I love a good road trip, particularly now that things have thawed here in New England. In addition to picking a playlist or downloading an audiobook, I set my GPS to be sure I’m taking the best route.
This is not so different from what high school students need as they chart a course to graduation; they should have a goal or end point and reliable pathways for getting there.
The reality is, though, our K-12 schools need support in mapping that out. Almost 72% of recent graduates report feeling moderately, slightly, or not at all prepared for postsecondary life, according to a 2025 national survey.
Beginning in 2019, Rhode Island, where I am commissioner of elementary and secondary education, has been working to address the problem, which became glaringly obvious to us in recent years as we set out to redesign students’ high school experiences.
Through an extensive audit of the educational opportunities available to high schoolers in our state, we learned 80% of students wanted to attend college after graduation, but only 52% were taking and passing the courses required for general eligibility at public colleges and universities in Rhode Island.
Math was among the areas where students fell short, which shouldn’t come as a surprise: The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress shows less than a quarter of 12th graders across the country are performing at the “proficient” level.
To better understand what was holding Rhode Island students back, we sought help from researchers at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The team found high school students were navigating hundreds of math course-taking patterns, meaning there was no consensus approach in math education from school to school. It was a case of practically anything goes. While the state required four years of math in high school, it didn’t define those credits. A financial literacy algebra course counted as a math course in some schools, but it was largely teaching financial literacy, not algebra. I’m all for teaching financial literacy—math is at its core—but it’s not teaching math concepts the way an algebra class does.
Worse, the analysis showed a third of our courses weren’t aligned to high school math standards but tied to middle school math standards. Our state education department has since offered guidance on what’s acceptable for high school math credit.
We leveraged the findings to create more coherent and rigorous math pathways. The new requirements specify that high school students need to take four math credits, which must include Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, and another allowable math class (like probability and statistics or data science).
Looking back, we identified a few key choices that set us on the right path. We urge other state leaders to consider the following when attempting to improve pathways to success after high school.
Learn from other places
When we set out to make these changes, we examined diploma policies in other states. In particular, we looked at places that required all students to complete college- and career-ready coursework in math and English/language arts—places like the District of Columbia, Georgia, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Virginia. At the time, these states were among those identified as leading the way in K-16 alignment. Today, there continues to be significant variation in graduation requirements across the country, including the number of math courses required and content of the classes.
As a state education leader, it’s rewarding when the policies my team and I develop help other leaders as they carry out critical work. This happened recently with the Rhode Island education department’s success reducing chronic absenteeism. But, similarly, I want to learn from others excelling in areas where our state has lagged. In the case of high school pathways, for example, we adapted a Georgia policy requiring that all high school math credits be selected from a vetted list of state-approved courses that was jointly developed with college-admissions officers, in our case, from the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College.
Capture student voice and support adult change
Previous efforts to reimagine high school in our state didn’t tap the power of student voice but instead were driven by assessment results. Those matter but can’t alone drive policy. Our state has worked hard to capture student voice through surveys and formal conversations with kids and to carry that focus into our implementation efforts. Our young people have told us loud and clear they want to graduate from high school completing the coursework that will support them in graduating college- and career-ready.
To support educators and administrators, our education department has hosted the “Let’s Get Ready” Community of Practice. These sessions support our educators on the new math guidance and highlight the connection between our math requirements, college-admissions tests, and student outcomes. We’ve also held sessions exploring strategies for ensuring all students complete the courses required to have an open door to enrollment in postsecondary education.
Be flexible to a point
We got some pushback from educators and school and district leaders on whether Algebra II is the right requirement for all students, but the reality is that it maps to what colleges in our state and region expect. As long as the majority of our students want to go to college, we will do everything in our power to help prepare them.
But compromise and collaboration have been important, too. Throughout this process, our goal was never to “be right” but to get it right for Rhode Island students. That means listening to feedback and changing plans when necessary. For example, we allowed for a longer runway for implementation than I had hoped for. The new requirements are in place for our current high school freshmen and sophomores and all students coming up behind them.
Early implementation of Rhode Island’s readiness-based math requirements is showing promising momentum, with districts expanding student participation in Algebra 1-Geometry-Algebra 2 sequences and advanced coursework while simultaneously building targeted supports for all learners to succeed in these courses.
We are keeping an open mind about how our policies might evolve and are looking at what leads up to high school coursetaking. We’re now examining middle school math pathways, including who has access to Algebra I in middle school and how those placement decisions are made. We also plan to audit and evaluate coursetaking patterns in English/language arts and science.
It’s been six years since we started our work to meaningfully improve our students’ high school experience. For other education leaders considering something similar, it’s important to know this requires leaders to be relentless believers in what students are capable of and what they should have access to. This belief must be visible in the expectations we set, the supports we design, and the opportunities we provide.
