Comment

A long-standing consensus exists that traditional comprehensive high schools no longer prepare students for the world that has changed around them. Policymakers and parents point to poor student performance on standardized exams and rising educational costs; employers are concerned that recent high school graduates do not have the skills to be productive in technologically advanced markets; recent high school graduates require remedial mathematics and English courses; and students regularly complain that school experiences are trivial, contrived, and meaningless. Despite the widespread agreement, research and efforts to reform high schools have been slowed by the view that reform should begin with children just entering the educational system because changes at the high school level come too late for struggling students.

Hilary Pennington recommends a restructuring of secondary and postsecondary education through a system of multiple pathways to college. In addition, she maintains that this restructuring must be accompanied by clear, uniform standards for all pathways that prepare young people well for college or careers and must build upon reform strategies such as personalization, relevance, and flexible time for graduation.

The strategies proposed in this paper are substantial; they require major changes in institutions and in behavior. The stakes, as Pennington suggests, are high. For many at-risk adolescents, high schools are a pathway to nowhere. Thus, it is important to look critically at the available research evidence and to take advantage of insights gleaned from other major reforms.

Rigorous Evaluations of Small-Scale Programs

The paper describes several reform experiments currently under way that have been successful in improving college matriculation for disadvantaged students. As informative as the successes have been, many reasons can be cited that a few innovative experiments are not a sound basis for transforming high schools. For example, multiple reform strategies are going on at the Fenway High School. Isolating which strategy works and which does not or why is difficult.

Education policies are often critiqued on the basis of the strength or weakness of the research behind them. Policies with high stakes must be based on rigorous research. This would suggest a more substantial research effort for reform, including independent, third-party evaluations using the most appropriate research design. The research for many of the strategies in this paper (for example, standards, personalization, relevance, and flexible time) is based on newly implemented policies (standards) or small-scale experiments (for example, small learning communities and flexible time). The research on these programs is largely descriptive, as many of the reforms were adopted without an evaluation component that followed students well beyond high school graduation through college and into their early labor market experiences.

In addition, little of the research supporting these programs incorporates an evaluation of their cost-effectiveness. No indication is made of the costs associated with implementing these programs on a larger scale. Teacher shortages after the implementation of the California class-size reduction suggests that small-scale experiments can easily run into constraints when they are implemented quickly on a large scale.

Lessons from Other Major Reforms

Changes in the behavior and tasks in any organization are difficult. This is especially true as pathways to college and career are changed because of the many sectors of the economy that would be affected. Not only would curriculum, management, and financing of the high school change in Pennington's proposal, but the behavior and tasks of universities, employers, and federal, state, and local governments would as well. More important, the proposed changes would require parents and students to take additional risks with newly organized schools and degrees. This would require substantial buy-in from each participant and important safeguards for students.

As research on comprehensive reform suggests, buy-in is difficult to achieve. Many changes advocated by design teams in the New American Schools program, for example, met considerable resistance and were heavily dependent on support by districts and principals. More important, a high level of coherence was necessary. All participants needed to understand how changes...