By Andrew Schmitz, Senior Managing Director, and Dr. Rachel Martin, Senior Director of Program Learning, at OneGoal
Reading time: Five minutes
What was a good day in high school?
Did you look forward to it?
Did you feel supported by multiple adults? How did your school prepare you for the next stage of your life?
Student perceptions and experiences inform a high school’s culture and climate and have a lasting impact on students’ ability to be successful after graduating. As more and more high schools seek to blur the lines between high school, postsecondary, and workforce, educators, administrators, and superintendents need information that captures how high schoolers feel and experience this transition and the support they receive. Because it can be predictive
of longer-term outcomes, this data should sit alongside other leading indicators of college and career readiness and help leaders inform their priorities and decision-making.
In 2023, OneGoal piloted its Student Postsecondary Culture Survey (SPCS), within the OneGoal Leadership Network as a tool designed to elevate student voice and provide practitioners with robust data about how high school students experience their post-graduation transition. The survey organizes data across four topics centered on a set of key questions:
Advising and Relationships: To what extent do students have access to the advising they need to reach their highest postsecondary aspirations?
Equitable Course Access: To what extent are students advised, encouraged, and supported in enrolling in advanced coursework (CTE, Dual Enrollment, AP/IB)?
Plans, Preparedness, and Expectations: To what extent are students prepared with the information and resources they need to reach their highest postsecondary aspirations?
Outside Support: To what extent do students have access to support outside of school to reach their highest postsecondary aspirations?
Over the last three years, OneGoal has collected nearly 15,000 survey responses from high school students across seven states, including 9,000 responses during the 2024-25 school year. This dataset includes responses from students in a public charter
school in Milwaukee, students from the Boston area, students from rural communities in Texas and Kentucky, and students from exurban and suburban communities that sit adjacent to metropolitan areas. As with any school improvement data, the trends
are complicated, nuanced, and multi-faceted:
The overwhelming majority of students feel comfortable talking to adults in their school about what they need to do to be successful after high school, and students report receiving information about the process to enroll in multiple post-graduation
pathways.
Nearly a third (27%) of students do not feel encouraged by counselors to enroll in an advanced course.
Nearly nine out of 10 students feel supported by adults outside of their high schools.
Students are worried about financing their post-graduation pathways.
The SPSC is an anonymous survey, but it leverages optional demographic questions to help educators understand the experiences of students across subgroups. Our data from this year revealed positive increases in student responses as students progressed
grade levels. For example, only 68% of 9th graders reported receiving information about application and enrollment processes for trade school or certification programs. However, that percentage rose to 84% for 12th graders. The largest gap across
questions was not across gender, racial groups, or even based on first-generation college student status. Instead, the largest gap was across students that self-identify as already enrolled in an advanced course versus those that identify not currently enrolled in an advanced course. Only 68% of students not currently enrolled in an advanced course report that adults advise them to take advanced courses (compared to 92% of students already currently enrolled). And, only 66% of students not currently enrolled in an advanced course
feel confident that they can be successful (compared to 90% of students already enrolled). Unsurprisingly, suggesting and advising advanced coursework to students can spur student behavior to enroll.
Too often, educational leaders over-rely on a small number of student-level metrics to make school improvement decisions related to college and career readiness. As Elaine Allensworth, Lewis-Sebring Executive Director of the UChicago Consortium, observed
in a recent webinar on how to measure school performance, ”Too much focus on any one metric you're going to miss a lot. And you're going to encourage practices that ultimately may not be the best for fully developing students giving them all the opportunities that they really want.”
Practitioners
can benefit from using a more nuanced approach that triangulates student-level metrics with survey data that increases their understanding of whether and how adult practices and the student experience is also changing. This includes examining data
from the SPSC, side by side with data on leading indicators for college and career readiness, as well as data on system-level changes.
Although there are reservations about
using student survey data to evaluate school performance, more and more states have included student surveys as a part of their accountability framework. Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, and New Mexico all leverage surveys as a part of their School Quality
and Student Success federal accountability indicator. In the same webinar mentioned above, Allensworth further detailed the promise of and research
behind survey usage: “People will say survey data is subjective… survey data… can be collected in ways that are highly reliable and highly predictive and give really good information about how students are experiencing a classroom.”
Research continues to emerge that establishes the link between improvements on these types of surveys and improvements on student outcomes. However, for this trend to continue, and for educators to embrace their use and reliability, survey tools
require alignment with emerging national efforts to
redesign and reorganize high schools. There is consensus across policymakers and practitioners for these types
of transformational changes to high school. Now is the time to invest in tools and data that equip educators to lead these changes.
Andrew Schmitz is the Senior Managing Director of system impact at OneGoal. He launched and leads the OneGoal Leadership Network, which partners with more than 60 districts in seven states.
Dr. Rachel Martin is the Senior Director of Program Learning at OneGoal and leads OneGoal’s work on system impact measurement.
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