What Should Our High School Students Study?

Nearly 40 years ago, scholars Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen published what has become one of the classic studies of public high schools in America.[1] Their thesis: Over several decades of steadily increasing access to and enrollment in secondary education,[2] the typical high school had come to resemble a shopping mall, a sprawling marketplace offering English, biology, carpentry, and bookkeeping, not to mention extracurriculars and multiple versions of each core course—not just English, for instance, but remedial English, business English, general English, honors English, and so on.

Of course, not everyone can purchase whatever they like at the shopping mall. And for the most part, explained Powell and his coauthors, only the most affluent (and, presumably, college-bound) students enjoy the best of what the shopping mall high school offers, a coherent sequence of rigorous academic courses taught in interesting ways by well-prepared teachers. Their less affluent peers (presumably destined for lower-skilled work) are directed to “choose” from a jumbled assortment of second- and third-rate options, piecing together just enough business English, accounting, culinary arts, and physical education classes to fulfill their state’s minimum graduation requirements.[3]

But surely, our public schools should expect every student to pursue a coherent and rigorous course of study. Indeed, that reasoning became extremely popular among school reformers in the 1980s. Most prominently, the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk—commissioned by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell—railed against what it called the “curricular smorgasbord” offered by most secondary schools. Nothing less than the country’s future was at stake, the report warned. If the majority of our students continue to take a mishmash of low-level classes, then they will lag behind their counterparts from overseas, and the U.S. will be unable to compete in the increasingly global and high-tech marketplace.

To ensure that our young people can keep up, concluded the report, states and local districts must ramp up their course requirements. Rather than allowing students to study core academic subjects for just one or two years, they should adopt a “New Basics” curriculum that requires them to take four years of English and math, three years of science and social studies, and a half-year of computer science.

But Powell, Farrar, and Cohen warned (and the authors of A Nation at Risk had the same concern) that adopting such a curriculum will not, all on its own, have much impact on student achievement. State and local officials will be happy to adopt new requirements—and to congratulate themselves for doing something to increase the rigor of high school education. However, Powell and his colleagues predicted, they’ll be reluctant to take the more difficult and expensive steps that would allow more students to succeed in those courses, steps such as investing in better teacher working conditions, smaller class sizes, stronger classroom materials, and more effective academic advising and support.

Indeed, every major school reform movement since A Nation at Risk—from school restructuring and comprehensive school reform to school-to-work, community schooling, and the standards and accountability movement that gave us No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—has begun from the premise that a highly complex system like public education will only respond to a multifaceted and well-coordinated set of reform strategies.

Nonetheless, many state and local policymakers have gone on to behave precisely as Powell and his colleagues expected. Over the last four decades, officials in every part of the country have constantly tweaked and added to their high school course requirements, often without making corresponding investments in services, supports, or resources.[4] If anything, they’ve tended to rely on a wishful, Field of Dreams theory of school improvement: If you build it, they will come; if you require it, students will learn.

Has this wishful thinking paid off? Since the 1980s, scores of researchers have wrestled over this question, struggling to determine what effects, if any, can be attributed to the adoption of more rigorous course requirements, independent of other reforms.

Only in recent years—thanks to improvements in the collection and analysis of student performance data—have they begun to settle that debate. As states begin to share detailed information about students’ progress from grade school through higher education and into the workforce, it is finally becoming possible for researchers to measure the effects of course requirements. And they can explore more nuanced questions, including not just whether students are required to take particular subjects and classes, but how well they perform in them, when they take them, how those classes fit into a larger course sequence, and how well these requirements align with postsecondary requirements.

Following the publication of A Nation at Risk, most states did tighten their high school course requirements (though no state fully adopted the New Basics).[5] They cut down on the number of electives, narrowed the list of courses that could fulfill core requirements, and mandated additional years of math, science, and, to a lesser extent, social studies.[6] (Since most states already required four years of English, that subject saw no significant increase.)

Enrollments in core academic courses rose steeply. By the 1990s, fewer students were sampling aimlessly from a shopping mall curriculum. In short, the adoption of new requirements did have one of its intended effects, significantly reducing the decades-long practice of offering most students—especially poor students and students of color—a hodgepodge of less-than-rigorous and often non-academic courses, leaving them unprepared for college.

And yet, this did little to close existing gaps in high-level course-taking. Among historically marginalized students, enrollments rose most steeply at the lower levels of the academic curriculum, in courses such as business math and Algebra I, rather than intermediate and advanced courses such as Algebra II and calculus.[7]

In fact, while the new requirements allowed these students to gain access to a more rigorous curriculum, their more affluent peers saw greater gains, resulting in even higher levels of stratification than before.[8] Because students from higher-income backgrounds already tended to enroll in college-prep courses, the new requirements did not force a significant shift in their course-taking.[9] However, as college admissions became increasingly competitive, those students enrolled voluntarily (or perhaps under pressure from their parents and friends) in more challenging courses, going beyond even what had been recommended in A Nation at Risk. Moreover, those students were more likely to attend better-resourced schools, which could offer more advanced courses.

While it is difficult to say whether the adoption of new state requirements helped fuel this surge in high-level course-taking, that surge was massive. As one study revealed,

Just 2 percent of 1982 high school graduates completed the necessary courses to satisfy…the New Basics high school curriculum. Over the next two decades, the proportion of graduates completing this academically intensive curriculum increased many times over…. Particularly pronounced is the jump in math and science courses, where the median class of 2004 high school graduates earned a full [course] credit more in each subject than the median 1982 high school graduate.[10]

By the early 2000s, the rationale for adopting tougher course requirements had shifted somewhat. A Nation at Risk had argued that boosting academic achievement would safeguard America’s economic prosperity (and improve its civic health, though this aspect of the report received relatively little attention). But as it became increasingly clear that success in the workforce had come to require more than a high school diploma, influential organizations such as Achieve, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association began to urge states to embrace an even more ambitious goal: to ensure that the diploma actually signifies that students have become “college- and career-ready.”

That is, advocates called upon states to do more than just require students to take at least two years of science, three years of math, and so on. Rather, they argued that academic expectations in K–12 should be carefully sequenced to ensure that what students learn in 12th grade allows them to make a smooth transition to the two- and four-year college curriculum (a grade-by-grade progression spelled out in great detail in the 2010 Common Core State Standards).

In response, most states toughened their high school course requirements still further, many of them raising their math and science requirements to three or four years. Some states also began to require students to pass end-of-course exams and graduation tests to meet specific college- and career-ready standards. And some states required all students to complete specific classes (Algebra II, most often) that are believed to meet minimum standards for college-level work.[11]

However, over the last several years—and particularly in the wake of a widespread public backlash against the Common Core, as well as a growing backlash against the notion that all students should go to college—various states have eased up. Today it is difficult to see a clear trend line among the states’ various approaches to setting course requirements.[12]

For instance, some states (and many individual districts) now require students to take specific high-level courses (such as Algebra I in the eighth or ninth grade), while others do not. Some require one or two years of foreign language study, but most do not. Many states require some combination of additional half- or full-year classes (increasingly common are civics, personal finance, and computer science), but other states list such courses as options that can fulfill an existing requirement (a computer science course might count as a math or science course). A handful of states allow individual districts or schools to define their own graduation requirements, and a handful of others are in the early stages of shifting to proficiency-based graduation requirements, which don’t necessarily require students to take particular courses.

Course requirements appear to be evolving perhaps most quickly in career and technical education (CTE), but here, too, the requirements are all over the map. Some states make no mention of CTE in their curriculum guidelines, while others treat it in a variety of ways, from requiring all students to take one or more CTE courses to defining it as an option that fulfills a general education requirement. And many states have recently created, or are in the process of building, distinct academic- and career-focused pathways, each with its own course requirements.[13]

Some of these recent changes in course requirements reflect larger trends in K–12 education, such as the current enthusiasm for investing in new CTE pathways, the increasing need for digital and media literacy, the growing interest in creating proficiency-based alternatives to the Carnegie Unit, and simmering concerns about the health of the nation’s civic life. Policymakers are also responsive to their own state’s particular mix of political pressures and public concerns (for example, the plight of students who enroll in college only to find that they must take non-credit-bearing developmental courses).

It's also clear that local and state officials have been quite responsive, over the last 40 years, to the argument that new economic conditions demand new high school course requirements.

Much less clear, however, is the extent to which all of these efforts to toughen and tinker with high school course requirements have been informed by empirical research into the effects of doing so, or whether these new course requirements have had the effects that their sponsors intended.

In the 1980s and ’90s, a sizeable body of research identified specific high school courses that appeared to give students an edge in later years, preparing them to succeed in college. Findings from this research have often been interpreted to support the push to adopt tougher course requirements.

Most influential were a series of reports published by Clifford Adelman, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Education, drawing upon federal data collections that included students’ high school transcript records, test scores, and answers to survey questions about their educational experiences over time. Focusing on students who later enrolled in a four-year college, Adelman asked which of many variables (student attendance rates, grades, test scores, family income level, and so on) were most strongly associated with completing a bachelor’s degree in later years. The most important factor, he found, was whether or not a given student had taken a rigorous academic course load in high school, particularly one that included Algebra II or, even better, higher-level math classes.[14]

Since then, many other studies have corroborated Adelman’s findings, showing that students who take a challenging academic course load in high school are significantly more likely than others to enroll in and graduate from college, particularly four-year colleges,[15] and to have higher earnings in subsequent years.[16] Further, those findings have been well-publicized and have been cited to support policy decisions on course requirements, particularly in the various states and districts that have pushed for all students to take Algebra I in the eighth or ninth grade. Indeed, Adelman himself suggested that, given the strength of his findings, policymakers would be wise to require a more rigorous academic curriculum in high schools, especially in math.

Still, while taking rigorous coursework may be correlated with later success, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will cause students to succeed. Perhaps the students who choose to take Algebra II, calculus, and other advanced courses in high school simply tend to be the kinds of students—better prepared, higher achieving, more ambitious, more affluent, attending better-resourced schools, and so on—who are more likely to enroll in and succeed in college.

But if the evidence remains far from conclusive, the technical quality of the research has improved greatly since the 1990s. The data have improved especially since 2005, when the U.S. Department of Education provided its first grants to support the development of statewide longitudinal data systems. Based on newer analyses of state and local data, some researchers have joined Adelman in arguing that while the correlational findings may not be definitive, they are strong enough to justify the adoption of tougher course requirements. For instance, one study, which reviewed several years of secondary and postsecondary student data from Florida, found that students who took rigorous high school courses had significantly better outcomes later in high school and college, regardless of their race, family income, previous academic performance, or even the subject matter of the rigorous courses they took.[17] The evidence may not prove that advanced course-taking causes students to do better, the study concluded, but it comes close.

Skeptics remain unconvinced. As researchers Andrew Penner, Thurston Domina, Emily Penner, and AnneMarie Conley have argued, it’s one thing to observe that when individual students take advanced courses, they tend to do better in high school and college. But Adelman and others make a huge leap of faith to assume that once schools require all students to take those courses, individuals will still see the same benefits.[18] When schools scale up a policy, Penner and his colleagues point out, they create an entirely new environment, in which the old research findings may no longer apply. They offer a helpful analogy: “Standing up at a baseball game is likely to improve any given spectator’s view. However, if every spectator in the stadium stands up at the same time, nobody’s view is likely to improve appreciably. In other words, the observation that standing improves views at the individual level is insufficient for estimating the effects on a policy requiring all spectators to stand up.”[19]

What important variables change once a district or state mandates that every student take advanced coursework? For one thing, the composition of the typical classroom changes dramatically. It’s easy to see how an individual eighth grader might benefit by opting to take, for example, an algebra class full of high-achieving peers, taught by an experienced teacher. But what happens, ask Penner and his coauthors, when most students are placed in algebra, and the spike in enrollments forces schools to staff the course with unprepared teachers? According to their study of a California school district’s implementation of the state’s eighth grade Algebra for All policy, every kind of student (from the least prepared to the most) tended to underperform in subsequent years, relative to similar peers whose schools did not implement the requirement.

Along similar grounds, other critics have argued that when states or districts ramp up their course requirements, underprepared students are bound to struggle and fail, which eventually may lead some to become demoralized and drop out of school. And in fact, while some studies have found that local dropout rates did not change in the years after new requirements were introduced,[20] other studies have found significant, if modest, increases in high school attrition.[21] Researchers have also found that after course requirements ramp up, those courses tend to become watered down, such that the content no longer reflects the title of the class.[22]

The research findings haven’t been entirely negative. For instance, a couple of studies have found that after states and districts ratcheted up their course requirements, college enrollment increased somewhat among those students who went on to graduate from high school,[23] including low-income and Black and Latino students.[24] Another study reported that “state changes in minimum high school math requirements substantially increase Black students’ completed math coursework and their later earnings.”[25]

On balance, though, the evidence suggests there is little to be gained by simply mandating that all students take specific high-level courses, and that evidence has only grown stronger as researchers have looked back to see what actually happened in the years after such requirements were implemented in various parts of the country. For instance, researchers at the Chicago Consortium for School Research looked into student achievement patterns in the years after the Chicago school system decided to implement a “college prep for all” policy, requiring all ninth graders to take rigorous coursework in algebra, science, and English. They found no gains in test scores, advanced course-taking later in high school, or college enrollments. Their conclusion closely echoed the argument made by Powell, Farrar, and Cohen four decades ago: “Policy solutions need to go beyond adding course requirements to address student engagement and the quality of classroom instruction.”[26]

Researchers have reported similar findings from a number of large-scale studies of student performance in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, and elsewhere: After policymakers mandated that all students must take specific, high-level academic courses, student outcomes did not improve, and on some measures they declined.[27]

Today, education policymakers from every part of the political spectrum agree that our public high schools have a responsibility to steer all students, not just a fortunate few, through a coherent course of study that prepares them to succeed as adults. Nobody wants to go back to the shopping mall high schools of the 1970s.

That said, we have overestimated the power of requirements alone to bring about better and more equitable student outcomes. And we have underestimated the need for more fine-grained data that can tell us which requirements matter most, for whom, and in what contexts.

Today, state data systems are advancing (some faster than others) to the point that they can monitor students’ progress from early education to and through higher education and workforce entry. They can link that information to a range of relevant indicators and outcomes and pursue a number of basic—and still unanswered—questions about which course requirements, grades, and other variables are related to long-term success.

These advancements put researchers in a much better position to provide useful guidance on pressing policy questions. For instance:

• As states build out high school pathways (with differing requirements for college- and career-focused students), what can they do to ensure that those pathways are relevant for both access to and success in postsecondary systems?
• What are the trade-offs between the depth and breadth of courses? Is it better to provide students more support in fewer courses or to expand content coverage over many courses? What policies might enable both—better performance across both depth and breadth of courses?
• To what extent should states be flexible in waiving specific graduation requirements, depending on individual student needs and interests, or on school model? What effect would waivers have on schools’ willingness to experiment with interdisciplinary courses, project-based learning, competency-based assessment, and other nontraditional teaching models and programs?
• Which college course requirements (e.g., advanced math, writing composition, laboratory science) matter most for post-college success? That is, to what extent are high school requirements pegged to college requirements that are not related to post-college success?

To date, empirical studies of high school requirements have generated one important lesson about what not to do: State and district policymakers shouldn’t expect students to succeed in postsecondary education just because they’ve been required to take Algebra II, laboratory science, and other advanced academic classes. Moving forward, research promises to yield more useful insights into how we might redesign the high school curriculum in ways that help all kinds of students, from every background, to prepare for life after high school.

We are grateful for the support of the Joyce Foundation, which funded this brief as part of a larger project in partnership with the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. For questions about the project, contact Elena Silva, senior director of PreK–12 education, at silva@newamerica.org.

[1] Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David K. Cohen, The Shopping Mall High School (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985).

[2] In the 1920s, roughly 15 percent of the country’s 14- to 17-year-olds enrolled in high school for one or more years. By the 1970s, around 90 percent of the age cohort did so.

[3] The National Education Association’s influential 1893 Committee of Ten report recommended that all high school students take a core curriculum of English, foreign language, mathematics, history, and science. Twenty-five years later, at a time of fast-growing high school enrollment, the NEA issued a second, equally influential report, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, which advocated for a more varied (and not necessarily college-prep) curriculum, including civics, vocational training, personal hygiene, etc. The shopping mall high school, argue Powell, Farrar, and Cohen, resulted from efforts to accommodate both of these competing visions.

[4] A notable exception was California’s Hughes-Hart Educational Reform Act of 1983, which paired new graduation requirements with an $800-million package of related programs to improve teacher mentoring, add instructional time to the school year, reduce school funding inequities, and more.

[5] Elliott Medrich, Cynthia Brown, and Lisa Ross, Overview and Inventory of State Requirements for School Coursework and Attendance (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Education Statistics, 1992).

[6] William Clune, Paula White, and Janice Patterson, The Implementation and Effects of High School Graduation Requirements: First Steps Toward Curricular Reform (Washington, DC: Center for Policy Research in Education, 1989).

[7] William Clune and Paula A. White, “Education Reform in the Trenches: Increased Academic Course Taking in High Schools With Lower Achieving Students in States With Higher Graduation Requirements,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 14, no. 1 (March 1, 1992): 2–20; and Jeremy Finn, Susan Gerber, and Margaret Wang, “Course Offerings, Course Requirements, and Course Taking in Mathematics,” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 17, no. 4 (2002): 336–66.

[8] Kathryn Schiller and Chandra Muller, “Raising the Bar and Equity? Effects of State High School Graduation Requirements and Accountability Policies on Students’ Mathematics Course Taking,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 25, no. 3 (September 1, 2003): 299–318.

[9] Bradford Chaney, Kenneth Burgdorf, and Nadir Atash, “Influencing Achievement Through High School Graduation Requirements,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 19, no. 3 (September 1, 1997): 229–44; and Peter Teitelbaum, “The Influence of High School Graduation Requirement Policies in Mathematics and Science on Student Course-Taking Patterns and Achievement,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 25, no. 1 (March 1, 2003): 31–57.

[10] Thurston Domina and Joshua Saldana, “Does Raising the Bar Level the Playing Field? Mathematics Curricular Intensification and Inequality in American High Schools, 1982–2004,” American Educational Research Journal 49, no. 4 (August 1, 2012): 693.

[11] National Assessment of Educational Progress, The 2019 NAEP High School Transcript Study (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).

[12] Ben Erwin, Daizha Brown, and Sharmila Mann, “50-State Comparison: High School Graduation Requirements,” Education Commission of the States, May 23, 2023.

[13] Achieve, “State Expectations for Graduation Matter—and Differ—More Than You Think,” Achieve.org, August 22, 2018; and Jennifer Sattem and Anne Hyslop, “Ready for What? How Multiple Graduation Pathways Do—and Do Not—Signal Readiness for College and Careers,” Alliance for Excellent Education, February 23, 2021.

[14] Clifford Adelman, Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns, and Bachelor’s Degree Attainment (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, June 1999); and Clifford Adelman, The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion From High School Through College (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, February 2006).

[15] Paul Attewell and Thurston Domina, “Raising the Bar: Curricular Intensity and Academic Performance,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 30, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 51–71; Megan Austin, “Measuring High School Curricular Intensity over Three Decades,” Sociology of Education 93, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 65–90; and Laura Horn, Lawrence Kojaku, and C. Dennis Carroll, "High School Academic Curriculum and the Persistence Path through College," National Center for Education Statistics 163 (2001).

[16] Joseph G. Altonji, The Effects of High School Curriculum on Education and Labor Market Outcomes, Working Paper 4142 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, August 1992); Thomas Dee, “Learning to Earn: More Stringent High-School Graduation Requirements May Reduce Students’ Chances of Earning a Diploma. But Higher Standards Also Improve Their Ability to Find a Job,” Education Next 3, no. 3 (June 22, 2003): 65–71; and Heather Rose and Julian Betts. “The Effect of High School Courses on Earnings,” Review of Economics and Statistics 86, no. 2 (May 1, 2004): 497–513.

[17] Mark Long, Dylan Conger, and Patrice Latarola, “Effects of High School Course-Taking on Secondary and Postsecondary Success,” American Educational Research Journal 49, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 285–322.

[18] Andrew Penner, Thurston Domina, Emily Penner, and AnneMarie Conley, “Curricular Policy as a Collective Effects Problem: A Distributional Approach,” Social Science Research 52 (July 1, 2015): 627–41.

[19] Penner et al., “Curricular Policy,” 628.

[20] Niu Gao, “College Readiness in California: A Look at Rigorous High School Course-Taking,” Public Policy Institute of California (2016): 1–11; Thomas Hoffer, “High School Graduation Requirements: Effects on Dropping Out and Student Achievement,” Teachers College Record 98, no. 4 (June 1, 1997): 584–607; and Jill Walston, Clyde Tucker, Cong Ye, and Dong Hoon Lee, Graduation Exam Participation and Performance, Graduation Rates, and Advanced Coursetaking Following Changes in New Mexico Graduation Requirements, 2011–15 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest, October 2017).

[21] Nathan Daun-Barnett and Edward St John, “Constrained Curriculum in High Schools: The Changing Math Standards and Student Achievement, High School Graduation and College Continuation,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 20, no. 5 (February 20, 2012): 1–25; Dean Lillard and Philip P. DeCicca. “Higher Standards, More Dropouts? Evidence within and across Time,” Economics of Education Review 20, no. 5 (October 1, 2001): 459–73; and Andrew Plunk, William Tate, Laura Bierut, and Richard Grucza, “Intended and Unintended Effects of State-Mandated High School Science and Mathematics Course Graduation Requirements on Educational Attainment,” Educational Researcher 43, no. 5 (June 1, 2014): 230–41.

[22] Chrys Dougherty, Lynn Mellor, and Shuling Jian, Orange Juice or Orange Drink? Ensuring that “Advanced Courses” Live up to Their Labels (Iowa City, IA: National Center for Educational Accountability, February 2006); and Tom Loveless, The Algebra Imperative: Assessing Algebra in a National and International Context (Washington, DC: Brookings, September 2013).

[23] Charles Clotfelter, Steven Hemelt, and Helen Ladd, “Raising the Bar for College Admission: North Carolina’s Increase in Minimum Math Course Requirements,” Education Finance and Policy 14, no. 3 (July 1, 2019): 492–521.

[24] Soobin Kim, Return to Algebra II: The Effect of Mandatory Math Coursework on Postsecondary Attainment (Rochester, NY: SSRN Scholarly Paper, November 15, 2018).

[25] Joshua Goodman, “The Labor of Division: Returns to Compulsory High School Math Coursework,” Journal of Labor Economics 37, no. 4 (2019).

[26] Elaine Allensworth, Takako Nomi, Nicholas Montgomery, and Valerie Lee, “College Preparatory Curriculum for All: Academic Consequences of Requiring Algebra and English I for Ninth Graders in Chicago,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 31, no. 4 (December 1, 2009): 367–91.