Education Reform in the Trenches: Increased Academic Course Taking in High Schools With Lower Achieving Students in States With Higher Graduation Requirements

Increased academic course taking was a major goal of the education reforms of the 1980s, and increased graduation requirements were the most common change in state policies. This study analyzes transcript data on changes in course taking among graduates of high schools enrolling mostly lower achieving students in four states adopting high graduation requirements during the 1980s. The changes that occurred must be counted at least a moderate success. Average credits per student increased in all academic subjects, and the level of difficulty of these courses also increased. Science was the biggest gainer of the 1980s, with growth primarily in beginning academic courses such as physical science, earth science, and chemistry I. The usefulness of the kind of data reported in this article to policy-making and the difficulty of collecting such data strongly support the need for systematic indicators of course taking coded by level of difficulty and disaggregated by administrative unit (nation, state, district, school).