For years, America’s approach to education has been guided by an overly simplistic formula: 4+4 — the idea that students need four years of high school and four years of college to succeed in life.
Even with this prevailing emphasis on college, around 40 percent of high schoolers do not enroll in college upon graduating, and only 60 percent of students who enroll in college earn a degree or credential within eight years of high school graduation.
While college completion has positive effects — on health, lifetime earnings, civic engagement and even happiness — it’s increasingly clear that college for all should no longer be our North Star. It’s time to scale up successful programs that create multiple pathways for students so high school is a gateway to both college and career.
More than 80 percent of America’s young people attend public schools, and the challenges many students and their families face are well known. Chronic absenteeism worsened during the pandemic. For many reasons, the country’s lowest-performing students are being left behind. Cellphones and social media have helped fuel an epidemic of bullying, loneliness and mental health struggles among youth. Educators, who have less and less authority in their classrooms, are valiantly fighting those headwinds, too often with insufficient resources.
So far, President Trump’s response has been to order the dismantling of the Department of Education and to propose billions of dollars of cuts to K-12 education that will push our system of public schools closer to the breaking point.
Republican-led states are increasingly embracing school vouchers, which let parents spend public funds on private schools, despite evidence of the negative effect of vouchers on student achievement: Evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio show that these programs can cause drops in test scores. And vouchers divert vital funding that could and should go to public schools. Arizona is spending millions of dollars on vouchers for kids already attending private schools. Students in Cleveland’s public schools may lose up to $927 per pupil in education spending to vouchers each year.
