For America’s High Schools, Is College The Problem?

(Spoiler alert: YES. But there is a solution . . .)

If education is the way a society articulates its values, then what, exactly, do we as Americans value?

On this, I fear, the record is clear:

Achievement.

Advancement.

And, ultimately, admission to higher education.

At one point, those priorities were defensible: for generations, high schools were the training ground, college was the finishing school, and a predictable plethora of professional pathways was the payoff.

Today, however, getting into college isn’t the answer -- it’s the problem preventing our country from having a system of schools that are designed to prepare young people to become healthy, autonomous adults.

How did we get here? And how might we find our way out?

First, it’s worth remembering that a structured system of schooling did not exist in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. Motivated by rapid industrialization and waves of immigration, reformers like Horace Mann championed education as, “beyond all other devices of human origin, the equalizer of the conditions of men, and the great balance wheel of the social machinery.”

Complicating their efforts, the country lacked any coherent curricular sense. With no precedent after which to pattern itself, the high schools of the mid-19th century featured a disordered array of courses that most students studied, willy-nilly, for short periods of time.

In response, in 1892, the National Education Association appointed the Committee on Secondary School Studies, which came to be known as the Committee of Ten, to examine high school curriculum and advise on methods, standards and programs. Those recommendations, which shaped the first set of College Entrance Requirements in 1895, supported the teaching of traditional subjects; an eight-year elementary school followed by a four-year high school; a schedule of one period per day for a five-day school week; and an insistence that the purpose of high school should be oriented entirely towards college matriculation.

It was, in other words, the blueprint we are still following today -- a fact that Charles Fadel finds ridiculous.

“We urgently need to modernize knowledge,” says Fadel, who founded the Center for Curriculum Redesign to help schools make education more relevant for the modern world. “That was true before AI’s arrival, but it is even more urgent now as a result. Why do most schools still teach trigonometry, for example, and not, say, data science? The answer is wrapped up in the lingering influence of the Committee of Ten, and the ways in which that anachronistic frame still shapes what colleges prioritize in their admissions.”

Unfortunately, as William Deresiewicz made clear in his best-selling book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, the suffocating influence of that frame has gotten inexorably worse over time: “the college admission rates lower, the expectations higher, the competition fiercer, the pressure on students greater.” And instead of fostering a nation of truly independent schools, we have “thirty-two flavors of vanilla,” and a “resumé arms race” to get kids into college that has birthed a landscape in which schools “manufacture students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid and lost, with little sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”

In his must-read limited Substack series, educator Brent Kaneft sounds a similar alarm. “What kinds of human beings are we trying to help into existence,” he asks. “Not credentialed ones—or not only. Not optimized ones. Not ones who have learned to perform wellness while quietly coming apart. The tragedy is not that we don’t know what human development means. It is that we have built institutions that systematically undermine it while claiming to pursue it.”

Indeed.

And according to Fadel, the Gordian Knot of the whole system is the way we do college admissions. “We must loosen this stranglehold,” he asserts. “We must reward the folks that are doing the more modern things to help young people learn and grow. And we must signal a new preferred value. Only that would open the door to a wider modernization of American education.”

OK, but how?

Could America’s high schools ever be freed from the curricular restrictions of college entrance requirements without endangering the post-secondary success of their students?

In fact, it already happened -- more than eighty years ago.

Which means it could (and must) happen again.

It was called the Eight-Year Study, or “Adventure in American Education,” and it was a landmark experiment in thirty American high schools: a representative sample of public districts, university laboratory programs, and private schools.

To spark innovation, the participants were exempted from the widespread college preparatory program that dominated all high school curricula. The commission sought waivers on their behalf from some 300 colleges and universities -- almost all of which agreed to release those schools’ graduates from the usual admissions requirements for a period of five years. And the educators were told to no longer think of their schools simply as places to do what was laid out to be done, but “as living social organisms of which each student is a vital part.”

Not surprisingly, it was difficult work. When the principals came together to discuss their early progress, in fact, one famously admitted: “My teachers and I do not know what to do with this freedom. It challenges and frightens us. I fear that we have come to love our chains.”

In time, however, the thirty schools widened their apertures, democratized their decision-making, and prioritized their students’ engagement in the learning process. And the results were unequivocal: the graduates of the experimental schools were strikingly more successful in college than the control students from the traditional pathway. “The conclusion must be drawn, therefore, that the assumption upon which school and college relations have been based in the past must be abandoned.”

It was a landmark study, with clear implications for American education that, had they been heeded, would have transformed the sector. But it concluded just as the country was entering the second World War.

Consequently, its lessons were lost.

And so, here we are.

Yet the wisdom of the Eight-Year Study remains, alongside the urgent need to update the work of the Committee of Ten.

Imagine, then . . .

An updated curricular framework that identifies the essential knowledge for the Age of AI.

A pilot study of participating schools who wish to breathe life into that new framework.

And a free pass for them to experiment from America’s colleges and universities, thereby untying the Gordian Knot and beginning the process of reorienting us all towards human development, and away from mere market survival.

We have the design precedent, the civic urgency, and the scientific understanding of what young people actually need in order to learn and grow.

Now we just need the organizing force.