National High School Center

Spotlight

Measuring Skills for the 21st Century
Leaders in government, business, and higher education are calling for today's students to show a mastery of broader and more sophisticated skills like evaluating and analyzing information and thinking creatively about how to solve real-world problems. But standing in the way of incorporating such skills into teaching and learning are widespread concerns about whether or not they can be measured. In Measuring Skills for the 21st Century, Education Sector Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva argues that they can indeed be measured accurately and can serve as common metrics of student achievement. Silva examines a number of new assessment models that do this and that demonstrate the potential to measure complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student's mastery of basic skills and knowledge. These emergent models, she concludes, are critical to meeting our educational goals—to ensure that teachers and students can monitor and improve the learning process—and our accountability goals—to ensure that schools are giving all students what they need to succeed. (December 2008)

Navigating the National High School Improvement Landscape
This web-based map developed by the National High School Center compares high school graduation requirements and minimum state university entrance requirements for the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The tool outlines the alignment of individual states’ graduation requirements and state college entrance requirements indicating whether a gap exists between what students must know to graduate high school and what they are expected to have mastered in order to enter college and succeed. The profiles also capture high school improvement initiatives in place to improve secondary education, as well as a brief description of the programs/strategies and the related research base. The press release for the map may be viewed here. (November 2008)

One Dream, Two Realities: Perspectives of Parents on America’s High Schools
Today in America, there are approximately 25 million parents who have children in American high schools. Their role in the educational achievement of their children is profound. Students with involved parents, regardless of their family income or background, are more likely to earn higher grades and test scores, enroll in higher level classes, attend school and pass their classes, develop better social skills, graduate from high school, attend college, and find productive work. The opposite is true for students whose parents are less engaged. Research confirms what common sense suggests: parents are central to the educational success of their children. In an effort to give parents a voice and to provide ideas on how schools and parents can work more effectively together to strengthen the education of children, this study was based on a series of focus groups and a nationally representative survey of 1,006 parents. (November 2008)

 

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