The researchers found these schools, five out of six with high numbers of students of color and those on free and reduced-price lunch, asking how to offer students multiple pathways to postsecondary success, beyond just college, without lowering academic rigor or expectations. Chosen because they had a track record of innovation, the schools were questioning whether the accommodations given to students during the throes of remote learning or right after the return to in-person instruction were still serving them well.

In doing so, they are expanding their visions of success and reimagining their purpose, a move which researchers note could mark a departure from past understandings of schooling. They titled their study “A ‘Good Life’ for Every Student.”

“We saw high schools starting to adjust the goal posts, where they were taking on more responsibility for student success in the long run,” said Chelsea Waite, senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.

Between April 2022 and November 2023, Waite and her partner, Maddy Sims, from Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership, did 266 interviews with current high school students, graduates, parents, teachers and school administrators. Of the six schools, including some in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, four were traditional public and two were charter schools. 

Two were alternative programs for students who are overage and undercredited, pregnant or parenting or have a history of chronic absenteeism. These students, administrators said, would have once been considered a success if they just reached graduation. Three other schools were focused on increasing access to Advanced Placement and other rigorous academic courses and to “Early College Experience” offerings.

Participating students and families identified three major priorities for post-high school futures: happiness, fulfillment and stability. For some, this included college. For others, it meant immediately entering the workforce. The concept of a “happy life” included financial security, but no one interviewed said salary was the main determinant of success.

These schools were not just trying to get students across the finish line to graduation and then directly to college, Waite said. Instead they were asking “What are students’ individualized understandings of who they want to be as adults and what they want to be in the world?” And “How can we set them up with a corresponding, individualized plan that can help them on that path to a good life?”

Each of the six schools prioritized students graduating with a “good plan” in place, but educators also acknowledged that “there really hadn’t been full alignment on what constitutes or what defines a ‘good plan’ in practice,” said Sims.

Looking to provide roadmaps for other high schools, researchers asked what success means to school communities, especially for students who have been historically marginalized; what solutions schools were exploring to help all students achieve; and what obstacles they were facing in this attempt. 

Challenges they observed across schools:

• Educators’ concerns that increasing flexibility could decrease rigor
• Desire to give students room to define their own paths to success without perpetuating historical “opportunity gaps”
• Overreliance on traditional data (such as test scores or graduation rates), despite recognizing that these are insufficient to meaningfully track success

 Examples of innovations they observed schools introducing to ensure students were academically engaged and supported:

• Shifts to interdisciplinary units and coursework. For example, in one school students were learning about marketing, social science, financial literacy and ratios in a multi-week course on the loan industry. One administrator said, “I think we can do a much better job of trapping kids in the honey of each content area. To be a writer is such a powerful thing. To be a scientist is such a powerful thing.”
• AP courses and “Early College Experience” courses, which partner with local colleges and universities
• Shift in grading towards “grading for equity” practices that focus on measuring what students know rather than how they behave
• Moving toward using the classroom as a space of exploration of identity and student-driven learning. One school allowed students to build credit-bearing “personalized learning experiences,” essentially independent studies with an advisor
• Individualized mentoring and counseling. For example, two schools used a “primary person” model, in which each student has one adult mentor who they check in with regularly 
• Alternative approaches to discipline, such as “restorative circles,” which they defined as “conversations intended to repair relationships and find mutually-agreeable solutions, after a behavioral incident or conflict”

“We did feel ourselves really compelled to illustrate how many different actions— taken by different people at different levels of the system— are necessary to support high schools systemically to be the kinds of places that set students up for a life of their own choosing,” said Waite.

While most of the schools started this transformational work before 2020, the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to study high school reform, according to the researchers. These challenging few years “strengthened educators’ dedication to achieving new designs for high school,” while increasing their focus on race, racism and equity.

Waite and Sims noticed that educators and administrators across the board were reflecting on how to provide students with flexibility and support without compromising rigor and high expectations. As teachers welcomed students back from remote learning, they needed to prioritize creating a supportive environment to see young people through a disruptive, traumatizing period. But now they’re questioning what comes next.

In discussing leniency during the pandemic, one teacher said, “We didn’t teach coping mechanisms, we just protected [students].” Teacher turnover and burnout also made it hard to hold students accountable. At two of the schools studied, the teaching staff was so new that they didn’t know what the classrooms looked like before COVID hit.

As for “college for all,” the researchers found a number of reasons some students are moving away from that mindset, including financial stress and risk, burnout, high-stakes testing and applications, and an understanding that there are an increasing number of jobs that don’t require a college degree. Schools wanted to ensure that college doesn’t become a privilege for a select group of students, while also communicating that a wider variety of options exist. 

High schools alone cannot be held wholly responsible to address all of the challenges presented in the report, the researchers said. “Instead, what we really observed is the incredible power of bridge building between high schools and the higher education sector, as well as between high schools and local employers.”

Waite acknowledged the study’s limitations, noting that these six schools don’t necessarily represent the entire country or even the Northeast. “What we do believe is that the themes and ideas and challenges that came through in the research … are really widespread and challenging issues that feel relevant to many different kinds of high schools.”

Beginning Friday and , the trial centers on a state funding system that relies heavily on local property taxes that plaintiffs allege provides inequitable state money to districts in areas with low property values and less personal wealth in violation of the Pennsylvania Constitution’s equal-protection provision. The current system fails to meet the commonwealth’s obligation to provide students with a “thorough and efficient system of education,” their attorneys argue.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The six districts who are suing will ask the Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg to declare Pennsylvania’s school funding system unconstitutional and order lawmakers to create a new one that directs more money to low-wealth districts. The non-jury trial of William Penn School District, et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, et al., will include as many as 50 witnesses, who will present a dizzying array of statistics on school finance and its effects on student outcomes that could extend into January. 

“This trial is really important for children throughout the commonwealth who are going to finally get the opportunity to tell the story of how they have been deprived of the opportunity for an effective education that so many students in well-funded districts in the state have the opportunity for,” Michael Churchill, an attorney with the nonprofit Public Interest Law Center, explained during a press conference Wednesday. 

In addition to the six school districts, the lawsuit filed in 2014 is being brought by four parents,  the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools and the NAACP – Pennsylvania State Conference. Plaintiffs are represented by the Public Interest Law Center, the Education Law Center-PA and the law firm O’Melveny. 

Defendants include the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the state Senate and Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. The defense has argued that the legislature, not the courts, maintains authority over school funding. 

“The question in this case is not whether Pennsylvania’s system of public education could be better,” Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, a Republican, , adding that lawmakers regularly pass bills to improve schools. “But imperfect is not unconstitutional.”  

The case was previously dismissed by the Commonwealth Court, which agreed that school funding decisions are the responsibility of the legislature, not the judicial branch, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the case must go to trial. 

“It is a mistake to conflate legislative policymaking pursuant to a constitutional mandate with constitutional interpretation of that mandate and the minimum that it requires,” Justice David Wecht wrote in a 2017 opinion for the court majority. 

In total, plaintiff districts allege the state’s schools are being shortchanged $4.6 billion a year, said Maura McInerney, the legal director at the Education Law Center-PA. 

“Many of our witnesses will tell a common story about the impact of entrenched inequities in resources in low-wealth school districts,” she said. “That takes the form of overcrowded classrooms, antiquated science labs, nonexistent libraries and a lack of staffing in the school buildings as well as unsafe schools.”

The trial is one in a long history of similar school funding equity litigation that has found varying degrees of success. In neighboring New Jersey, in 1990 — nine years after the case was first heard in court — the Supreme Court and required lawmakers to direct more resources to low-income districts. The most recent high-profile example unfolded in Connecticut, where in 2016 lawmakers were ordered to completely reconfigure the state’s school funding system only for the Supreme Court to overturn the lower-court ruling two years later in a 4-3 split decision.

It is not the function of the courts “to create educational policy or to attempt by judicial fiat to eliminate all of the societal deficiencies that continue to frustrate the state’s educational efforts,” Connecticut’s then-Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers wrote in a 2018 opinion. 

Even in some states where courts have found education funding schemes unconstitutional, the road to resource equity has been an uphill battle. In New York, for schools to settle a legal battle that stretches back decades. In 2006, the state owed schools more money to provide students a “sound basic education,” but the 2008 recession undercut state efforts to bolster funding, which is only just now being addressed.

Meanwhile in North Carolina, on Wednesday to increase education funding by $1.7 billion. The issue stems from a 1994 funding equity lawsuit that alleged students in low-income communities weren’t offered the same educational opportunities as those in wealthier counties, claims the court agreed with three years later. More than two decades passed, however, before this week’s edict finally forced state lawmakers to come up with the money to fully satisfy the 1997 decision.

A supports the notion that increased school spending leads to better educational outcomes for students. 

In the Pennsylvania case, plaintiffs include the Johnstown School District where the middle school’s library remains locked because it lacks a librarian. In the Panther Valley School District, attorneys have blamed high teacher turnover on low pay and difficult working conditions, leaving the teachers who stay to manage increasingly large class sizes. In the Shenandoah Valley School District, a school psychologist works as an assistant principal. 

Overall, in Pennsylvania is distributed at the state level, meaning districts have to rely on local property taxes for a larger share at 43 percent. That ratio ranks the commonwealth 45th nationally, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 

On average, Pennsylvania’s wealthiest districts spend $4,800 more per student than its poorest districts, according to the Education Law Center, and that per pupil gap grew by more than $1,000 over the last decade after factoring for inflation. 

While the state has increased education funding in recent years — and federal pandemic relief funding added an influx in new education money — the plaintiffs argue the disparities and funding levels remain unacceptable. 

Critics have maintained, however, that Pennsylvania schools are adequately resourced and the “state share” is meaningless. Jennifer Stefano, the vice president and chief strategist at the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank, that Pennsylvania ranks within the top 10 nationally for overall education funding. 

“Total spending per student is thousands of dollars above the national average, thanks to ample state funding and local funding that is far above what most local taxpayers in the rest of the country provide,” Stefano wrote. “It’s only because of this outsized local tax haul that an objectively high state funding level can be made to look small — basic fractions.” 

But McInerney held that the state average funding is misleading. Pennsylvania is home to “many high-wealth communities and children are doing well in those communities,” she said. It’s the children in low-wealth areas, disproportionately youth of color, who are struggling. Half of the state’s Black students and 40 percent of its Hispanic students attend the 20 percent of school districts with the lowest wealth. Meanwhile, higher-income communities are able to raise more for schools through local taxes because they have a richer property tax base. 

“Pennsylvania has some of the largest gaps between low-wealth and high-wealth districts of anywhere in the nation and they also have some of the greatest disparities in academic outcomes,” she said. “For example, 94 percent of students graduate in four years at our high-wealth districts whereas in poor districts, that percentage is 74 percent.”