With the flat 2013 test scores posted by Hartford students, business leaders across the region have every reason to doubt that Hartford’s K-12 education system will ever really produce the talent pipeline their businesses want and need. With barely 25 percent of Hartford 10th graders testing at grade level, students graduating today aren’t prepared to complete post-secondary education and come back to work and lead in large numbers.
However, with so many successful business models feeding off a cycle of innovation and replication, it begs the question, “Do we have just one recipe for success among Hartford’s high schools that can be replicated?” I submit that we have much to learn from the handful of high schools that are succeeding in Hartford, especially from the highest performing non-magnet high school, High School Inc. (Hartford’s Insurance and Finance Academy). This particular school has three key ingredients: industry standards, school leaders from industry, and intentional culture shock for students.
A number of local corporations were involved in the very early design of this school, and still play a major role in its governance as well as its funding, ensuring accountability for results. Today those partners include the Connecticut Insurance and Financial Services Cluster, Travelers Cos., Franklin Trust Federal Credit Union, The Hartford Financial Services Group, and Waddell & Reed. These partners invest real time and real resources, because skin in the game matters. The internships that students must earn and complete are not simply efforts to expose kids to industry content; they are an attempt to teach and train students on what it means and how to be a professional.
High School Inc. Principal Terrell Hill is an Army veteran — and an entrepreneur who has worked in the areas of workforce diversity, conflict resolution and team building as well as owning a coffeehouse. The business knowledge he imparts to his students is firsthand. Coming from industry to lead the Insurance and Finance Academy at High School Inc., Hill is a standard bearer with authority.
This is the most difficult ingredient. In the transition to the culture of work (or college), a complete identity shift is the key to success for young people. It’s not about shedding your identity as a young Hartford student, but about creating a second identity as a scholar and young professional. “Codeswitching” is defined as the practice of shifting back and forth between languages, but it can also be defined as the practice of managing multiple identities that are appropriate to their context. For students to play in the professional world, a complete identity shift is what’s needed. At High School Inc. the culture of high expectations is grounded in hard, honest conversations with students about the quality of their school work and about the level of their professionalism on the job at internships.
In Hartford’s choice system, all the high schools have industry themes and all of them have to be chosen by the students who attend them. The opportunity to cultivate industry-level standards at each school is there, if we do three things:
1. Drive much closer proximity to industry by taking school-level partnerships up to school-level governance;
2. Push for school leaders to have industry-level experience and expect them to drive industry standards;
3. Ask our schools to employ youth development specialists who can help students build new identities as young professionals.
And for those businesses who are already partnering with Hartford schools, I ask you this: how can you take your partnership to the next level so that you don’t invest time and money into a school that, 10 years from now, still doesn’t provide the rigor needed for college and career? Let’s follow the recipe, as a city, and as a region, and build the talent pipeline we all need.
Paul Diego Holzer is the executive director of Achieve Hartford!, an education reform advocacy group.
