Should America Be More Like Them? Cross-National High School Achievement and U.S. Policy

Abstract

The modern comprehensive American high school, since its inception in the early twentieth century, has been co sidered alternately an organizational blessing and a bane on educational progress. Welcomed as an organizational advance through which the hodgepodge of schools in urban America could be made into an orderly pedagogical and administrative pyramid, the early modern high school was seen as an educa tional institution meeting the social and economic challenges of an increas ingly diverse industrial-urban society.1 The image of a rational, bureau cratic, large, and robust comprehensive high school was pushed forward through the middle of the twentieth century as a progressive and moderniz ing model for the entire nation.2 However, by the second half of the century, as evidence of social decline, persistent poverty, racial disparities, and edu cational failure in urban communities became ever more obvious, the image of the urban comprehensive high school shifted from an exemplary model to a broken institution in need of reform.