in 2010xv.

Vocational Training and Apprenticeships -- An Opportunity Missed
In some countries they do a very hard and fast division of students into those who are going to
college and those who will be going to a craft school or into some kind of apprenticeship
program. In the U.S., we divide our kids into two groups, too. Except we say ‘this group goes
to college, and this other group drops out, and we don’t know where they go.’” -- Jeff
Livingston

Another casualty of viewing high school as nothing more than a stepping stone to college, is that
high school vocational and technical programs have fallen by the wayside and have not evolved
to keep pace with the technology advances of the past few decades.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, vocational training meant developing the skills necessary to repair a
car, build a simple piece of furniture or style hair. Many of the college educated people who
determine education policy today still believe this to be true. They are professionals, college
grads themselves, and have little direct experience with the technical trades.

But technical training in the 21st century is very different from what it was only a few decades
ago. Today it is more about knowing how to install and repair advanced information and
communications systems, how to operate a CAT scan or handle computer-driven manufacturing
equipment than it is about wood or metal shop. Even truck drivers, assembly line and warehouse
workers often need to know how to operate a sophisticated computer system to do their jobs
properly nowadays.

In addition, technical fields that previously required extensive training but not necessarily a
college degree -- such as IT maintenance, medical tech or nursing -- now require people with a

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sophisticated college-level background in subjects such as advanced algebra, applied physics,
programming skills, anatomy, statistics or bio-chemistry.

In Germany, Austria, France and some other countries, large numbers of students begin entering
formal apprentice programs designed to develop highly trained technicians and crafts people
possessing marketable skills. In the U.S., on the other hand, only about 0.3 percent of the
workforce currently acquire their skills through an apprenticeship.xvi

A 21st Century U.S. High School System for a 21st Century World
The distressing fact is that the bar has been raised for success in the 21st century, but the bar has
remained the same -- or it has actually been lowered -- at many high schools in the U.S. So large
numbers of students are leaving high school -- with or without a diploma -- having few of the
skills or very little of the knowledge necessary to compete in the modern world.

Can we do better? We think the answer is: “We must.” But how?

As noted earlier, we believe there are four inter-related areas where high schools need to step up
their game to make our students -- and eventually our workforce -- more competitive with those
from other countries:

 A new curriculum that focuses on developing critical thinking, teamwork and problem-
solving skills as opposed to just “knowing the answer;”

 Better use of new technology tools, for both teaching and assessing individual student
strengths and weaknesses, as well as for encouraging more creative, critical thinking and
problem-solving;

 Better and more professional development for teachers to support them in using
technology to engage students, to enhance students’ understanding and to help make
learning more meaningful; and

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 Taking a fresh look at the very structure of high school and questioning all of our
assumptions about how it should work in pursuit of a new paradigm.

I. A New Curriculum for a New Century
“What do we want our students to demonstrate they can do when they leave high school? I
think we should want them to be able to use their minds well -- to think, to reason -- to work
cooperatively and be more self-directed.” -- Gerry House

The purpose of high school today is to learn how to learn, which means understanding how one
goes about gaining new knowledge and skills and developing the habit of lifelong learning.

That used to be what a college education was all about. But in today’s world, where technology
leaps forward at such dizzying speed and occupational skills must be continually updated, high
school must now become the place where young people learn how to learn and adapt.
Otherwise, by the time they get to college -- or any other kind of post-secondary education -- it’s
often too late for them to acquire the skills and abilities necessary to engage in lifelong learning.

Fortunately, new technologies and increasingly less expensive computing power make it easier
to tailor courses of study to small groups and even to individual students. It is now both possible
and necessary to create high school curricula that are adaptable to students’ focused career plans.

Components vital to any new high school curriculum should also have:

1. A Greater Focus on Critical Thinking
There is a great difference, writes noted educator Dr. Douglas Gerwin and his co-author
David Mitchell, between simply memorizing content and developing the capacity to learn.
“In the one, you receive something from without; in the other, you generate something from
within.” xvii

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High school students need to have their abstract thinking skills challenged, their ability to
weigh the validity of different ideas exercised, and their overall participation in the world of
events and ideas outside the classroom encouraged.

2. A Greater Focus on Problem Solving
One of the deficiencies with today’s basic high school curriculum is that it does a very poor
job of designing either course work or experiences that encourage students to approach
problems that have no clear solution and work with others to solve them.

Problem-solving and collaboration skills are the precise abilities many jobs require today.
But if you were to ask most employers “what skills do you value most in your employees?”
and then ask most recent high school graduates “what skills did you walk away from high
school possessing?” you would see a major disconnect. Employers want people who can
think, solve problems and work across cultural and national boundaries with others -- skills
and abilities our high schools are currently not providing.

3. A Greater Emphasis on Teaching Basic Life Skills
“We say that the whole point of high school is to get into college, and then we do nothing
to show students how they should accomplish that. My company, Unigo, was founded on
that disconnect. We created unigo.com because the high schools were really falling short
when it came to the practical aspects of applying to college.” -- Jordan Goldman

Students should have the opportunity to learn some practical life skills while they are in high
school.

Recent high school graduates are often overwhelmed by the sudden freedom and
responsibility of managing their own lives in college because they have never learned how to
budget their time or finances. They leave high school not knowing how to balance a
checking account or work in teams with others to complete projects.

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High school subjects attempt to be almost exclusively academic, dealing with abstract
concepts such as interpretations of literature, the social impact of historical events, or
mathematical and scientific principles. This kind of content is important and no one suggests
eliminating it. But we need to do a better job of relating academic concepts to real-world
problems and their solutions.

4. More Meaningful External Educational Experiences and Apprenticeships
We want our students to be able to make a connection between school and the larger society -
- whether it is career, work-related, or has to do with being a better citizen. High school
should provide well-defined experiences for students so that they can explore the world as it
relates to the relevance of their learning.

Apprenticeships are one way many European countries keep their manufacturing base and
their technical trades thriving. Approximately 40 percent of teenagers in Austria enter an
apprenticeship program at the end of their compulsory education (at age 15),xviii and the
percentage of young people who go into apprenticeships in Germany, with 342 recognized
trades, is over 50 percent.xix

In the U.S., only a very small percentage of high school kids are in apprentice programs, and
many of those are for Special Needs students, who may go to learn how to operate a cash
register and work in retail. Most U.S. apprentice programs do not provide the kind of
advanced training that could lead to a viable career for someone with an aptitude for
technical study or design.

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II. A Better Use of Digital Tools and New Technologies

Digital communications technologies and the Internet have become an important part of almost
everyone’s daily life today -- especially for teenagers -- except in high school.

Former governors Jeb Bush of Florida and Bob Wise of West Virginia recently released a new
report on digital learning in which they write that “Technology has the power and scalability to
customize education, so each and every student learns … at his or her own pace, … [while
offering] teachers an effective way to overcome challenges and better educate students of all
learning needs …”xx

We agree, and offer the following ideas for bringing high school into the modern digital age:

1. More On-Line Courses
Almost all college students will take at least one online course and most will take more than
a few, but high schools students rarely have the opportunity to do the same; that should
change.

Online courses are the great equalizer. They can provide high-level, individualized
instruction to students across the country -- regardless of where they live or the local
education resources available to them. They are cost-effective, and much of the
infrastructure is already in place.

Online courses could be a boon for students at all levels. They would empower higher-
performing students to study subjects or levels of a subject not offered by their high school;
students can access M.I.T. lectures in physics online now. They could also aid under-
performing students by providing additional help. And they could prove decisive for those

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students who need flexible scheduling to meet job or family obligations while trying to stay
in school and graduate.

With online learning, there is no longer any reason why students always have to actually
come to the high school building to get an education.

2. Ongoing Formative Assessment
Many bemoan the heavy reliance some schools now put on standardized testing and the
“teaching to the test” style of classroom instruction that often results. But the original
motivation behind standardized testing was a good one -- a desire to accrue data on student
performance. Fortunately, there are more effective, less disruptive ways to compile even
more meaningful and useful student performance data than locking everyone into a room
twice a year and giving them a do-or-die test.

Large standardized testing is “summative” by nature -- it can reveal only what students have
or have not learned during the semester or year just passed. But new, web-based digital
technologies allow schools -- and even individual teachers -- to compile large amounts of
“formative” data, which can provide educators with detailed information on how each
individual student is doing -- right now -- while still in the classroom and capable of being
helped.

Built-in, ongoing and formative student assessment goes on in the background while students
are learning. Students are unaware they are being assessed, and so the assessment does not
distort from the learning process the way a large summative test often does. But it does
allow teachers to intervene -- to provide either extra help or more advanced study --
depending on the individual student’s performance and his or her demonstrated
understanding of the material.

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3. Employing Social Media
“School used to be the place where students learned about new technologies. Now kids
learn about cool new stuff outside of school. It makes school look behind-the-curve and
irrelevant.” -- Jordan Goldman

Facebook currently has half a billion users around the world, and young people spend
enormous amounts of time on the Internet interfacing with their friends, watching videos and
playing computer games. These media certainly can be used frivolously, but they can also
serve as important tools for learning.

The U.S. education community has been resistant so far to making use of the Internet,
computer gaming and social media sites for education, seeing them as distractions. But at
their core these media are communications tools like any other. In fact, they are the primary
communications tools used by both high school and college-age students today, and we
cannot ignore that.

Social media combined with e-books is one way to help make learning both more social,
participatory and enjoyable for young people. Imagine an e-textbook integrated with a
Facebook-like social media web page, where students could gather online to discuss their
responses to the text with each other and share ideas as they read.

III. Professional Development for Teachers
“Teacher education programs have to play a larger role in teaching future teachers how to
integrate technology as a powerful learning tool.” -- Gerry House

Education programs at the nation’s teaching colleges will begin preparing their future teachers
for a 21st century classroom when schools begin demanding it. And that will happen within the
next few years, as the coming generation of new parents begins sending their young children to
school.

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This year’s freshman college class is among the first group to have grown up with computers and
the Internet as part of their lives since birth. The people starting families now in their early or
mid-twenties do not remember a time without computers. They will not be satisfied with seeing
their children educated in a 20th century classroom environment. The pressure to add digital-
based adaptive learning tools -- and teachers qualified to use them -- will be intense. Smart
educators will begin to prepare for that day now.

IV. Re-Imagining High School for the 21st Century
“A 9th grade student came into one of our partner high schools with a terrible record of
performance and attendance in middle school. His new high school teachers sat him down
and asked him, ‘Why don’t you come to school? Why don’t you pay attention in class?’ He
said, “It’s all boring; I don’t see the relevance.’ He was very bright, and no one had bothered
to ask him before. He was given more challenging work—work that required him to learn new
knowledge and skills — and his attendance and performance improved But he would have
been written off at most high schools and probably would have dropped out.” It was the
combination of high expectations and high supports that saved him. -- Gerry House

“In high school today you go into a room, listen to a person standing at the front of the room,
and write down everything that person says without question. There are very few other places
in the world where that happens.” -- Jeff Livingston

“There may be something to be gained by deconstructing the way high school works today,
piece by piece.” -- Jordan Goldman

As we continued to discuss how high school could better prepare students for the 21st century,
we agreed that the very structure of how we have organized and continue to run our high schools
-- the traditions that seem to perpetuate year after year without question -- should be
reconsidered.

Most high school classes are the exact same length of time. Students are almost always in
classes with other students who are in the same age and grade. One teacher per class, the same

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teacher for an entire year, and then you often never have that teacher again. Why is it like that?
Are there other ways that might be more productive?

Following are three ways in which we might change how we fundamentally view U.S. high
school in the near future:

1. Stop Thinking of High School as a Building
A high school education need no longer be limited to the physical place.

High school is about learning the things one needs to know to succeed in life. It’s not about
coming to the same building every day and following the same schedule with the same
people. Many businesses are flexible today in offering their employees the opportunity to
tele-commute. Why shouldn’t high schools offer “tele-learning?”

Allowing students who must work or who would like to combine their education with
apprenticeships to take courses online and complete work at night or on weekends could lead
to lower drop-out rates.

And with online, long-distance learning, students need no longer be limited to learning just
those subjects for which the local high school has qualified teachers. Certain rural districts
may not have a qualified AP Math or Computer Science teacher in the area, but with online
technology, a teacher doesn’t even have to be in the same state as the students.

2. Give Students More Options and More Control
Many high school students have the capacity to begin acting like young adults and taking
more responsibility for their own future lives and careers as adults -- and will do so if given
the opportunity.

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Today’s typical high school student is treated too much like the typical middle-school student
and too little like the typical college student. Give people more of a stake in their own lives
and they will respond.

Time, all by itself, is not a cure for immaturity.

3. Create a Structure That Allows for and Encourages Experimentation
High schools should put structures in place that would allow them to experiment with new
programs and ideas, measuring their success (or lack of it) often and re-evaluating them to
determine whether they need to be adjusted or eliminated.

This could prevent high schools simply replacing one orthodox way of doing things with
another. If a system of continuous improvement through experimentation with alternative
structures were put into place, schools could try new ideas in small doses just to see what
works and what doesn’t.

Those ideas that are shown to improve student performance could be integrated into the
broader school environment. This is what businesses do, and what smart educators have
always done on their own. We believe a formal system of experimentation would quickly
show some impressive results and lead to real, much-needed change at the high school level.

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Conclusion
Many U.S. students receive an excellent education in high school, go on to college and
eventually find their way to rewarding careers. But they are disproportionately from higher-
income homes and are no longer the majority.

At the same time, a growing number of U.S. students -- both lower income and middle-class --
are falling by the wayside, either dropping out or graduating without being either college- or
career-ready.

This is happening -- not because the kids aren’t smart enough or don’t know what’s good for
them -- but because high school has become too focused on making students college eligible
without making them sufficiently college and career-ready. At the same time, it is not
encouraging them to develop the kind of critical thinking and problem-solving skills that will
enable them to function in whatever they do after high school, regardless of how technology
develops.

We agree with President Obama and his Education Secretary Duncan when they say that all high
school students should be preparing for either college, a job, or further career and technical
training. In each case, high school students should all be on a path to a career that will be both
financially and emotionally rewarding. Otherwise they are wasting their time and our resources.

U.S. high schools can and should do better by providing our young people with the opportunities
they need to plan their futures. We have the talent and we have the resources; what’s needed is
the political will to support education reform, the courage to admit the system now in place is not
working, and the commitment to taking strong action to build a new type of high school that will
fully prepare all of our students for success in the 21st century.

19

Policy Paper

###


i
Diploma’s Count, 2010 ‐
http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/dc/2010/DC10_PressKit_FINAL.pdf.

ii
Education at a Glance 2009 : OECD indicators, OECD, Paris, 2009. www.oecd.org/edu/eag2009;

iii
Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve:  75 Percent of Young Adults Cannot Join the Military;
2009 Mission: Readiness ‐ http://www.missionreadiness.org/

iv
New York Times, December 7, 2010 “Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators.”

v
The Governance Divide:  A Report on a Four‐State Study on Improving College Readiness and
Success, a report conducted and issued by:  the Institute for Education Leadership, the National
Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and the Stanford Institute for Higher Education
Research, 2005

vi
National Center for Education Statistics, Profile of Undergraduate Students, 2007‐2008

vii
AMA 2010 Critical Skills Survey

viii
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary
Schooling in America, 1910–1940, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1999): 683–723.

ix
Goldin, Claudia, The Human Capital Century and American Leadership:  Virtues of the Past,
Department of Economics Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research, 2001,
p. 4.

x
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary
Schooling in America, 1910–1940, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1999): 683–723.

xi
Shawn Fremstad and Andy Van Kleunen, Redefining Public Education for the 21st Century:
Toward a Federal Guarantee of Education and Training for America’s Workers, Clearinghouse
REVIEW Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, May–June 2006.

xii
U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2003.
20

Policy Paper

xiii
Deloitte 2009 Education Survey Overview, Redefining High School as a Launch Pad

xiv
http://www.edweek.org/ew/dc/2010/gradrate_trend.html

xv xv
Diploma’s Count, 2010 ‐
http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/dc/2010/DC10_PressKit_FINAL.pdf.

xvi
Zakaria, Fareed, How to Restore the American Dream, Time Magazine, Oct. 21, 2010.

xvii
Gerwin, Douglas, Ph.D. and Mitchell, David, What is the Purpose of School? Lilipoh
magazine, Spring 2009.
http://www.lilipoh.com/articles/2009Issues/Spring2009/what_is_the_purpose_of_school.aspx

xviii
^ http://wko.at/statistik/jahrbuch/Lehrling5.pdf

xix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship#cite_note‐10

xx
Digital Learning Now!, Jeb Bush and Bob Wise, Foundation for Excellence in Education,
December 1, 2010.

21

High School for the 21st Century

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