ABSTRACT
Standards-based accountability policies entered the public schooling system at the end of the twentieth century as a major reform effort, one that has the potential to dramatically change the face and function of the comprehensive high school. For the past hundred years, the pattern of high school change has mainly been one of enrollment growth. In the middle of that period, the Conant Report (1959) posed the primary challenge to high school organization: could high schools accommodate the “horde of heterogeneous students that has descended on our secondary schools” (p. 602)? To do so, high schools would grow not only in size but in structure, offering a widely differentiated array of courses aimed at the “heterogeneous” tastes and talents of diverse students, and organizing teachers and content into discrete departments.
