Educators and philanthropists have directed significant intellectual and financial capital over the past several years toward improving urban high schools, with mixed results.  Overall statistics still look grim:   graduation rates fall below 50 percent in six of the nine largest school districts in the country.  Students from low-income households drop out at six times the rate of their upper-income peers.  By the end of high school, black and Hispanic students have attained reading and mathematics skills comparable to those of white students in eighth grade.  Promising approaches have emerged, however, as a result of the past several years’ work.  High School Futures, Inc. (HSF) proposes to integrate those strategies into traditional urban high schools—a necessary next step in bringing those initiatives to scale. 

HSF works with school districts and teachers’ unions to insure that existing urban high schools prepare students for college and career.  It is the mission of HSF to

• Raise graduation and college and matriculation rates,
• Improve student academic performance, and
• Narrow the achievement gap between white students and students of color,

by deepening the innovative work of teachers and broadening the definition of school-based leadership in ways that can be replicated nationally and brought to scale. 

HSF’s approach to high school reform weaves together elements of and lessons learned from the past eight years of school improvement initiatives.  HSF schools, as a result of their work with our organization, will

• Define data more broadly and richly than they currently do and use it to drive instruction and decision-making,
• Implement a distributed leadership model that builds effective teams and expands teachers’ ability to collaborate with and support the building principal as instructional leader (rather than manager),
• Create an inquiry-based environment that leads to rigor, relevance, and relationships for students, teachers, and administrators alike, and
• Develop a vertically integrated leadership pipeline from the classroom to the central office that both enhances current governance and provides a conduit for newly certified prospective school and district leaders. 

Teachers in traditional urban high schools want their students to succeed.  Instead of being tapped as an invaluable resource, however, they generally must act as passive recipients of the latest wave of professional development or school reform.  They see these waves as the flavor of the week, ushered in by a superintendent whose average tenure will last three years or by a building principal who has an 81 percent likelihood of leaving the school within five years.  HSF uses its deep knowledge of and experience with traditional urban high schools to leverage veteran teachers as key implementers, rather than recipients of, reform.