The American Diploma Project and Standards First

by David Majesky

The American Diploma Project (ADP), a joint effort of Achieve, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and the Education Trust, has completed a study of the graduation requirements of all 50 states and has found them lacking.

ADP set out by researching not what students should learn, but what was essential for them to learn in order to be successful in either post-secondary study or on the job. Their thinking was that students would either move from high school to college or to work and that even students who attended college first needed to be prepared to join the workforce. One critical recommendation of ADP was the need to ensure that students who earn a high school diploma are ready both for a challenging post-secondary experience and for the world of work.

The study asked two key groups—college professors and employers (with assistance from high school teachers)—what they thought students needed to bring to a first-year college course or to a "high performance workplace" in order to succeed. From this data, they generated a set of mathematics benchmarks and English benchmarks that matched those requirements. To illustrate each benchmark in action, ADP was able to establish examples drawn from college assignments and from real-world workplace tasks.

These benchmarks can be used to assist states in the critical work of revising their original sets of standards. They can also help demonstrate to students the expectations that they will most certainly face after leaving high school. Still another value of these revised benchmarks in English and mathematics is the interpretation of the benchmarks for teachers. Correlating the ADP benchmarks to the Ohio benchmarks—while not a simple task—would be a valuable use of a curriculum developer's time, helping teachers understand what is expected of each benchmark, how others view it, the relationship to national standards, and the value of the benchmark in the workplace. The examples in mathematics alone would enhance the program in any high school that chose to study them.

The Ohio Department of Education has engaged ORC's Standards First to correlate the new competencies, as they are developed, to each of the Technical Competency Profiles. Throughout the winter months, ORC has aligned technical competencies in Information Technology and Construction Technologies with the academic content standards in mathematics and English language arts for the 8-10 and 11-12 grade bands. When these are published, teachers will have the added advantage of seeing how the competency is related to academic content. As part of this project, Standards First will also provide a short "teacher suggestion" section for each benchmark, which will assist teachers in implementing the ACS benchmark.

The big question, of course, is whether or not the melding of academic content and career technical content is a realistic possibility, or if it is just another academic pipe dream that looks good on paper, but cannot be achieved. The answer is that this kind of academic and career technical implementation can work and is working. In its February 7, 2005, edition, the New York Times profiled Brooklyn's Automotive High School in a story entitled "Vocational School Aims for Mechanics Who Can Write."

The article describes how this school was on the verge of shutting down due to lack of educational progress by its students. A new principal, Melissa Silberman, led the charge to reinvigorate the school with coursework that values high expectations for all of the students. Silberman stated, "I believe that tomorrow's mechanic can love classical music, and tomorrow's mechanic can be a scholar, and those things can exist side by side." And she began to work with faculty to develop a new model for vocational/academic integration.

At the time of the article's publication, Automotive High School was still just a short while into its restructuring; even so, it is already showing signs of progress. There has been a re-introduction of advanced study courses, a new emphasis on college counseling, and the creation of team efforts between vocational and academic teachers, formerly bitter antagonists. The story described this new approach:

Efforts are also under way to meld the school's vocational and academic missions. This semester, a business teacher, a math teacher and a shop teacher are running a class together; their students will run a school store. Other teachers are honing an English curriculum meant to lure in car buffs with literature like Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and selections from "Drive, They Said: Poems About Americans and Their Cars."

Automotive High School is just one example of a school that recognized the needs of students to be prepared for the world of work and for post-secondary experiences. Both academic content and career technical teachers have the obligation to prepare students for what will be expected of them after high school. Working together—through the new TCPs and by using Standards First instructional and content resources—teachers from both sides of the secondary aisle will be solidly preparing their students for post-secondary education or for the workplace. The American Diploma Project is simply one more resource that can be combined with Standards First to achieve this goal.