This post is very much a follow up from last week’s Teaching Toward Citizenship post.

There are a lot of reasons why it’s going to be hard to change the structure of school curriculum to create a more citizenship-driven schooling – especially at the high school level. But there’s one that stands out as a particular road block, and it’s a bit of a sacred cow of the high school experience.

College admissions.

Much of the way we progress through the high school curriculum is to get kids into college – and specifically, top colleges. From AP, to math sequence, to world language requirements, high school curricular paths are deeply – I’d argue overly – influenced by the college process. When colleges – and again, especially top tier colleges – have strict college acceptance requirements, schools are often backed into a corner or risk not giving their students access to the most competitive colleges.

Our high school math sequence is a prime example of this conundrum. I believe deeply that a citizenship-driven mathematics education would include Statistics as a core course, rather than Pre-Calculus and Calculus. Whether we are talking about political polling, financial planning, urban planning, understanding insurance, or medical decision-making, there are dozens of reasons that we all need to have profound grounding in statistical analysis and data visualization than most American citizens have today. Simply, if you are not statistically literate, you are a lot easier to lie to. And this is becoming more and more true and important every day.

According to a 2019 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, 17% of high school graduates took a Stats class in high school, as opposed to 43% of graduates who took Pre-Calc or Trig, despite the fact that Statistics is so much more relevant for the overwhelming majority of kids. And I’d argue it’s because we push kids through a math sequence that’s meant to get you to Calculus as the “hard” class at the end of the rainbow. This means that Algebra 2 – which kids generally take in 10th or 11th grade – becomes the gate-keeper class for Pre-Calc and in states like PA where you don’t necessarily need a fourth year of math, kids often tap out after Algebra 2 because that course is often constructed to be a gate-keeper for the “upper-level” math courses. (Again – from the NCES study, 85% of student take Algebra 2, and only 43% took Pre-Calc. That’s some serious gate-keeping.)

And this tracks with what we see at SLA. We send a handful of kids to Ivy League schools every year. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a single student who has gotten into one of them who had opted out of the Pre-Calculus / Calculus track to take Statistics instead. Not one. These might be kids who will be English or History majors. So often Stats ends up being for the kids who choose a fourth year of math (you need three years of math, three years of science and a fourth year of one of the two to graduate in PA), but don’t want the “hard” path and aren’t applying to the most competitive levels of college.

Another example is Advanced Placement. Schools are pushed to offer AP classes as part of the college admissions process – and 35% of 2023 graduates took an AP exam, according to the College Board. AP classes have a specific curriculum, most of their courses are not broad-based, citizenship-driven coursework, but (by definition) designed to be college courses. Advancement is great, but to what end and at what cost? Do Advanced Placement classes push kids further into the workforce development educational mindset at the expense of citizenship? And AP is really about college, little else. When I hear kids (not at SLA – we don’t offer AP courses) talk about AP classes and why they take them, college admissions is almost always the first reason. And of course they do, the College Board pushes that thinking when they publish statements like, “85% of selective colleges and universities report that a student’s AP experience favorably impacts admission decisions” on their site.

And colleges lean hard into all of this. If a school offers Advanced Placement (we don’t), then students are expected to take them if they want access to selective colleges. I was doing a scholarship application for one of our students last week, and there was a whole section I had to answer about whether or not the student had taken “the most challenging courses” the school had to offer. And that question is very commonly asked on counselor and school recommendation files. Many colleges say they want to see extra years of World Language on the transcript, and all those choices come at the expense of students being able to take a broad breadth of courses. Even if a course isn’t the most “rigorous” a school has to offer as evidenced by the College Board’s list of the courses colleges most want to see – and no, Statistics isn’t on their list.

And yet… we stand at a moment when all this can change. We know that changing demographics mean that the nation’s number of 18-year-olds are dropping rapidly, and colleges are facing an existential threat as they have to compete for students in a way never before seen. Many higher education institutions will not survive — and many colleges are desperate for students. According to a 2019 Pew study, only 3.4% of four-year schools accepted fewer than 20% of their applicants, while 53.3% of the schools accepted over two-thirds of their applicants. Here in Philadelphia, Drexel – long a sought-after, competitive university – is facing a $63 million deficit and is making huge cuts. U.S. News and World Report reports that Drexel now has an acceptance rate of 78%. I guarantee you that not all 78% of those students took “the most rigorous” courses their school could offer.

This means that so much of our high school curricular choices are driven by the demands of a small handful of schools, whereas the overwhelming majority of our college-bound students go to schools that by the very nature of the changing demographics of college admissions have to be more flexible about who they are accepting and the courses those students have taken.

And we need to remember that, in 2023, only 61% of all recent high school graduates were enrolled in college to begin with — and of that 61% in school, 25% were in two-year schools that – I’m willing to bet – had no course requirements other than a high school diploma. (Source – Bureau of Labor Statistics) So… to do a little real-world math here on all the (ahem) statistics I’ve been throwing around in this post: 61% of students are in college, and of that 61%, 25% in two-year colleges, which means (.61 – (.61 * .25)) only 46% of recent college graduates are in the schools that this whole process is ostensibly built for. And a tiny, tiny fraction of those kids are at schools that actually have the ability to drive this process because they have the ability to turn away enough kids to actual dictate curricular choices.

No wonder so many kids feel like high school isn’t built for them.

Now is the moment when K-12 schools have to realize the power they have in this process. For the nearly 30 years I’ve been in education, colleges had the ability to dictate to schools what they wanted to see. Now, we have a moment where we can level that playing field and design a more thoughtful educational experience for all our students.

If we’re going to move toward a more citizenship-driven education, we’re going to have to start naming and knocking down the barriers to that shift. A primary barrier is that – for too long – the highly selective colleges have used our schools as a ranking and sorting system for their own admissions processes. This has led to the curricular arms race toward an ever more “rigorous” high school education at the expense of helping students to become more fully actualized citizens with the skills and knowledge they need to understand – and meaningfully take part in – the world around them.

As K-12 institutions, we have an opportunity to dream bigger than being the sorting hat for colleges. We can design curriculum that engages all our students in a more meaningful, more relevant, more citizenship driven experience. We can help our students see that being learned helps them be better voters, better parents, better friends and family members – more thoughtful, active and aware citizens of their world. And we can issue a challenge to the colleges that have – for too long – dictated their needs to us — we can help our kids be better prepared for the whole world, not only your campuses, but you’re going to need to expand the scope of what you see and what you value, and if you do, you can partner with our schools and our kids, and help all our students be ready for the world. And colleges, if you do, you might find that you can better serve your civic mission as well.