Let High Schoolers Do Less? Let High Schoolers Experience More

The New York Times ran a guest column last month by an English teacher calling for high school students to “do less so they can do better.” Student responses from three schools (two suburban public schools and one private school) on October 10 echoed the stressed-out, over-scheduled message. This well-intentioned plea to dial back expectations aims at a small percentage of US students and offers the wrong prescription. Boredom, disengagement, and weak career preparation are bigger problems. The answer is not less, it’s better experiences and better signals. Better experiences to engage all students and better signals to replace proxy credentials like grades and transcripts with true skill and experience representation.  

Few students play the selective admissions game. 

Less than 3% of high school students are admitted to selective colleges. With pressure from parents, maybe 10% of students opt into the selective college admissions game by seeking perfect grades in AP/honors courses and a “more is better” approach to extracurriculars. It’s an obsolete and inefficient game yielding weak signals. It’s a track packed with isolated low-level tasks in time-based courses valuing memorization and compliance over relevant skill development. 

The exploding cost of selective universities makes the prize for this “race to more”  relatively less valuable. In a world where skills rule, it will matter less where you go to college and more what you can do.  Additionally, the emergence of AI has experts predicting the impact on entry-level professional jobs, like those filled by selective admissions college graduates.

High school students are stressed about context more than curriculum. 

As Professor Scott Galloway notes in his TED Talk, the deck is stacked against young people. Many arrive at school each day coming from challenging environments of unstable housing, food scarcity, and threats of violence. Some are working evenings and weekends in minimum-wage jobs. They are worried about the climate crisis and are pretty sure social security won’t be around for them. 

Some aspire to be first-generation college students but lack access to guidance and financial aid (exacerbated by the recent FAFSA challenge which data indicated reduced the number of college applicants). A recent survey suggests that three-quarters of students feel less than prepared to make college and career decisions. Nearly half of those starting college leave without a credential (whether a diploma or otherwise). This suggests bad-fit decisions and results in the new worst-case scenario of debt without a degree.

Disengagement is a much bigger problem than over-scheduling. 

Many students are not engaged in school. A recent survey found that  60% of high school students are engaged. Only 52% said they enjoy coming to school and 48% said what they are learning in school helps them outside of school. The pandemic increased trauma, hopelessness, and dissatisfaction with traditional education, particularly rote one-size-fits-all learning.  

​​Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, during their 2018 tour In Search of Deeper Learning, similarly found that deep engagement was more of an exception than the norm. Additionally, according to Gallup’s 2023 report, on average, students rate their school’s ability to make them feel excited about learning as a mere C+.

School should be more challenging with high agency,  high interest, and high-value learning experiences, rather than compliance-focused with little voice and choice and few if any opportunities to identify important and interesting problems. 

Solution 1: We need to provide better experiences.

Rather than simply reduce the amount of work, let’s redesign the high school for more work that matters. When surveyed, Americans believe that students need more personalized and purposeful learning. A new Populace study found that “Americans do not care if all students study the same thing compared to them getting to choose courses based on their individual interests.”  They also found that “Americans prefer an education system where all students receive the unique supports that they need throughout their learning and all students get whatever amount of time they need to learn a new concept or skill at their own pace.” Also, “Americans want to grant more control to students themselves, prioritizing a K-12 education where all students have the option to choose the courses they want to study based on interests and aspirations.”  

Research on motivation and engagement supports personalized and purposeful learning. Students are more motivated when they see relevance and have some choice. We summarize this in six core principles to which schools should strive.

First, all students deserve access to high-quality learning opportunities that support long-term success and a strong sense of belonging. Second, every learner is different. By providing (or supporting learners to co-author) personalized approaches that meet challenging outcomes, we increase the chances of success for every learner. Competency-based approaches that focus on mastery rather than time in a class fuel this approach. Third, learning experiences should help students find and develop a purpose or purpose mindset to make a difference in the world. Fourth, when learning leads to awe, wonder, joy, or engagement, outcomes are stronger. Joy can be supported by strong relationships with others (peers, mentors, teachers, etc.). Fifth, building learning experiences that are culturally connected, contextualized, relevant, place-based, or real-world increases engagement and outcomes. And finally, every learner deserves to be intellectually challenged with high expectations.

Solution 2: We need to depend on better signals.  

While a transcript full of uninspiring honors courses and inflated grades based on seat time is a current proxy to gain access to the best universities, we need better signals. Students need rich learning experiences embedded in the school day that are documentable, communicable, and valuable to the learners themselves, higher education, and prospective employers. When we replace traditional transcripts with learning and experience records, we increase access and value to higher education and employers for every student. These experiences connect learners to the real world through internships and apprenticeships, applying what they learn to purposeful work. Using the (still-valuable) core knowledge and skills to apply to novel contexts and challenges, all students get real-world challenging experiences to help guide them towards college and/or career. When each student can showcase these experiences and related skills – accumulated over a high school career – the outdated transcript proxy fades as verified skills surface.

This already is happening. Early efforts in extended transcripts exist in Ohio’s Graduation Seals program, the national Seal of Biliteracy, and New York’s Civic Readiness Seal among many others. And, students from public and private high schools are gaining access to quality universities with competency-based transcripts (without grades) through the efforts of organizations like Mastery Transcript Consortium. Individual schools like Iowa Big, Building 21, and Northern Cass and innovation networks like Collegiate Edu-Nation, P-TECH, New Tech Network, Big Picture Learning, High Tech High, XQ Learning, and CAPS, among others, show that high school can look and feel different – while better preparing all students for the future. 

Solution 3: We need to continue listening. 

We would love to see another round of student responses. The brave students who submitted responses from Glenbard West High School, Hinsdale Central High, and Northwest Academy (which we are confident offer strong and well-funded education programs – even if the students feel like it is too much) are schools that serve a more affluent population. What do the rest of the students think about their high school experience when the primary issue is not the volume of work? 

The answer is not less, it’s better experiences and better signals for all students in every high school. Let’s lean into the work of redesigning the American high school.