When State Policy Undermines Effective Practice:
Too Much of Anything Often Results in Nothing (or Worse)
Dear Colleagues,
When High School Students Have Significant Academic Skill Gaps
A few days ago—in a regularly-scheduled Zoom Professional Learning (PLC) session for an out-of-state District—the conversation shifted to a common (especially post-pandemic) high school dilemma:
“How do you teach high school students who are two or more academic years behind in their foundational literacy, math, and writing skills?”
Knowing that large academic skill gaps are not easily remediated especially in junior and senior-level courses, I responded to the dilemma with one of my instructional principles:
When the gaps between the core instruction and the academic skill readiness of students are too large to remediate, you need to “Re-core the Core.”
Indeed, educational research and practice have shown that when students lack basic, prerequisite literacy, math, and writing skills at the secondary level, they do not effectively learn new “grade-level” material—even with supplemental tutoring focused on remediating the skill gaps.
In other words, “Core Instruction plus Remediation” approaches do not work.
This is because (a) there is not enough out-of-class remedial time to close the already-large academic gaps; (b) the prerequisite skill gaps cannot be bridged during classroom lessons using scaffolded acceleration methods; and (c) these gaps still undermine the learning and mastery of the new, grade-level material.
Thus, the skill gaps are never fully closed, and the student falls academically further and further behind.
Parenthetically, the presence of students with significant prerequisite skill gaps also often presents an instructional “drag” for the students who have the prerequisite skills and are ready to learn. Especially at the high school level, this is disruptive to these students’ quality of their learning, and they may not attain their highest potential levels of continued academic proficiency.
The Instructional Solution for Skill-Gapped High School Students
You need to “Re-core the Core.”
In other words, the students with significant skill gaps need to be taken out of the core curricular courses in question, and scheduled into intervention courses— providing them the intensive remediation needed to close the prerequisite skill gaps as quickly as possible.
[I can already feel some of your “But’s.”]
I say this knowing that these students may not receive graduation-earning credit for the intervention courses, and— therefore—they may not graduate in the “traditional” four years of high school.
But I also say this knowing that:
- If students are missing significant prerequisite skills and they take a Core Curriculum course anyways, they are either likely to fail the course (thus, not earning graduation credit anyways), or they will barely pass the course, missing yet another critical set of skills that will be the prerequisite skills for the next course in the sequence;
- If they take the Intervention course(s) and close the prerequisite skill gaps, they will not only pass and benefit from the next Core Curriculum course, but they will eventually graduate from high school with the cumulative skills needed to proceed successfully into the college, career & technical education, or career option of their choice; and
- The ultimate instructional goal of high school is not about GPAs and the number of courses taken, but about student opportunities to learn, master, and demonstrate their competence across targeted functional skills.
This last statement emphasizes a competency-based approach to high school coursework, instruction, and grading— something that every state in the country now allows.
Softening the Blow: Looking at Some Related High School Facts
Let’s look at some related facts. . . to hopefully soften the “shock” of my “Let’s Go Backwards to Go Forward” high school intervention course recommendation.
First: Most high schools already use a competency-based approach to graduation. . . with their most-capable students (!).
That is, many skilled high school students graduate after their junior year and go to college, or they take dual-enrollment high school/college courses as seniors.
Conversely: Some students—for example, students with disabilities—may (by law) receive high school instruction and related services until they are 21-years-old.
In addition, other non-disabled high school students take adult learning or career & technical education courses when they are 19, 20, or 21 years old until they successfully graduate from high school.
Next: Too many high school students graduate from high school after four years only to spend their first year of college taking remedial courses (national statistics suggest that 25% or more of community college students require such courses).
In essence, despite their high school diploma, the first year of college for these students is functionally their fifth year of high school. Parenthetically, it far more expensive for them to do it this way than stay in high school.
Finally: It is professionally irresponsible to graduate students from high school with the lowest GPA possible knowing that we have not fully prepared them for post-graduation success.
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So, once again. . . high school instruction and graduation should not be about time; it should be about proficiency.
But. . . one of the high school principals attending my virtual PLC last week told me. . . it’s not that simple.
With frustration in his voice, he told me, “But if we don’t graduate enough students in four years, then the State Department of Education 'dings’ us, and we lose our accreditation or go into school improvement status.”
Hmmmmmmm.
The Ghost of “No Child Left Behind”
While we know that high school graduation requirements differ across many states, the U.S. Department of Education—through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA/ESSER)— has now standardized the calculations so that the data can be compared from state to state.
But ESEA/ESSER still lets individual states determine their own accountability criteria when identifying a “low performing high school” that requires “comprehensive support and improvement” (CSI). This includes how different states determine that high schools are not graduating high-enough percentages of students in a timely way.
It is here, critically, where one “ghost” of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—the previous ESEA legislation that guided education between 2001 and 2015—still lurks.
This is because almost 30% of our states still use NCLB’s four-year graduation metric to evaluate high schools relative to their need for systemic improvement.
And yet, when NCLB became ESSA in 2015, some states did change the rigid four-year metric, establishing more flexible “tiered” models that recognized that some students need more time to graduation from high school. These states now evaluate districts on the percent of high school students—graduating from their 9th-grade cohort—who graduate, for example, in four years versus five years versus six years.
For example, in 2021, Alaska, Arkansas, and Ohio school districts receive points for students graduating from high school in both four years and five years, respectfully. Connecticut districts got points for students graduating in four years and six years, respectfully. And, Delaware and New Mexico districts got points for graduating students in four, five, or six years, respectfully.
[CLICK HERE for a State-by-State ESEA State Accountability Spreadsheet]
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Tying this Blog Together
Going back to the high school principal on my Zoom call, and his fear that putting students with significant skill gaps into intervention courses would extend their graduation to a fifth (or more) year. . . resulting in his school being “rated down” by the State Department of Education. . . here is the reality and the issue.
He is right.
As he is in a four-year high school graduation state, his high school might be rated down for too many fifth-year graduates. This might result, over time, in his high school being cited by the State Department of Education as a “low performing” school. And, the high school might then require “remediation.”
But why is he and his staff of professional educators being put in a position of doing what is right for his students, when it may turn out wrong for this school?
And the answer is: He shouldn’t !
As someone who worked for a State Department of Education for thirteen years during the No Child Left Behind era, this situation is just one of many examples where restrictive and inflexible state educational policies undermined effective school- and student-centered practices.
And the solution for THIS dilemma is ?
- Every state in the country should move to a tiered, multi-year, punishment-free approach to track and quantify how many years it takes its students to graduate from high school; and
- Every school district in every state should have an opportunity to qualitatively and quantitatively explain why it took some students longer than four years to graduate.
For example, if a high school had 25% of its students graduating in five years, and showed that their GPAs in the last two years of high school were in the top 50th percentile of all graduating seniors, how could a State Department of Education say that this high school was low performing?
Or, if a high school had 25% of its students graduating in five years, and showed that half of them went to college or community college and none of them needed to take remedial courses, how could a State Department of Education say that this high school was low performing?
And, if a high school had 25% of its students graduating in five years, and showed that the other half went immediately into full employment with salaries above the poverty level—allowing them to live independently, how could a State Department of Education say that this high school was low performing?
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Bad education policies too often result in bad educational practices.
And bad educational practices most often hurt students who are at-risk, underachieving, unsuccessful, and without the power to advocate for themselves.
But in order to change bad educational policies, we also often need to understand the dynamics of how they came about. . . and recalibrate these dynamics.
Too Much of Anything Often Results in Nothing (or Worse)
The fact of the matter is that many of the policies written into No Child Left Behind were based on a belief that school staff were either incompetent or unmotivated, and that punishment—or the threat of punishment—would change their behavior in the classroom or across a school.
Said a different way: When NCLB was passed in 2001, the U.S. Congress and even our President (Bush) believed that educators were untrained, unsupervised, unmotivated, unprofessional, and uncaring relative to students’ academic outcomes.
Indeed, according to NCLB, if a district or school did not attain a progressively increasing level of student academic proficiency, the principal could be fired, the school could be reconstituted, and the staff could be “on the street” looking for new jobs.
And the result?
NCLB did not markedly change students’ functional skill levels in literacy, math, and writing across the country.
While the percent of students “passing” the State Proficiency Test appeared to go up annually in many states, one reason was the use of a “floating proficiency cut score” that different State Education Departments moved from year to year to show statistical increases that did not reflect students’ actual skill improvement. These fluctuations allowed some states to avoid NCLB federal sanctions.
In the end, our schools were no better off because of NCLB. . . and, in fact, many of them were worse off.
For example, at-risk, underachieving, and unsuccessful students did not close their academic skill gaps. Teacher and administrator motivation was strained. And school morale plummeted.
Educational policy—driven by NCLB—was pushed to the extremes. And we were all worse for it.
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But educational policy during that time was not completely punitive in nature. During this same time, many states instituted bonus programs for their most successful teachers.
Here, it was believed that these incentives would motivate large groups of teachers so that large groups of students would become more academically proficient so that large groups of schools would “move the needle” of continuous school improvement.
Once again, it did not work.
This policy bred within-school staff anxiety, jealousy, in-fighting, distrust, disengagement, and disputes.
The teachers who received bonuses often were snubbed by their peers the next year. The teachers who “just missed” getting bonuses were frustrated or disheartened the next year. And the teachers who believed that they “did not have a chance” to get bonuses showed up, but simply rolled over in apathetic resignation.
And who incurred the greatest losses? The at-risk, underachieving, and unsuccessful students.
Teachers did not want to teach them because they would not show the academic proficiency improvements that would earn them a bonus.
And so, these students often got the new, inexperienced, and/or least proficient teachers.
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All of these outcomes were predictable if policymakers had considered the individual, social, and group psychology of motivation and human performance.
At this point, this same psychology needs to be discussed and applied so that NCLB’s legacy of bad policies can be rescinded, to be replaced by newer, scientifically “smarter” policies that will bring us the educational outcomes that we all want.
Ultimately, these policies should lead to practices that:
Ensure that teachers consistently teach (a) academic and (b) individual and group social, emotional, and behavioral information, content, and skills to students in effective, differentiated ways such that, in a developmentally-sensitive way, they learn, master, and are able to independently apply these (a) to real-world problems or situations, and eventually (b) to successful employment and community functioning.
Critically, this is the same goal that we advocated in our four-part Blog Series—earlier this year—that focused on the “Four Pillars of Teacher Preparation and Proficiency.” The four pillars discussed were:
- Teacher Hiring and Orientation
- Teacher Induction and Tenure
- Continuing Teacher Appointments and Coaching, and
- Teacher Leadership and Advancement
[CLICK HERE to LINK to Part IV of this Series]:
Ensuring that Post-Tenure Teachers Remain Actively Engaged as Collaborative Contributors in their Schools: Aligning the Seven Areas of Continuous School Improvement to Teacher Leadership and Advancement (Part IV)
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The point here is that the actions and activities within these pillars help to create a climate and culture of professionalism in a school and district that minimizes the need for artificial incentives, consequences, and punishments.
This professionalism eliminates the need for policies that undermine effective, common sense practice.
And this will relieve administrators of having to choose—literally and figuratively—between (a) providing critical intervention opportunities to high school students with significant prerequisite skills gaps in literacy, math, and/or writing; and (b) potentially sacrificing their high school’s status as a truly effective school because of an archaic, poorly-conceived policy.
Summary
This Blog began by analyzing and then describing solutions for a common high school instructional dilemma that has only been made worse by the pandemic:
“How do you teach high school students who are two or more academic years behind in their foundational literacy, math, and writing skills?”
Knowing that large academic skill gaps are not easily remediated—especially in junior and senior-level courses, we responded an essential instructional principle:
When the gaps between the core instruction and the academic skill readiness of students are too large to remediate, you need to “Re-core the Core.”
Indeed, educational research and practice have shown that when students lack basic, prerequisite literacy, math, and writing skills at the secondary level, they do not effectively learn new “grade-level” material—even with supplemental tutoring focused on remediating the skill gaps.
If we keep these students in their “core” classes, we create a double-jeopardy outcome: They not only fail these classes, but they also never close the academic gaps that contribute to the failure.
But if we hold these students out of these core courses and provide them the intervention courses that will close their skill gaps and help them pass the core courses in the future, a new dilemma results.
This is the dilemma that, because it may take these students more than four years to graduate from high school, the high school make get lower school effectiveness ratings from its State Department of Education, and run the risk of being identified as a “low performing high school in need of comprehensive support and improvement.”
The rest of the Blog discussed the fact that almost 30% of our states still use the four-year graduation metric that they established during the (1991 to 2015) No Child Left Behind years to evaluate high schools’ need for systemic improvement. We share the educational benefits for the states that now include five- and six-year high school graduation rates in their high school evaluation processes. And we discussed why and how these school policies came about, and what happens when bad school policies undermine effective student-centered practices.
In the end, we recommend (a) reviewing and rescinding the archaic, ineffective NCLB policies that still exist; (b) nurturing schools’ climate and culture of professionalism through effective hiring, coaching, and tenuring practices; and (c) taking high school administrators out of situations where doing right by students turns out wrong for their schools.
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As always, I appreciate everyone who reads this bi-monthly Blog and thinks about the issues or recommendations that we share. . . especially in the middle of your summer break.
As we soon begin to re-engage to begin the new school year, know that there are many Project ACHIEVE resources to help you (see our Website Store: www.projectachieve.info/store), and that I am always available for a free one-hour consultation conference call to help you and your colleagues move “to the next level of excellence” relative to your students, school, or organization.
Please feel free to reach out if you would like to begin this process with me.
Best,
