Earlier this month, Governor Inslee signed into law a bill intended to start a chain of events that I’m optimistic will lead straight to the students I teach.
EHB 1121 essentially authorizes the State Board of Education to establish procedures for local schools to grant credit waivers to certain graduation credits on a case-by-case basis for students impacted by events beyond their control.
There are several things I like about this. One, it isn’t limited to this year: it establishes a protocol which can be applied when a student’s education was impacted by local, state, or national emergencies.
Two, this part: School districts may be authorized to “grant individual student emergency waivers from credit and subject area graduation requirements established in RCW 28A.230.090, the graduation pathway requirement established in RCW 28A.655.250, or both” (page 2, lines 7-10 of the law as passed, which you can read here).
That last authorization is key to authentic flexibility. There are a variety of ways that students may have been impacted this year, and the “waivers from credit and subject area” requirements will hopefully give us some leeway. Some kids might have engaged in their art electives because it helped them cope with what was going on in their world, but might have struggled with distance-learning chemistry class. Conversely, another might have thrown themselves into the latter and felt unequipped to engage in the personal vulnerability that might have been plumbed in the former. The language about “credit and subject area” waivers allows us to take either situation into consideration, and not withhold a diploma from a student who was not able to check the box next to that last art or science credit.
While I do believe that the graduation pathways were a positive step forward, I am relieved that they are included in the waiver, since their nascency in policy might have meant that the COVID years would have been their first attempt at full implementation in many districts.
Bigger than all of this, though, is what the need for this bill reveals about our high school graduation credit system as it is.
Based on my unscientific observation, prior to implementation of the 24-credit requirement, most high schools tended to offer six possible credits each year. With the transition to 24-credit, many shifted to a seven- or eight-period schedule.
A traditional six-credit per year model makes some sense, as that allows about an hour per day for teaching and learning for each credit. Eight-credit-per year systems tend to be on a block schedule, with four periods per day and either an A/B schedule or some other rotation.
But let’s think about it differently: This can mean that a student may be juggling as many as eight distinctly different subjects at once, on top of jobs, sports, clubs, and just having a life as a human teenager.
Fellow adults, while it is true that we have a lot on our plates (work, family, bills, etc.) there is simply no correlate in the adult world of having to balance and be accountable for…on a daily basis…so many distinct obligations which all carry the kind of long-term implications as failing to earn a required credit toward your high school diploma.
That’s a lot of plates to keep spinning in the air, and for six-credit-per year systems, that means there is no room at all for a single plate to fall. One failed class throws you completely off track… which means (1) summer school (not always free, and may supplant income-generating work time), or (2) doubling or tripling up to take more classes on top of required classes, or (3) returning as a 5th year senior, which should be no source of shame but makes districts’ data “look bad” so kids are often shuttled off to other systems when that looks inevitable.
This may sound hyperbolic. But in twenty years of working with kids who struggle to give adequate attention to such a wide breadth of obligation, I have observed that managing this array of distinctly different obligations is a very real problem.
My pie in the sky is a shift completely away from credits to a systemwide (rather than ad hoc) mastery-of-standards-based system. I have (albeit messy) ideas about what that might look like via creative integrated course offerings, and quite frankly, it feels a whole lot more like the real world where our application of knowledge and skills are integrated rather than isolated.
This also gives me hope for the future of graduation requirements, especially the piece about flexibility for “authentic flexibility.” I have several students who would really benefit from this, and I am all for a standards based approach in grad requirements.
Even when I was in high school, there were so many more elective options for core subjects that are essentially non existent, at least in my discipline. Why can’t senior English be poetry, or music writing, or sports literature, or a whole host of other topics that would be more engaging to student interests and plans after high school? I too have some messy ideas about what that would look like but I hear year after year that this is what students want. So, why not?!
And as a belated update, the WA SBE has released its official rules on this. You can read more here… in WAC form so it is kinda dense and repetitive, but holds to the waiver premise I described above in the blog post: https://tinyurl.com/sberules2021
Many times since the pandemic started I have thought about the high school version of myself and how badly I would have been impacted by all of this. I barely graduated high school for the exact reasons you so thoughtfully laid out and I know that remote learning would have untenable for the 17-year-old version of myself. I agree this a big step in the right direction but there is still so much more that can be done for these young adults.
That is really great news! I have long been concerned about English Learner students who come to the U.S. in their late teens and then need to play catch up to earn credits while also being required to pass state tests in a language they are just beginning to learn. This seems like a step toward the right direction. I remember almost not graduating myself because of a missing PE credit. I had been in the Running Start program and had made a mistake in calculating the college credits to high school credits. It was a good thing I had met with my counselor and she caught that in time.
Six classes at a time seems ample for any high school student.
I checked my alma mater’s graduation requirements. Los Gatos High School has shown up on lists of “Top 100 High Schools in the Country,” so you can expect them to have rigorous requirements. Here is what LGHS says about academic load:
A six-period day is the standard course load for students, though, they have the option of taking seven classes.
No student may take more than 35 credits (seven classes) per semester without prior approval.
Standard graduation requirements are:
3 years history/social studies
4 years English
2 years math (including Algebra 1)
2 years physical/life science
1 year either visual/performing arts or language OTE
2 years PE
half year applied arts
75 additional credits
College prep graduation requirements are:
2 years history/social studies
4 years English
3 years math required/4 years recommended
2 years lab science required/3 years recommended
2 years language other than English required/3 years recommended
1 year visual/performing arts
i year college prep electives
PE not required
applied arts not required
I really don’t know what high school looks like in this state, other than what you tell me. How is it so different that students need to take eight classes a year to complete their graduation requirements?
Jan, their definition of credits must be very different if they take 35 per semester… in WA our 24 total required credits are spread out over all four years, with kids needing to earn six credits per year to stay on track. In this model, in a six period day (1 credit per period if the course is yearlong, and otherwise prorated based on time), there is no room for a kid to fail a class without being knocked off track. It’s all fine if we’re okay ignoring kids who might struggle and just letting them dissolve away, and I’m not okay with that, so flexibility and room for mistakes is my preference.