ABSTRACT
Completion of secondary education is now seen as a necessity for all young people if they are to have a reasonable opportunity to contribute to and benefit from modern societies. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the international average rate of completion of secondary education among its member countries is 80%, but this rate ranges from about 75% to nearly 100% (OECD, 2006). Yet even Singapore, with a high school completion rate of more than 95% (Sclafani, 2008), is seeking further improvement. The evidence we have suggests that it should be possible for virtually all students to complete a challenging secondary education. At the same time, there is a view among education change experts that, hard as it
is to create lasting change in elementary schools, it is much more difficult to do so in secondary schools (Fullan, 2006; Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006). And of course, the higher the current completion rate, the more difficult it will be to make further gains. In secondary education, as in elementary education, the literature is full of
examples of individual schools, or sometimes small numbers of schools, that have been able to show dramatic improvements in student outcomes, retention rates and areas of school reform, and sometimes under very difficult circumstances (e.g. Muijs, Harris, Chapman, Stoll & Russ, 2004). At the same time, there are very few examples of system-wide improvement (Reynolds, Stringfield & Schaffer, 2006), although system-wide improvement is what we need. Improving large numbers of schools is much harder to do than single site (or small cluster) reform because it cannot be a matter of relying on a small number of outstanding leaders or teachers, which so often seems to be the situation in the cases of exemplary schools. Instead,
we need strategies that will work across many schools with people with average levels of skill and commitment. There are many reasons why system-wide improvement in secondary schools is
difficult. One has to do with size. Secondary schools are typically much larger, which means that there is more anonymity and less ability to know each student well. Compounding larger size is the rotation of students among classes taught by specialists, so that teachers encounter many more students in a day or week than they do in elementary schools and students have less contact with any individual teacher. A further issue is the division of secondary schools and their teachers into sections or departments by discipline or area of study, which tends to reduce the sense of professional community across the school and makes whole-school approaches to change harder to deliver. Public confidence in secondary schools, the sine qua non for the system’s progress, also tends to be lower than for elementary schools. However, these structures are not the only barriers to better student outcomes.
A major dilemma lies in the basic purpose of secondary schooling. In a 2005 report, the World Bank (2005) outlined the central dilemmas that face secondary education all around the world. Secondary schools, the Bank said, are trying at one and the same time to be
