Closing the Aspirations-Attainment Gap for Urban High School Students

Most students today aspire to graduate from high school and go to college. Yet too many are not achieving their goal. For instance, fewer than 7 percent of 13-year-olds in the Chicago public school system ultimately will graduate from high school by age 19, enter a four-year college, and obtain a degree within six years after high school graduation. The numbers are even lower for African-American and Latino students.

Melissa Roderick, Co-Director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, contends that the primary goal of high school reform should be to tackle this problem head-on. Preparation for college, rather than just high school graduation, should be the measure of high schools' performance. In her commentary for MDRC, Closing the Aspirations-Attainment Gap: Implications for High School Reform, Roderick challenges urban high schools to: (1) reduce dropout rates by focusing on students' transition to high school and their success in the ninth grade, and (2) make sure students are college-ready and receive the support and guidance they need to get into college and graduate. Meeting Five Critical Challenges of High School Reform: Lessons from Research on Three Reform Models by Janet Quint discusses what MDRC has learned about initiatives designed to improve low-performing schools.

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