Could a ‘high school readiness’ metric help parents evaluate K-8 education?

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of parents are questioning whether public schools deliver the quality of education they’ve promised.

Now, the Fordham Institute, an education reform think tank, is proposing a new metric to measure school success: “high school readiness.”

High school readiness is the idea that elementary and middle schools should be judged by how their students perform in high school, as measured by GPA.

Fordham explains this would communicate to “school staff that their mission isn’t just proficiency on testing day or uncontroversial promotion to the next grade level. Rather, the mission of any good school is to prepare students for future success.”

High school readiness is a quality criteria because it meets the following five standards. It is:

• Valid – it’s something policymakers and parents care about;  

• Reliable – it’s consistent over time; 

• Timely – it’s useful for current decisions, not just future predictions;  

• Fair – it doesn’t disadvantage schools with more challenging student demographics;  

• Trustworthy – it won’t incentivize schools to lower their standards to inflate grades or graduation rates. 

Previous research has found high test scores in middle school aren’t necessarily correlated with a better high school GPA.

However, when students attended middle schools with good high school readiness scores, their ninth-grade GPAs were consistently higher by one-tenth.

Thus, using high school readiness as a metric would allow parents to see through the fog of standardized test scores and choose an elementary or middle school that prepares students for success in high school.

“By holding schools accountable for students’ success at their next school, it explicitly disincentivizes teaching to the test or socially promoting students in ways that yield short-lived and ultimately illusory gains,” the report authors concluded.

“[High school readiness] provides a holistic measure of students’ performance that reflects their achievement, engagement, and effort across all subjects – not just reading and math. That’s a test of performance, commitment, and character that is worth teaching to.”