Let's be clear: in the information age, a high school diploma is no longer enough, especially for low-income students and children of color. We've been calling on high schools to prepare students for access to college, but even that isn't sufficient: we now know that in order to give these students a chance to succeed in college and in life, they need to be ready to persist all the way through college and graduate with a degree.

Within that frame, I believe the Early College High School (ECHS) model is a strong approach for ensuring that students graduate from high school college-ready - and increasing the likelihood that they will succeed in college. Several of the entrepreneurial organizations that we support at NewSchools – including Aspire Public Schools in California, Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC Schools) in Los Angeles, and Friendship Public Charter Schools in Washington DC – are using this model. For example, Aspire piloted the Early College model at its Benjamin Holt College Preparatory Academy campus, and found that the exposure to college classes and the supportive structure were extremely helpful in preparing Aspire students for the rigors of college. Because students actually earn college credit for these courses as well as high school credit (and may even earn an associate’s degree while still in high school), the ECHS model also decreases the amount of time and money that is required of students to complete a postsecondary degree – no small benefit for the low-income families that Aspire serves. Aspire was so impressed that it decided to make the ECHS model the backbone of its high schools, and today, many of its students are becoming the first in their families to attend college. Despite the popularity of the program, Aspire is currently grappling with how to maintain it in the face of budget cuts that have forced some of its college partners to cancel the classes its students need.

Meanwhile, at PUC Schools in Los Angeles, the organization has partnered with a variety of local institutions of higher education, including a technical college, a community college, and a California State University campus. The partnership has benefits in both directions; colleges tap into a new pipeline of potential students, which should boost enrollment and retention rates, and some of PUC's college partners even use PUC classroom space during off-hours. (For more on PUC's ECHS model, including program components and costs, see “PUC Schools: The Design and Implementation of an Early College High School Program” at http://www.newschools.org/files/PUCEarlyCollegeHSCase.pdf)

However, the challenge of getting underserved students to and through college is simply too big for a single solution. In some communities where the ECHS model is not an option, education entrepreneurs are establishing collegiate academies for juniors and seniors to provide college-level course work at the high school and online. NewSchools has also been incubating a new venture that will provide support to high schools as work to track their graduates through college, and provide support services to those graduates along the way.

The proliferation of early college high schools just illustrates that even students who had been disengaged from school before can flourish and succeed when exposed to challenging curricula and given the right supports.

This was one of the key lessons from the School Redesign Network’s High Schools for Equity report. When disadvantaged kids and kids of color who otherwise might have been tracked into a watered-down curriculum were allowed to self-nominate for AP classes their learning gains were impressive. They rose to the challenge, took the opportunity to follow their interest and succeeded. It’s not surprising that early college high schools – by breaking the link between past performance and the allocations of current opportunities to succeed – have the same impact.

It’s important to note though, that students in these programs don’t just benefit from high expectations and exposure to challenges for which they otherwise would have been deemed ineligible. They also receive the kind of advising about class selection, coaching in study habits, planning assistance for gradation and tutorial help to which all students should ideally have access. Such supports help young people gain the confidence and habits that allow them to persist in college until graduation. Whether the venue is college credit earned at a local university, college preparation gained via AP classes, or competitions which had been reserved for elite students, democratizing access to challenging, meaningful learning opportunities and supports will spread around the learning gains and opportunities to achieve at high levels.

In these dire economic times, we should also recognize the value of helping more young people get on the road to higher education at no or low cost. For working class and first generation college students, who doubt that higher education is within their reach, early college high school can act as an important on-ramp to the improved quality of life associated with post-secondary education. These programs show the equity benefits and economic promise of democratizing access to challenging learning opportunities.

In Rhode Island, both the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Higher Education have a strong commitment to what we call Early College Access and Opportunity. In fact, a law that passed last year, known as “The Rhode Island Bachelors Degree in Three Program Act,” requires our two agencies “to establish a seamless credit-transfer system for high-school students and other policies” to encourage early enrollment and early college completion.

We believe that early access to postsecondary education can help students develop academic skills, allow a wide range of students to try college courses, and increase the likelihood that our graduates will be ready to succeed in college. Our Office of Higher Education estimates that about 2,600 of our students participate in some form of early college access, at either public or nonpublic colleges and universities in Rhode Island.

We have recently signed on as one of the eight states that have joined the National Center on Education and the Economy initiative on board examinations. As part of our plan to transform education in Rhode Island, we have agreed to pilot “board-examination systems,” on a voluntary basis, in one or two of our high schools in the fall 2011. We believe that internationally benchmarked board examinations can be a powerful tool in preparing high-school students for college.

The board examinations will align with a complete curriculum of English, mathematics, science, civics/history, and the arts. Students who take these courses and pass the examinations will be eligible for early college enrollment.

For many students, early enrollment can be an excellent opportunity to face challenging courses, to save money by earning college credits while still in high school, to prepare themselves well for success in college, and to move on an accelerated track toward college graduation.

It’s important, however, that board examinations and other programs for early enrollment remain voluntary. Students passing the board exams should have the option of graduating early and attending college, but they must also have the option of continuing on in high school to graduate with their peers. Early enrollment makes sense only if we use it in the best interest of students. We should never use early enrollment as a way to push students through high school faster than they would like.

We are enthusiastic about the board-examination system because it aligns well with the goals of our strategic plan, Transforming Education in Rhode Island, which include:

· diversifying the ways that students can access college;

· helping schools develop multiple pathways toward graduation; and

· increasing opportunities for dual enrollment or early college access.

Among the tasks ahead of us as we get ready to implement the board examinations in Rhode Island are:

· ensuring that the board-examination system aligns with our state standards and the Common Core;

· ensuring that the system aligns with our proficiency-based graduation requirements; and

· working with our partners in higher education to guarantee early admission for students passing board exams.

We are very excited to join with the National Center on Education and the Economy and with our partner states in this innovative program that will meet the needs of so many of our students. The board examinations will be just one of the ways in which we will expand opportunities, both in-school and out-of-school, for our students to move toward high-school graduation and college success.

So far, we've had school, government and business leaders agree that high school students ready for college work should be allowed - even encouraged and supported systematically - to do college work. We all seem to agree that such changes, whether on premises or in partnerships with external institutions, will be efficient for students, progressive for education and potentially cheaper for taxpayers. That this is noteworthy, and a viable topic for debate, illustrates the immaturity of our reform efforts and silently exposes a few high, broad hurdles faced by education reformers. One is reminded of J.R.R. Tolkein's Ents, the thoughtful, learned shepherds of the forest who spent a full day of deliberation that amounted only to a lengthy exchange of greetings. After 3 days, they marched into action. Will the education reformers follow suit?

Superintendent Quon's succinct conclusion - "So why wouldn't we do this?" which refers to the Early College High School initiative and those combinations of secondary/post-secondary curricula like it - exposes a cleft in what seems to be armor of benevolent, common sense policy. We've got several giving it a thumbs up, but hardly anyone has actually done it. Superintendent Quon, for one, presides over an 18,000-student district that, to my knowledge, has not committed to such a model despite admitting it's old hat in California. [His district has, however, committed to combating teacher retention problems by improving workplace ergonomics (PDF, pg. 3)]

Like Mr. Peha, I saw as a student a handful of motivated, capable peers pursuing college-level coursework that our rural district didn't offer. I also lived down the street from Boston's acclaimed MATCH school, a remarkable example cited by Mr. Lomax, during its formative years and saw it transform students into college-bound aspiring scholars who carried themselves with pride and a sense of purpose. Now I see kids embracing challenging distance-learning opportunities offered by post-secondary institutions before those same students are allowed to get behind a steering wheel.

But the reality in Superintendent Quon's Cupertino is the same as the reality everywhere else - laying the groundwork for reform, and especially implementing it properly, is a slow, complex process. Opportunities for advanced coursework such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs have been around for decades. In the push to optimize the high school experience and bridge it with the college level, the AP program is an Eephus pitch waiting to be knocked out of the park. And in an embarrassingly high number of districts, administrators and school boards are still crowded in the dugout debating which bat to use.

Others still, despite solid evidence, aren't even sure a baseball bat is the right tool. Professor Kirp is sensible to call for solid research, something of which we can't have enough. And President Obama has famously committed to evidence-based decision making - presumably making use of good research to make policy decisions, a marriage of the academic and political - on many occasions. The rub is that such evidence loses luster when in the calloused hands of our nation's elected sausage-makers. We've witnessed the coffer of the Head Start program swell through Representative Kildee's Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act (2008's Public Law 110-134) despite ever-mounting evidence of its inefficacy, including the quiet suppression of a Department of Health and Human Services study (PDF) showing Head Start's glaring inefficiency and long-term inadequacy [Data collection complete, 2006; study shelved until 2010]. We need not look so far in the past to find ideology trumping evidence; just this week the Senate voted 55-42 against a measure that would re-open Washington, D.C.'s outstanding, and above all, successful, voucher program. The moral here: Rep. Kildee gets a grade of A from the National Education Association and 100% from the Association For Supervision and Curriculum Development; we get higher taxes and real education reform at a pace that would gobsmack a snail.

The 'Early College' model is promising in NY, CA, TX and twenty or so other states; AP/IB programs are accelerating large numbers of students; distance learning is bringing college to high schoolers' desktops and schools like MATCH are executing properly that vision of public education that so many of us have had for decades. The question isn't so much whether we think these ideas are good, but whether we're willing to support their expansion with action and money - two terribly scarce resources. Mr. Vander Ark stated courageously, "Every student should graduate from high school having experienced college success" - and yes, in this ideology-driven sector it takes courage to commit to reform for low-income, first-generation college-goers, students of color and kids whose parents make $200,000/year - and he is right.

The Ents have finished saying, "Good morning." Now it's time to see whether they'll march.

Fred Crawford, Principal of the Greenville Technical Charter High School in South Carolina, submitted the following:

editor's note - Greenville Technical is an early college high shool. Thanks to Nelson Smith for bringing Mr. Crawford into the conversation.

The traditional one size fits all approach of public education does not do enough- “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got”. If current high graduation rates continue, the percentage of workers without a high school diploma in 2020 will be 40%. In addition, 45% of the job openings in the next decade will be in middle level labor positions requiring more than a high school level education. The Early College High School initiative continues to demonstrate promise in addressing these issues by changing the structure of the high school years and compressing time for students to complete a college degree. Early and Middle College programs have improved high school graduation rates, college completion rates, and better prepared students for entry into careers. This model removes many of the barriers that prevent students from advancing to college while providing enhanced supports to help them excel both academically and personally to come to understand that college is “doable”. Since EC students earn college credit while in high school, the time it takes to complete a college degree is condensed. Students and families also benefit from reduced or free tuition costs. Ultimately, ECHS turns obstacles into opportunities for student success while “demystifying” higher education for many first generation college students. Also, ECHS combats low expectations by helping students see themselves as both high school and college graduates. By aligning the high school and higher education curricula, students participate in rigorous coursework that instills in them the skills, knowledge and behaviors necessary to be successful in college. More students pursue a college degree and fewer students drop out of high school. Most importantly, students set new goals for themselves and become inspired to graduate and pursue postsecondary education.

When Lauren Merrill graduated from her Toledo, Ohio high school last spring, she was also completing her sophomore year of college at the University of Toledo. She walked across the stage with a high school diploma, a slew of awards, and 63 college credits towards her major in pharmacy. More importantly, this daughter of working-class parents who had no college experience now had the confidence that she was indeed college material.

“I never thought about going to college until I was accepted to this school,” she wrote last spring. “I never thought it was remotely possible, or that I was smart enough. Coming to Toledo Early College High School made me think about the world in a whole different way.”

Housed on the campus of the University of Toledo, Toledo Early College High School is completing its fifth year as part of a statewide cohort of nine Early College High Schools in Ohio that were created with the help of KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other partners.

These high schools are raising expectations and defying the odds that urban kids are not likely to be college material. To put it mildly, these schools have been life changing for students, parents and faculty.

With the higher expectations that all students can master college-level classes, these schools are consistently graduating more than 90% of their students, and all of them earn college credits while in high school, with greater than one in three graduating high school with both a high school diploma and two years of college credit (60 hours) or an associate degree. The Early College High Schools are rated among the top schools in Ohio despite being located in mostly high-poverty urban school districts.

Early College High Schools are finding ways to blur the lines between K-12 and post-secondary work, building crosswalks between college courses that earn high school credits and then building the supports that help high school students succeed in those courses.

This is the kind of experience all students should have in order to be college and career ready and have a chance to become life-long learners.

But the development of Early College High Schools has come with challenges. In Ohio, for instance, the state has not been able to develop a sustainable funding structure that overcomes the silos between the K-12 and higher education funding streams, literally placing these successful schools at risk.

Nonetheless, the benefits that accrue to the state, students and families from graduating students who will not only enroll in college but succeed there far outweigh any short-term obstacles to getting more Early College High Schools in place.

The Early College High School initiative and the general idea of letting students start their college education before high school graduation holds a lot of promise. Many high school students are ready for a full college curriculum well before high school graduation and should be able to pursue college credits early full- or part-time. We need to move as far as we can and as fast as we can in the direction of creating flexible opportunities that address the range of student capabilities and learning styles while at the same time being careful to mitigate one-size-fits-all solutions.

In fact, just last month, UNCF’s Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS) Program adjusted its guidelines to make early-college students eligible for GMS scholarships, carving out an exception to the general GMS requirement that Gates Scholars must be entering freshmen.

That modification spotlights the kinds of adjustments that colleges and financial aid providers will need to make to accommodate early-college learners. Thad Nodine points to another such adjustment when, in his study of the Early College initiative, he refers to these programs as both rigorous and supportive. The kinds of students that the early-college movement targets, “low-income youth, first-generation college goers, English language learners, students of color, and other young people underrepresented in higher education,” have the best chance of college success when they receive, in addition to financial aid, the kinds of academic and social supports that Gates Millennium Scholars receive as part of their GMS participation. Early-college learners may also benefit from support that helps them adjust to their relative youth compared to their college-age classmates. This kind of support would seem to be critical to youthful early-college participants in community college environments, where many students are adult learners with families and jobs.

The results are encouraging so far, with indications that early-college learners graduate from high school, enter college, and graduate from college at higher rates than other students of comparable age. My colleague Dr. Karl Reid, UNCF’s Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, reports that a Boston MATCH Charter High School that enabled seniors to audit classes at Boston University transformed the aspirations of the seniors, and also instilled a college-going culture at the high school, anecdotal evidence that points to the potential that these kinds of programs possess.

Of course Early College is itself in its relative youth; I look forward to research comparing early-college outcomes to outcomes for students who are similarly situated but do not take part in an early-college outcome. And I look forward to the extraction from that research of lessons learned that can be applied to subsequent iterations of this promising idea.

The need for dual enrollment to help students succeed has never been greater. The United States has one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation – nearly half of African-American students and 40 percent of Latino students attend high schools where the majority of students do not graduate. In addition, the cost of attending a public college has almost tripled in recent decades. Tuition has skyrocketed at a rate nearly ten times the rate of increase of the average family’s income. Because of this, and the fact that many students enter college in need of remedial coursework, almost half of the students who begin college do not complete their degree.

That is why I introduced the Fast Track to College Act with Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI). The bill, H.R. 1578, establishes new early college high schools and other dual enrollment programs, and provides support to existing programs that already are achieving results. These programs enable students, especially those underrepresented in postsecondary education, to earn an associate’s degree or up to two years of transferrable college credits at no cost to their families, while still in high school. These programs also reduce dropout rates, keep students engaged, and provide a seamless transition to college.

I have seen firsthand the success of dual enrollment programs in my home state of Michigan. In 2007, Governor Jennifer Granholm funded the opening of six early college high schools, including the Genesee Early College in my district. Genesee Early College is a partnership of the Genesee Intermediate School District, the University of Michigan-Flint and local health care systems that prepares students for careers in the health fields. Genesee Intermediate is also a partner with Mott Community College in the Mott Middle/Early College, which has been enabling at-risk students to earn their associate’s degree since 1991.

Forgive me for popping in again so quickly but after reading Ms. Hoffman’s post, and receiving two e-mails last night from parents who read my post, I just realized something: I think ECHS solves the “college- and career-readiness” issue more effectively than standards.

Let’s be honest, even though CCSSI is doing a great job, we’re years away from knowing whether or not those standards, or the standards used by any state, will correlate with "college- and career-readiness." For one thing, standards are hypothetical. For another, states will have different tests. Finally—and perhaps most perniciously—I think we can count on states to muck around with their tests, lower their cut scores, and fuss with their testing procedures in order to make gains appear larger than they actually are.

But ECHS is different. For one thing, it’s practical and applied, not theoretical. If kids are passing college courses, some of which will obviously be related to future career aspirations, we know for certain that they have indeed attained “college- and career-readiness.” Ms. Hoffman's "20-credit" metric could be the only "test" we need.

When we factor in two other things, ECHS seems again like a significantly better approach to benchmarking kids and the system: (1) Everyone seems to love ECHS. By contrast, everyone has at least a few gripes about standards and testing; and (2) The data Ms. Hoffman has collected suggests that ECHS programs are incredibly successful, particularly for kids who may not be successful in traditional high school environments.

The clincher for me, however, always comes from real-life experiences. Last night, two parents wrote to tell me how much their children benefited from ECHS programs in their communities. They mentioned only one downside: the “schizophrenic” nature of schooling for their kids. As one mom put it, “My daughter was a college kid in the morning and a high school kid in the afternoon. Not only that but she ended up with an incredibly long day. And we had to give her our extra car so she could drive back and forth between her high school and her community college.”

So, again, I would like to suggest that we move ECHS “into” HS and just make the ability to take college courses a standard feature of every American high school. This will improve access to ECHS programs for all kids. Best of all, it will provide a simpler, cheaper, and more reliable way of knowing whether they are “college- and career-ready.”

Nancy Hoffman, vice president of pathways through postsecondary at Jobs for the Future, submitted the following:

Early colleges are not only a good idea, but are proving successful. Over the last 7 years, Jobs for the Future and the partner organizations that began the Gates Foundation-funded Early College High School Initiative have dealt with persistent doubts about whether young people at risk of not going to college could and would take up what seemed a daunting challenge— get from being behind in high school to moving at an accelerated pace into college. Now with over 42,000 students in over 200 schools in 24 states, the data we’re getting is cause for cheers! Seventy-four percent of early-college high school students are of color, 56 percent of the students receive free and reduced-price lunch and 40 percent of the graduates earned more than one year of college credit while in early college. Students are graduating from high school with an average of 22 college credits and 81% go on immediately to college. For more info see www.earlycolleges.org

Numerous studies show that earning 20 college credits in the first year of college is a good predictor of college completion. While early-college students aren’t technically in their first year of college, there is reason to believe that 20 college credits in high school is a good predictor of college completion as well.

Putting young people on an accelerated course to college without remediation isn’t easy. You can’t just lop off the senior year of high school. Our schools provide intensive catch up support and very rigorous teaching to get students ready for college courses in 11th and 12th grades. You also have to negotiate and build a strong partnership with a postsecondary institution that is willing to collaborate, provide postsecondary credits and work with teachers and school leaders. Finally, you have to ensure that the young people you take in develop a strong college-going identity, and that requires that no one in the school ever flinches from the expectation that every student in the school can prepare for, enter college, and earn a degree. The proof is to have done some college before enrolling.

JFF is encouraged to see changes in state dual-enrollment policies that allow a wider range of students to benefit from free college courses in high school. At least seven states have instituted dual-enrollment policies that reflect the early-college philosophy . At the national level, the Fast Track to College Act and other bills pending in Congress would do that by providing funding for early colleges and dual-enrollment options that come with intensive academic support.

As for the new NCEE initiative, we hope to learn from their work, just as many states and districts have learned from ours.

Early College High School is a great idea. So great, in fact, that I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t just called “high school.”

When I was a strapping young Roughrider at Roosevelt High in Seattle, there were always a few kids who zipped up to the local community college to take classes for part of their day. If I hadn’t be so lazy, or so smitten with music during my senior year, I probably would have been one of them.

These were classes our school didn’t offer, mostly in math past Calculus I and II, in foreign language past French 8, Spanish 8, German 8 and Advanced Latin, and in the relatively new at that time, “whiz bang”, STEM subject of computer programming. We had a four-terminal VAX system and four programming courses at RHS but for the serious Bill Gates stuff, we had to go elsewhere. Bill was going elsewhere, too. He was sneaking out of his bedroom at two in the morning to work the big machines at the University of Washington. I like to think of that as EMCHS or Early Morning College High School.

Many people from my generation (“Beer is great, sex is fun, we’re the class of ’81) took college courses while in high school, sometimes for much of their junior and senior years. This was considered something of a privilege but no one I know was ever denied. I think all you needed was a note from a teacher and permission to leave campus during the day. It was all very hush-hush back then, of course: “Hey, I heard Dean Thompson goes to North Seattle Community College in the afternoons and that’s why we never see him at lunch anymore.”

Remember, too, that high school was so easy back then that some of us actually had all our credits in order by the end of our junior year, and most of the rest of us were done by January of our senior year. In my last semester of high school, I think I took five music electives—which actually turned out to be college- and career-readiness training for my study of music at Central Washington University and my professional career in Boston in the music and music technology industries.

So, even back in 1981, an ECHS-type education could be had at a regular public high school. Obviously, things would have been more convenient if the whole shebang could have been baked right in to one building. But then some of the cachet of leaving campus might have been lost. And Dean Thompson would have been far less mysterious—which for a math geek like Dean would have been a real tragedy.

I don’t think the education I got at Roosevelt was nearly as good as what my cousin Jon and Bill Gates got over at Lakeside—or what Dean got at NSCC. But I don’t feel like I was in any way deprived. I had a blast my senior year learning how to be a musician. This was possible because our high school had one of the best jazz directors in the nation. Without Waldo King, I would have had only the typical high school concert choir experience, with nary a note of professional training. But with Waldo leading the way, I developed real-world chops learning how to be an arranger, an ensemble leader, and a soloist. I even got a little business law on the side because everyone was writing new tunes, making new arrangements, and praying that Hal Leonard Publishing would pick them up. Or that one us might reprise the success of our former classmate Dave Barduhn who put two cuts on Kenton ‘76—while still in high school! That’s not just career-readiness, that’s an actual career.

So the key to making high school better, and to giving high school kids an “early college” experience, is really just a matter of making sure we have great teachers in our high schools. As with so many exciting “structural” reforms, the magic lies not in the structure itself but in the culture of teaching and learning people create within them. So just having more ECHS programs isn’t the answer. Having better ones, maybe. Having high schools designed as ECHS programs from the start, with ECHS-grade teachers is the key and ECHS-grade culture is the key.

ECHS is not new. And people have always liked it as far as I can tell. Now that it’s a “thing”, (and if it’s an “initiative”, and if that initiative has an office or an advisory board or a set of patners, then it must be a “thing”), I don’t see why it shouldn’t be expanded. But let's do it strategically in a way that benefits the most kids.

If ECHS becomes BIG thing, and it accelerates ad hoc, we end up with the old “Goose and Gander” problem once again. Just another variation of the “AP for All” issue or the more generic, “Why can’t all kids have everything?” rag. If something is so good for so many kids, why don’t we give it to all kids? You know someone's gonna ask that sooner or later. As we try to pretend in the coming years that every kid will be college- and career-ready, this issue will crop up over and over.

Upselling America on ECHS as the modern reconceptualization of high school makes sense to me because it would show that we were actually going to deliver this time on the promise of standards. Promoting more ECHS programs as some kind of special opportunity for special kids might lead us into yet another achievement gap because incremental improvements in a system accrue most rapidly to those most able to take advantage of them.

ECHS works. ECHS is good. ECHS is surprisingly easy to pull off when, as Mr. Vander Ark points out, the appropriate partners can be wrangled. So let’s expand ECHS and let more kids head off to college during high school—but let them do this at high school as a regular part of high school.

We’re all in favor of dramatic high school reform. This is the kind of dramatic reform we can all get behind because we’re probably all behind it already. What would serve our nation better? More Early College High School programs? Or more good High Schools that actually prepared kids for college the way they were supposed to?

Moving ECHS into HS would be conceptually simple, though I’m sure there would be practical hurdles to jump. Structurally, we could split high school into two phases if we felt we needed a new structure: “regular” (though we’d want a sexier name and a cool acronym for sure) for kids at grades 9 and 10. And “college- and career-readiness” (good name, bad acronym) for 11th and 12th graders.

(In the “Whatever happened to…?” file, when did we decide to drop the third “C” of citizenship? If you haven’t noticed this before, all reforms can be predicted years in advance simply by reading the Gates Foundation’s current education tagline. Not so long ago, I believe it said something like “Preparing all students for college, career, and citizenship.” Check it out now: “Our Mission: Help ensure greater opportunity for all Americans through the attainment of secondary and post-secondary education with genuine economic value.” Aha! It’s all about GEV now. I smell a new metric coming. Apparently, the only reason kids go to school is to get a good job, so K-12 education is really just a job training program. Not exactly what Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, and John Dewey had in mind. (Though Dewey probably wouldn’t have minded quite as much.) I sure miss citizenship as a goal of our education system, though. But I’m willing to give it up if folks with bigger brains and more experience than I have say this is the way things have to be. I have no beef with BG. I just want to know why he dropped the third “C”.)

Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming…

I have no idea how a new ECHS-is-really-just-good-HS concept would work at scale. But I don’t see why this idea couldn’t further the ends of the ECHS movement while providing the means to fix high school at the same time. More ECHS programs would be great. But I’m sure there’s a disappointingly low ceiling on the maximum number of programs that can continue to be created and maintained ad hoc. And if we don’t have enough of these programs, and more people want them for their kids, we’re gonna end up with yet another equity issue on our hands. That’s why making ECHS standard equipment on the new model of high school is so important.

Ed reform is becoming more diffuse every year as new program pop out like Cherry Blossoms along the Potomac. In another decade or so, we’ll have a special program for just about every kid. And if you’ve peeked at the Obama blueprint, you know exactly what I’m talking about (you may also have noticed that a certain kid was left out, but that’s an issue for next week). In the future, we should be striving for fewer, better programs, and building the best right into the system itself.

Bringing ECHS into the standard HS has many potential advantages like cost savings and increased access for more and different kinds of kids. Best of all, it provides a proven model for reforming the Great American High School which, as we now know, isn’t quite as great as we thought it was, and really does need a major overhaul.

A side benefit of making ECHS part of HS is that this would mitigate the coming kerfuffle over college- and career-readiness standards at the high school level. Next week, I’ll make what I hope is a strong argument for how standards and tests are not reliable predictors of college- and career-readiness. (I suspect Monty Neill will make a similar, and probably tighter, argument.) But if kids are actually taking college courses and getting on-the-job training, they’re obviously career- and college-ready—assuming they do their homework, of course. So moving ECHS into HS solves the most potentially embarrassing problem of new reform: kids who are “state certified” as “career- and college-ready” but who can’t get into college or a career. This almost certain eventuality has “breach-of-promise-class-action-lawsuit” written all over it.

So thumbs up on ECHS. Thumbs further up if we realize that ECHS is really a model for the new HS. Thumbs down if we fail to see this connection and if ECHS forever remains a tiny movement relative to greater national high school reform.

This is a great idea which should have been implemented years ago. This is not a new concept in California. We need to blur the lines between high school and community colleges so that students can see there is light at the end of the tunnel. High schools need to reform their practices and re-look at their role in the continuing education of its students. We need to reach all students and expose them to early success in higher education endeavors. This is a great and cost effective way to open up higher education to our students and their parents and to show them that a college education is an attainable goal. So why wouldn’t we do this?

Call it coincidence, but in one week in 2002 I had a bus ride with Cece Cunningham, a phone call from Bard President Leon Botstein and a discussion with Utah Gov. Leavitt that all pointed to the opportunity for an Early College High School Initiative. Hilary Pennington, then with JFF, quickly signed on to run the efforts. We were able to recruit eight high capacity groups in a couple weeks including Portland Community College, KnowledgeWorks Foundation, and NCLR. Ford Foundation, an early supporter of the Middle College Consortium, signed on a co-sponsor.

The premise was that a coherent, accelerated, well-supported degree pathway would help more low income students finish a college degree. With nearly 250 versions of ECHS with many different variations, we can conclude that the idea of accelerated degree pathways has merit but blending K-12 and higher education is difficult in most state policy environments.

PCC demonstrated that for struggling students that found high school pointless and college an impossible dream, an ECHS provided the motivation to finish high school and earn an AA degree.

To make ECHS opportunities more broadly available, states need transparent placement exams that signal readiness to earn college credit, weighted funding that follows the student, and credit articulation agreements between high schools, community colleges, and 4 year universities.

For most students, the senior year is an academic waste of time. There’s no reason that most students can’t earn finish high school requirements in three years and begin earning college credit. Every student should graduate from high school having experienced college success. A 4 or 5 year pathway to an associate degree and/or industry certificate is a great option that should be available to all students.

With fewer than 70 percent of America’s youth graduating from high school, and many graduates discovering that they can’t make it in college, any promising innovation deserves a shot. Early college high school is one of those intriguing ideas, and the evaluations give some cause for cheer.

But caution should be the byword. Early college high school is not the answer—we don’t know how well it will work on a wide scale—and it ought to be tested against other reform strategies.

The assumption of the accelerated program strategy is that introducing tests that measure college readiness—not the dumbed-down standards that many states have adopted, but honest exams—will push poor kids to succeed, while also pushing schools to prepare their students for higher education. It’s a “high expectations” model, and there’s suggestive evidence that—if the support is there—setting the bar high can lead to academic success. What’s more, students who test out of the last years of high school will actually be prepared to do college work. They’ll have had a taste of what college is actually like, a reality check that can cushion the transition to higher education and increase the likelihood that they’ll earn their B.A.s.

Will it work? A lot depends on whether high schools can rise to the challenge, delivering education with the rigor demanded by the tests, and whether high schools and colleges can partner successfully. There’s a danger that, because the higher education that’s built into the model is community college, the strategy will reinforce a two-track system, with poor kids channeled to nonselective higher education while middle class kids take AP high school classes and then enroll in four-year schools. If early college high school has a prayer of narrowing the access gap, smart counseling and solid financial support must be part of the package.

It’s worth recalling that early college high school isn’t the only promising idea for reforming secondary schools. Among the solid options are Community Schools, like those run by the Children’s Aid Society in partnership with the New York City school system, which have shown promise of boosting graduation rates. The Harlem Children’s Zone, which has had considerable success through eighth grade, will soon enroll high school students on its “conveyor belt.” The Montgomery County MD public schools, with their relentless emphasis on reading and math skills, record high school graduation rates for kids from poor families that equal the national average—and college success rates that better that average. The Green Dot Public Schools, which operate 12 high schools in the grittiest neighborhoods of Los Angeles and have a presence in New York City, don’t do anything fancy. Standards are high, parents are engaged, schools stay open more hours of the day and more days of the year, key decision-making is left to the principals. What’s remarkable are the results—graduation rates above 70 percent, more than four times higher than in nearby high schools.

These aren’t the only high school reform strategies that deserve consideration. The Department of Education, with its commitment to evidence-based reforms, should fund small-scale studies of several models to determine which of them make the cut. That’s the only real way to test the merits of early college high school.