Comment

Hilary Pennington does a fine job of laying out the current state of high school reform in the United States from the perspective of the transition from school, on the one hand, to postsecondary education and careers, on the other.

She describes a fascinating collage of experiments, in which many kinds of distinctions start to blur. High schools offer college programs. Colleges offer high school programs. Academic and vocational goals are combined in the same programs and course. Programs are offered by some things that look like schools and others that do not. And so on.

This picture is both exciting and disturbing. It is exciting because it gives one the feeling that the wraps are at long last being taken off. A system that has patently failed is being challenged as it needs to be. People with interesting and appealing ideas for its rebirth and renewal are being given funds and scope to try out their plans and proposals. It is disturbing because what is most needed is a system and this rampant experimentation and the blurred boundaries could produce something that feels like bewildering chaos to its participants. By way of explaining what I mean by a system, I will provide a composite sketch of the way a number of other advanced industrialized nations organize education for the years in which U.S. students attend high school.

In those countries, all students take more or less the same curriculum for their first nine or ten years, set to the same standards, and then they go their own way. Until recently, those ways were typically very separate, but, in the last few years, that has been less and less true. Now students who have elected gymnasium (the route to university) for their upper secondary path are increasingly making a lateral move afterward to pick up a vocational credential. Similarly, governments are making it much easier for students who start in the upper secondary vocational curriculum to add enough demanding academic courses to qualify for university exams, formerly open only to gymnasium students. Some nations also are creating new paths to the university entrance exams that are just as demanding as the traditional gymnasium but composed of courses that in many cases are built around problems and projects.

These countries are responding to the same pressures the United States is—the drying up of low-skill jobs and the enormous resulting political pressure to provide postsecondary education to virtually everyone—but they have some important advantages.

First, many of these countries have done a much better job than the United States has in the first nine or ten years of the education process. The effects are most visible in the bottom half of the distribution, where students typically achieve at far higher levels than the U.S. lower half. That means that they are better prepared for gymnasium and for a vocational education that requires serious intellectual effort.

Second, in most of these countries, a national school leaving exam serves also as a college (they would say university) entrance exam. There are very few private universities, so it is clear how well a student has to do to go to university, thereby providing a powerful motivation to achieve. In the United States, one can go to most institutions called colleges with no more than a high school diploma, the requirements for which are typically minimal.

Third, these countries have a much stronger tradition of vocational education, typically accompanied by a national system of occupational skills standards and strong employer participation. In most of northern Europe, students who do not meet the skills standards simply cannot get a job in their chosen occupation, so students planning to enter the work force after what the United States calls high school have strong incentives to take tough courses and work hard in school. Employers play multiple roles in the process of training students for their chosen occupations, assessing them against the standards and, in many other ways, easing...