The stated mission of high schools is to prepare all students for success in college, careers and citizenship. Yet in most states, high schools are rarely held accountable for ensuring that students achieve these goals as they are defined today.

Colleges, meanwhile, have few incentives to improve college retention and completion rates. With the number of jobs requiring at least some education beyond high school expanding rapidly, states must work closely with higher education systems to introduce more effective strategies to ensure that the students they admit actually graduate with a degree and a productive set of skills and knowledge.

States must strengthen their data and information systems; few states can gauge how well high schools prepare students for college and work. Longitudinal data systems should follow individual students from grade to grade and school to school, all the way from kindergarten through postsecondary education and the workplace. That way, student success (or failure) can be traced back to high school experience and the information can be used to strengthen the experience for the next class of students. Such systems will also provide more accurate measures of dropout and graduation rates.

Building High-Quality Data Systems

There's been significant progress in the number of states that have committed to building P–20 longitudinal data systems. Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, report having in place data systems with unique student identifiers that follow students from pre-kindergarten through the postsecondary level, and 38 other states plan to develop such a system.

As states move forward to develop and connect K-12 and higher education longitudinal data systems, many have successfully tackled the challenge of developing the technical capacity to match. In fact, having the necessary technology in place to match records across the systems often isn't the main barrier to matching. Among the 38 states with plans to develop a P-20 data system, 14 already have the technical capacity to do so. Even if the technology piece is in place, states still need to develop regulatory or legislative policies to coordinate the K-12 and higher education systems, address privacy concerns raised by FERPA, determine which body has authority over the data collection and matching, and secure sustained funding for the technological and human resources costs of matching.

College- and Career-Ready High School Accountability Systems

Once states have high-quality data, they then need to use that information to hold high schools accountable not only for their high school graduation rates but also for whether those graduates are college- and career-ready and whether they are successful in their post-high school pursuits.

State high school accountability systems that measure college- and career-readiness should take into account key indicators, including:

• Percentage of students completing a college- and career-ready curriculum (7 states do);
• Percentage of students reaching a statewide college - and career-ready cut score on a high school assessment (no states do);
• Percentage of students placed into credit-bearing, non-remedial courses in reading, writing and/or mathematics upon entry into college (2 states do).

To date, nearly one-third of the states factor one or two of these indicators of college and career readiness into their high school accountability systems, but none factor all four. As the next generation of school accountability takes shape, it is becoming increasingly clear that most states do not base their accountability systems around the preparation of graduates for postsecondary success and will need to rethink the way they hold high school accountable.

All Students Should Graduate, and All Should Graduate College- and Career-Ready

As states continue to struggle with their high school accountability models, there are a few states – Louisiana, New York, North Carolina and Texas – that do include an accurate cohort graduation rate and an indicator of whether students are earning a college- and career-ready diploma. Another six states and the District of Columbia plan on moving in that direction in the future.

Trying to correct the fact that schools often score higher on test-driven accountability ratings when they push low-performing students out, Louisiana adopted a new accountability system that holds high schools accountable for both dropout rates and student achievement on the state assessments. Each student outcome — from dropping out to graduating with academic or career/technical endorsement — is worth a certain amount of points on the newly developed "graduation index" that goes into a school’s accountability rating. The system encourages schools to continue working with students who fail to graduate within four years. If a student upgrades his or her “outcome” after four years, the school’s accountability rating will reflect that increase in a student’s status.

As Louisiana also is one of the ten states currently using a cohort graduation rate in their accountability formula, they are among the handful of states with the capacity to know exactly how many students are graduating from high school, and how many are graduating having earned a college- and career-ready diploma.