Michal Kurlaender, Linda Darling-Hammond, Kramer Dykeman, Alexandria Hurtt, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Jacob Jackson, Douglas Knecht, Beryl Larson, Susanna Loeb, Julia Perlmutter, Sean Reardon, Sherrie Reed, Lauren Ziegler
High schools shape young people’s pathways into college, careers, civic life, and adulthood. The experiences students have during these years, academically, socially, and civically, influence the opportunities available to them after graduation and the ways they come to understand themselves, their communities, and their possible futures.
Adolescence is a sensitive and generative developmental period. During these years, young people build identity, purpose, moral reasoning, civic commitments, and the capacity to connect their own experiences to larger social questions. High school therefore serves as both a transition point to postsecondary education and a developmental setting with lasting consequences for students’ intellectual growth, belonging, agency, and participation in society.
California high schools are expected to prepare students for college and career while also supporting broader developmental goals. The evidence reviewed in this brief shows that the state’s high schools do not yet provide these opportunities consistently. Access to college-preparatory and advanced coursework varies substantially across schools and student groups. Many students report low levels of engagement and connectedness, and chronic absenteeism remains well above pre-pandemic levels. Developmental research and examples of high school redesign also point to ways schools can create stronger relationships, more meaningful learning, and clearer pathways into adulthood.
This brief synthesizes evidence from Getting Down to Facts III studies on adolescent development, high school course-taking, postsecondary preparation, chronic absenteeism, student experience, and high school redesign. Across these areas, the findings point to a central challenge: how California can make high school a stronger launch point for opportunity, development, and civic participation for all students.
Key Findings
1. Adolescence is a developmental window in which secondary schools can shape identity, purpose, and civic reasoning. Developmental research shows that adolescence is a period of heightened neuroplasticity, social sensitivity, and expanding capacity for abstract and systems-level thinking. High schools can support deeper learning when they provide strong relationships, safety, meaningful inquiry, and opportunities for students to connect academic work to larger questions about themselves and society.
2. High school designs shape opportunities for strong relationships and deeper learning opportunities. High schools that have redesigned to create small learning communities, teaching teams, and advisory systems support stronger attachment and belonging and higher graduation rates. Those that incorporate community-connected, project-based learning and civic engagement opportunities develop transcendent thinking, agency, a sense of purpose, and perseverance.
3. High school course-taking structures students’ postsecondary opportunities. Advanced math, A-G completion, AP, dual enrollment, and CTE pathways are associated with college enrollment and other postsecondary outcomes. These pathways shape students’ access to college and career options, and they are also key ways that high schools organize academic opportunity.
4. Access to college and career preparatory coursework remains uneven across schools and student groups. California students’ course-taking opportunities vary by school context, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, gender, English learner status, prior achievement, and local course offerings. Structural barriers within and across schools shape both which courses are available, which students enroll in them, and their likelihood of succeeding.
5. Course pathway decisions can have lasting consequences for students’ later opportunities. California’s post-Common Core math pathway changes show how district decisions about acceleration and course sequencing can reshape access to advanced coursework. The rollback of eighth-grade algebra access reduced later enrollment in advanced math, especially precalculus and calculus, without clear evidence of improved achievement.
6. Many high schools are not consistently organized around the developmental conditions adolescents need. High levels of disengagement, absenteeism, and weak connectedness point to a mismatch between many students’ experiences and the conditions that support adolescent learning. Redesigned high school models, strategic staffing, and new technologies may help schools create stronger relationships, more meaningful learning, and more flexible supports, but these approaches remain unevenly available.
