Preparing Students for Success in Life Beyond High School

The question of how high schools can prepare their graduates to be successful in college and the workforce has received a great deal of attention lately. Bill Gates focused further attention on the subject with the 2009 annual letter he released several days ago as part of his Gates Foundation work. In the letter, Gates challenged the nation to set a goal that 80 percent of American students will graduate from high school ready to attend college by 2025.

What it means to be "ready for college" is not something that Gates defines, although he acknowledges that it will be difficult to measure. And some have already criticized Gates' challenge as unrealistic. However, a number of people besides Gates are thinking a great deal about what it means to be college-ready, including Elena Silva, whose Education Sector report, "Measuring 21st Century Skills," was released back in November. While "21st century skills" is still a slippery and not fully defined concept, Silva makes a good case for how those skills - which she defines as "the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information" - can be measured accurately and comparably, and how they can be integrated into current standardized assessments.

So too is Achieve working toward defining what it means to be college-ready through their American Diploma Project (ADP) Network, to which 34 states (including Pennsylvania) have already committed with the hope of ensuring that their high school graduates are prepared for college or careers. The ADP has done much work to consider what rigorous content and skills graduates need to master in order to succeed after high school.

Of course, I have to mention that Michael Cohen, the president of Achieve, will be talking about the ADP in his upcoming LPC Colloquium Series talk on Thursday, February 12th (which will also be transmitted via live webcast). His talk should merit some attention considering a recent Pennsylvania Department of Education study finding that one-third of recent PA graduates enrolled in a state-owned university or community college are not prepared for college-level math or English and most enroll in a remedial course. Pittsburgh Public Schools are also under pressure to produce graduates who will succeed in college after those graduates receive scholarship money through the Pittsburgh Promise.

Even after we figure out what skills prepare students for life after graduation, and how to assess those skills, new questions come to the fore. What resources do high schools and school districts need to prepare students for college and the workforce? What learning on the part of teachers and administrators is necessary to impart such skills? How can district, state, and national policy support this work? These questions will be as challenging to answer as what skills are necessary in the first place.