Raising the Educational Achievement of Secondary School Students - Volume 1 Summary of Promising Practices

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Executive Summary

Secondary schools in the 1990s face unprecedented challenges: they must prepare students for a rapidly changing workplace, train students to be effective purveyors of information, and help students become productive citizens. The national education goals call for schools to raise graduation rates and help students attain world class standards. Achieving those goals will require that every school provides stimulating, substantively rigorous opportunities for all students to learn.

Several new federal initiatives are designed to spur efforts at comprehensive school reform and help secondary schools meet the challenge of enabling all students to attain higher standards. Title I of the newly reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), in particular, aims to improve the teaching and learning of youth in high-poverty schools. Rather than adding on to or replacing small parts of a secondary school student's day, as Chapter 1 services typically did, Title I will serve as a resource for the restructuring of a school's regular program. Four principles, embodied in the legislation, will characterize new Title I programs:

High academic standards with components of education aligned so that everything is working together to help children reach those standards.
A focus on teaching and learning.
Flexibility to stimulate local initiative coupled with responsibility for student performance.
Links among schools, parents, and communities.

Two other federal initiatives--the Goals 2000: Educate America Act and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act--complement and reinforce Title I at the secondary level.

Middle schools and high schools that are successful in improving the academic performance of their students have a number of features in common. They offer students access to challenging, high-quality curriculum and instruction, and they have adopted new organizational arrangements that support improved learning opportunities. They link school work to future opportunities, and they actively address the needs of the whole student, creating networks of support that allow students to succeed. Finally, they use many resources to energize and sustain their work, chief among them the enhanced professional skills of their faculty.

This idea book is one in a series designed to support the implementation of the new Title I legislation. This volume presents research-based ideas and promising practices for schools searching for ways to increase students' chances of academic success. A companion volume contains profiles of successful secondary schools that illustrate how they have put principles of good practice to work.

Strengthening And Enriching The Secondary School Curriculum

Successful secondary schools engage students in work that is challenging and worthwhile and ensure that all students, including low achievers, have access to high-quality, academically rigorous subject matter.

Engaging Students in Authentic Work

Students are more likely to engage in academic work when they perceive that it is significant, valuable, and worthy of their effort. Secondary schools demonstrating success with students at risk of school failure have engaged students in lessons that make sense to them and show them the connections between what they learn in school and what they experience in their lives outside of school. These lessons start with what children know and expose them to applications of higher-order thinking traditionally offered only to advanced learners.

Restructuring Curriculum

For schools featured in the companion volume to this idea book, creating a curriculum that is challenging and engaging for all students has involved four kinds of innovation:

Substantive depth in curriculum. Sustained study of a few central themes can give rise to richer, more complex understanding than the outcomes produced by study that is thinly scattered over a wide array of topics and skills.
Interdisciplinary learning. Increasing depth often requires an interdisciplinary approach; integrated curriculum often complements reforms that aim to provide students with deeper understanding of complex ideas and related information.
Internships, community service, and service learning. Internships, paid employment, and community service, combined with classes that allow students to reflect on and learn from their experiences, offer the foundation of authentic learning experiences that nurture students' academic and social competence while producing work of value to the community.
Integration of academic and occupational focus. Programs organized around a particular academic or career focus create a learning environment that capitalizes on the common goals and interests of students.

Increasing All Students' Access to Challenging Curriculum

The original rationale for tracking and other forms of ability grouping held that such practices benefitted high and low achievers by enabling teachers to tailor instruction to their special needs. However, current research indicates that low-track students perform poorly in school in part because they receive less extensive and effective instruction overall. Among the approaches schools have used to increase access to challenging curricula for all students are:

Replacing traditional tracks with heterogeneous grouping and employing new instructional strategies to ensure all students' success. When properly implemented, cooperative learning, for example, stimulates individual achievement and student integration by ability level.
Integrating academic and vocational education. Students in vocational programs can master essential college preparatory content if they are encouraged to take high-level courses in a program of study planned around their vocational interests.
Promoting students' success in challenging coursework. Detracking schools can adopt effective programs that prepare students to succeed in courses such as eighth-grade algebra and ninth-grade geometry--the gateways to advanced work that is the prerequisite for career development.

Adapting Organizations To Increase Learning

To support innovations in teaching and learning, successful secondary schools develop new organizational arrangements, as needed. Two approaches are particularly rewarding: creating communities of learners on a manageable scale, and restructuring uses of time.

Creating Communities for Learners

Successful secondary schools create communities of students and teachers where learning is supported and valued. They often organize into small sub-units, sometimes based on a single academic or occupational focus:

Smaller school size. A growing body of research on the effects of school size supports arguments for downsizing (Howley, 1989). Keeping learning communities small allows teachers to develop individualized learning plans for students who need them; students and teachers get to know and understand each other better.
Schools-within-schools address the impersonal nature of comprehensive high schools by creating a home for students and teachers who share an interest or career orientation. Teachers in these smaller units find it easier to collaborate over common learning goals and behavioral expectations; similarly, students see themselves as part of a learning community with clearly defined goals and expectations.
Clusters, houses, and teams provide another way to divide teachers and students into more manageable groups. Usually, two to five teachers assume primary responsibility for a proportionate number of students. Because they control scheduling, they can arrange special learning opportunities extending beyond the traditional class period, regroup students for special projects, offer interdisciplinary units and courses, and make other adjustments to accommodate team needs.
The role of choice. Seasoned observers of successful secondary schools report that allowing students some freedom in choosing their school community may lead to greater commitment and deeper engagement in learning.

Using Time Flexibly

Besides reorganizing work groups, successful secondary schools use scheduling systems that permit adjusting of time allocations to accommodate diverse learning experiences. A common approach to reconceiving the use of time is block scheduling, in which teachers can create daily class periods that last from an hour to 90 minutes or more. The extended period frees up time for complex projects, and teaching longer and fewer periods can reduce the number of students that teachers see in a day.

In addition to dividing up the school day differently, a number of restructuring schools have loosened the boundaries of the traditional school day or year to accommodate alternative learning experiences. In a more flexible school week, high school students can combine their program of regular classes with internships or courses at local community colleges or universities; other schools add evening classes and summer sessions to expand learning opportunities for students.

Linking Schooling To The Future

To function as informed and productive citizens, students should graduate from secondary school as skilled learners, able to continue their education in college, technical school, or work-based programs and acquire the skills they need to achieve their adult goals. As they develop into competent adults, students must become lifelong learners, able to pursue their learning goals beyond their formal training.

School-to-Work Programs

Several school-to-work program models have proven successful in recent years:

Tech prep programs connect the last two years of high school with two years of postsecondary education. Academic experience is often coupled with opportunities for work experience, although students receive most of their training in the classroom.
Youth apprenticeship programs emphasize employer-provided training. During their work experience, participants are paid for their work and monitored by a skilled professional at the job site.
Career academies use a school-within-a-school model and focus on a specific career field, such as health or finance, that presents good employment opportunities in the local market. Academies offer curricula that integrate career topics with applied, hands-on activities and rigorous academic courses, supplemented with training at the workplace.

For the successful schools profiled in the companion volume to this idea book, exposing students to careers and postsecondary education options is an important part of their mission. Among their career awareness activities are field trips to workplaces, job shadowing programs, and career days.

College Prep Programs and Support to Attend College

Successful secondary schools expand students' visions, encouraging them to continue their formal schooling beyond the twelfth grade. Schools that are successful in helping their students continue with further education provide support by coaching them through the application process, guiding their search for financial aid, and, in other ways, making postsecondary education a viable option.

Creating Networks of Support for Students

Networks of support that address students' academic and personal needs can enable at-risk secondary students to persist and succeed in school. For at-risk students in particular, schools must take an active role in responding to personal, emotional, and basic survival needs that frequently go unmet in traditional school environments.

School Membership

A sense of school membership is an important prerequisite for student success. Co-curricular activities such as student government, academic or special interest clubs, theater and music groups, and intramural sports teams have traditionally enhanced students' sense of school membership by providing them with additional avenues in which to succeed and find a "niche" in the life of the school. Fostering a strong sense of school membership for students who feel disconnected also requires an expanded role for teachers, as they seek to meet students' social and personal, and academic needs. Besides encouraging student participation in co-curricular activities, schools may attempt to develop a sense of school membership through:

Peer tutoring and mentoring activities that can stimulate students' commitment to school by linking them with other members of the school community. Recognizing that they can offer something of value can be an important source of motivation for students.
Adult mentoring programs that provide an opportunity for students to form a close relationship with an adult connected with the school.

Student Advising

Although guidance counselors traditionally serve as students' primary advisors, their ability to provide the support that at-risk students need is often limited by overwhelming caseloads. Most schools profiled in the companion volume to this idea book have taken steps to ensure that students have sustained contact with adults who serve as advisors. Small-group advisories, homerooms, or other arrangements enable teachers or other staff to actively provide guidance and monitor the academic and social development of students.

Safe and Disciplined Schools

In a school setting, harmonious interaction between students and teachers requires substantial agreement about the expected norms of behavior. All students must know their obligations and be supported in meeting them. In safe and disciplined schools, students develop self-management skills through classroom routines and school practices that encourage them to contribute positively to the learning of others. One way they can learn appropriate behavior is from adult modeling and coaching. Disciplined schools also take steps to strengthen school safety measures.

Creating Partnerships with Families

Parents and other family members are crucial links in the network of support that students need to succeed in school. Parents and other family members influence their children's academic and social development by supervising how they spend their time outside of school; fostering the development of their children's confidence and motivation to become successful learners; and influencing the work of schools through their participation in governance, advisory, and advocacy groups.

Although research indicates that students of all ages do better in schools where parents and other family members are involved, there are few empirical data that show which strategies for fostering partnerships with families work best at the secondary school level. It appears that the same principles that govern successful elementary school parent involvement programs hold true for middle schools and high schools as well. Schools must view parent involvement as a process rather than a series of isolated events; communication between the school and families should be ongoing and two-way; and there must be commitment on the part of leadership coupled with provisions for on-going assessment of parent involvement efforts to inform future planning.

Developing Comprehensive Support Systems

A school-based program that incorporates social, economic, and health services--usually provided by agencies other than the school itself--can help reduce dropout rates, improve student achievement, and promote long-term self-sufficiency. Among the services having the potential to increase the capacity of students to fare better in school are child care, health care, transportation to and from school and work, family support services, and substance abuse treatment.

Resources For Improvement

Secondary schools with well-deserved reputations for effectiveness use many resources to nurture and sustain their growth. Among the most important of these resources is school faculty.

Staff Development

Adopting the innovations that contributed to their effectiveness led many of the schools in the companion volume to this idea book to engage in more extensive, long-term professional development efforts than they had previously undertaken. Successful staff development programs include the following components:

New methods and materials. Professional development activities must cultivate teachers' willingness to replace the familiar with new methods and their competence to do so.
Peer collaboration. Many new approaches to teaching described here--interdisciplinary courses, schools-within-schools, etc.--require extensive collaboration among peers. Professional development activities should help faculties develop new norms that nurture useful collective efforts.
Principles of reform. To support the critical thinking and explorations demanded by new curriculum and instructional programs, professional development activities must cultivate participants' deep knowledge of subject matter and their understanding of key principles of action.
Sharing responsibility and authority. Teachers testify to the importance of establishing a professional climate that accepts occasional floundering as the natural consequence of trying out promising new approaches. They discovered that, over time, thoughtful experimentation and reflection generate a culture that assumes continuous professional growth.

Other Resources

When teachers are involved in setting goals, designing reforms, brainstorming options, and making implementation decisions, changes are more likely to result in long-term improvements.

Successful projects typically engage teachers in decisionmaking and problem-solving early and often, and this engagement contributes to the staff commitment that real change requires. Active engagement in planning and time to reflect on their experiences as they unfold permit faculties to adjust courses thoughtfully and make appropriate haste. Finally, change requires extra resources--for training, released time, new materials and equipment, and time for coordination and management.

The resources available to schools--faculty expertise, time, and money are crucial in enabling schools to engage students in the business of learning, set high standards for student success, and provide the support students need to succeed.
-###-

[Acknowledgements]

[Introduction]