The rise of artificial intelligence and other technology has traditional high schools scrambling to keep up — with states doing an uneven job of encouraging schools to embed critical thinking skills, and offer students access to internships and college courses, according to a new report.

Today’s world, the nonprofit XQ Institute argues in its new report , “requires an entirely new kind of educational experience — one that traditional high schools were never designed to deliver,” the report found. 

“We live in an age of self-driving taxis, blockchain, and renewed interest in space exploration. The public launch of ChatGPT placed a powerful form of generative artificial intelligence (AI) within the reach of every American,” the report continued. “(The) stage is shifting rapidly. Our young people are growing up at a time when the economy and workforce are in constant flux. And high schools must keep pace.”

Schools not only need to emphasize work and early college experiences, XQ found, but also teach interpersonal and thinking skills as much as academics.

“What do we need to know when we leave our high school doors?” asked XQ CEO Russlynn Ali. Math, English and science are still important, she said.

“But layered on top of that, we need to be critical thinkers,” Ali said. “We need to be able to collaborate. We need adaptability. We need these skills that will help us succeed in life, no matter what direction we choose after we leave high school.”

XQ wants states to encourage schools to follow the lead of Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis or the Museum High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where students learn academics and interpersonal skills through projects, not lectures. Another standout: Oakland, California’s Latitude High School, where every 10th grader follows an adult through a work day to learn about the job, 11th graders have month-long internships and seniors can choose to do a longer one.

The new report takes a different approach from XQ’s previous work, which has centered on schools.

“States have more responsibility and authority over their schools than certainly in recent memory, if not in my lifetime,” Ali said. “They must be the locus of change.”

States are mixed however, XQ reports in the new study, in how they are succeeding in meeting 10 goals XQ considers key to school innovation. XQ met with school leaders across the country to create the goals — and then researched how much progress each state and Washington, D.C., has made toward them:

• 46 states have met the goal of offering work experience, such as internships, as credit toward high school diplomas.
• 38 states give every student a chance to earn college credit before graduating, by taking Advance Placement, International Baccalaureate or college classes.
• 32 states give schools the ability to award students class credit under a mastery or competency system showing they know the material, instead of just attending a class. 
• 32 states have identified key skills students need to learn for the future, including non-academic skills XQ has made a major part of its work, such as teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving. States often created a “Portrait of a Graduate” spelling these out.
• Just 10 states — Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington — met six of the goals; and no state met all 10, though 31 met at least four. Two states — Alaska and Florida — met only two of the goals.
• Two of XQ’s goals — finding ways to measure how well students have learned interpersonal and thinking skills, then showing those on report cards  — haven’t been realized by any state.

XQ plans to track changes and update the report every two years for the next decade.

“I think of these as a start, definitely not a finish line,” Ali said.

To highlight the 10 policy goals and encourage states to adopt them, XQ is planning to visit schools and policymakers in 25 communities, likely over the next two years. Details of that tour, which starts March 4 in Indianapolis and stops in Columbus, Ohio, the week after, are still being developed.

XQ, a nonprofit and affiliate of investing and philanthropic firm Emerson Collective, was co-founded by Ali and Laurene Powell Jobs. Powell Jobs is Emerson’s founder and president, and wife of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

XQ has been refining its vision for redesigning high schools since launching in 2015 with a well-publicized campaign to identify and support innovative “Super Schools” across the country. It gave a total of $102 million in 2016 to 18 schools — including the schools mentioned above — before expanding its work to 28 states.

XQ’s vision has its , who say it and who are to prepare students. But school districts and several states, including Indiana, Rhode Island and Utah, agree with the approach and are open in their support.

Utah’s state superintendent Molly Hart said the state rarely adopts any national approach, but there is great overlap in what XQ promotes and the state’s push to redesign high schools, including the support of mastery teaching approaches and requiring students to earn a meaningful professional credential before graduating.

”We align closely when you look at some of the goals and policy actions that XQ does,” she said. “We have a lot of similarities in what we’re looking at.”

The report, and shorter reports XQ released for individual states, also highlight policy changes and efforts already in place that XQ considers “beacons” for change. Among them:

• Indiana: For giving schools increasing flexibility in giving students class credit for showing proficiency in a subject, rather than just sitting through a class all semester or year. 

• Rhode Island: For changing diploma requirements so that all students, beginning in 2028, must take the courses in math, foreign language and even art that qualify them to attend college.
  
  “Our kids were not even taking the classes to be able to apply to those schools,” said state education commissioner Angelica Infante-Green. “Once they got there, they were in remedial courses because we weren’t preparing them for college level achievement.”  

• Texas: For allowing students to earn 12 hours of college credit in high school, either through college, AP or International Baccalaureate classes.

• Colorado: For encouraging the growth of CareerWise high school apprenticeships, the largest youth apprenticeship program in the country. Colorado also broke career preparation into three categories — Learning ABOUT Work, Learning THROUGH Work, and Learning AT Work.  

• Utah: For giving schools grants to train teachers how to educate students using a mastery/competency approach; and how to rate student progress. Utah also backed some schools in trying out vastly different report cards – keeping the traditional A-F grade scale, but also giving students a new Mastery Learning Record that shows their progress on durable skills.

Ali said XQ also wanted to highlight two goals that haven’t been met yet, but that she considers vital — developing tests to measure how well students have learned key non-academic skills and then changing student report cards to rate students on those skills.

Ali said the standardized tests states use to measure student skills in math, English and science offer some sense of what students know, but are outdated. There’s no clear way yet to assess how well students have mastered durable skills to prove to colleges or employers they have those skills. And Ali said that schools tend to prioritize learning the state measures and judges them on, so schools won’t teach them vigorously until they are part of report cards and school ratings.

But XQ recognized 12 states for trying to develop those tests and report cards, six of them for participating in a pilot project with the Educational Testing Service, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Mastery Transcript Consortium (now part of ETS). The Skills for the Future project has been working to create tests on durable skills, starting with three — collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

XQ is not part of this effort, but partners with Carnegie on some related work, and says it enthusiastically backs it.

The Skills for the Future team, which includes Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, is still working on creating new tests but recently broke down each of those three skills into smaller skills as one step toward creating tests.

Communication, for example, is broken down into segments — presentation skills, making messages more clear, adapting messages for different audiences or comprehending communication of others — that are then broken down further into sub-skills.

Infante-Green said measuring these skills will be a “game changer.”

“I think it will give employers things that they have been looking for, as well as change how we teach, what we teach, and how we incorporate (those skills) into the academic field,” she said. “It’s important. It won’t be one or the other, it’ll be both.”

Ali also stressed that just passing policy changes won’t be enough. Schools, teachers and parents need to also be on board.

“It’s not a checklist,” Ali said. “It has to be implemented in a way that is sustained and empowering and supportive of what needs to happen in the classroom.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to �鶹��Ʒ.

That’s not the weighty middle-aged regret of lost dreams. It’s the lament of an Indianapolis high school senior who waited until late into his sophomore year – Gasp! – to take advantage of the college classes Indiana offers high schoolers for free or little cost.

Indiana is one of the few states where starting college as a high school sophomore makes you a late bloomer. The state ranks just behind Idaho in leading an early college credit movement, as states increasingly encourage high school students to take college classes, most often at community colleges.

In Idaho and Indiana, high school students make up more than half the students in community college classes, according to a. Iowa and Montana follow, with high schoolers representing more than 40% of community college enrollment, and eight other states comprising more than 30% of enrollment. 

On the other end, states such as Rhode Island and Connecticut haven’t joined the push, with high schoolers making up just 6% and 10% of community college students, respectively.

High school students have long been able to get a head start on college credits, traditionally by taking accelerated Advanced Placement classes and accompanying national Advanced Placement tests that started in the 1950s. Colleges then decide which credits to award based on the test scores. The College Board still offers 39 AP course guidelines and tests each year.

But earning early college credit has become more urgent the last few decades, as college costs have exploded and employers increasingly require study beyond high school. So states have seen dramatic increases in “early college,” “dual enrollment” or “dual credit” where high school students take classes on college campuses or high school teachers offer college classes.

Those approaches have allowed the number of high school students earning college credit to more than double since 2011 to 1.5 million a year, according to the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. About 75% are enrolled in community colleges and the rest in four-year schools. Columbia researchers also estimate that more than a third of high schoolers take at least one college class before graduating.

“The pitch to communities and families and students is…get your first year of college out of the way in high school, or get it done in high school,” said researcher John Fink. “That’s a very compelling affordability pitch to students and families and obviously that’s an important issue on everybody’s mind.”

In a state as aggressive as Indiana, it’s normal for students like Torres, a student at l Believe Circle City High School, to be taking quantitative reasoning at Ivy Tech Community College this fall after taking psychology and introduction to criminology as a junior.

“I was kind of just in trouble all the time,” Torres said of himself as a freshman. “I didn’t really care about school stuff. It wasn’t until last year where I started actually doing my work and decided to take dual enrollment seriously.”

“Now I’m kind of trying to rush things,” said Torres, who wants to earn a degree before starting a career as a police officer. “I kind of wish I started early when they had given me the opportunity.”

Fink and other Columbia researchers reported in October that students taking college classes early are in college right after high school and are more likely to earn technical certificates, associates and bachelors degrees.

Taking classes directly through a college allows students to receive credits automatically, which is often more attractive to students than AP classes that rely on test scores to turn into credits, said Julie Edmunds, director of the Early College Resource Center at the University of North Carolina -Greensboro. 

“When all the college credit relies on passing a single exam on a single day, there are students who aren’t going to be successful in that kind of environment, and the proportion of AP takers that actually receive credit is much lower,” Edmunds said.

Other factors make taking college classes attractive to some students, including letting students intimidated by college test it out or colleges offering classes like advanced physics or foreign languages that their high schools can’t provide.

Still, though almost all states allow high schoolers to take college classes, there’s no consensus on how much to encourage and how to pay for it. A found a wide variation in the training teachers need to teach college classes, which students can take them and who pays for them.

Twenty-six states required high school students to meet a college’s entrance requirements first, the study found, while others do not. Nineteen states required students to have a recommendation from a school official, while others require students to pass tests or just let students decide on their own.

States also differ on which community college classes automatically count toward four-year degrees.

And states are divided on who pays for early credits, the study found, with states like Alabama and South Carolina requiring high school students to pay full tuition rates and states like Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Washington, D.C. covering the entire cost of the classes.

The Idaho State Board of Education attributes its high rate of community college enrollment on the state’s Advanced Opportunities program, which gives students up to $4,625 to pay for college classes.

And there are big differences too between students who just enroll in some college classes and those in so-called “early college high schools,” where college credit is prioritized and schools offer more specialized counseling and specific courses to help students succeed.

“If you’re expanding access to college,you can’t just throw everybody in college courses without giving them some level of support,” Edmunds said. 

In Indiana, where officials boast of being a national leader in early credits, having one single community college, Ivy Tech, with 45 campuses around the state under one umbrella, makes coordinating between schools easier.

The state also made course credits more valuable starting in 2013 by creating the , a collection of 30 college credits – some math, some English, some science, some social studies – guaranteed to transfer to any public institution in the state. That lets students know classes they take in high school will count at any public, and some private, school they choose.

The state also encourages high schools to offer classes in that core to students, so that some will complete it by graduation. 

Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Chris Lowery said high schools slowly started making these classes available, with 84 of about 500 offering it three years ago. He said he and state education superintendent Katie Jenner, have pressed other schools to add it, growing that number to 275. 

That often means having teachers like Brooklyn Raines, an English teacher at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, teach Ivy Tech classes at the school. Though an employee of Indianapolis Public Schools, Raines had to apply to Ivy Tech as an instructor, attend early college training over the summer and have her curriculum for Introduction to Creative Writing approved by the community college’s English department.

She now teaches that class at Crispus Attucks three days a week on behalf of Ivy Tech. Though there can be worries that college level work is too much for high school students who are younger and haven’t learned as much as older students, Raines said her students are capable.

“Despite the stigma that they aren’t traditional college students, so they can’t retain the information, or they can’t keep up with the information, they prove time and time and again that they can,” Raines said.

Other times, students take Ivy Tech classes online. That’s how Layla Kpotufe, a fellow senior at the same high school as Torres, took a world politics class last year that has her debating whether to continue on a political science path or follow a previous interest in neuroscience.

Kpotufe, who has already earned an associates degree in general studies, said the Ivy Tech classes could cut her costs for her bachelors degree nearly in half.

“It would definitely take a lot of money off,” she said. “That’s why I think Ivy Tech is a really good opportunity for people, especially if you want to stay in state.”