Tess Stovall and Deirdre Dolan:

f you discovered that only one in four graduates from your neighborhood high school would earn a college degree, would you be alarmed?
For decades, there has been a laser-like focus in education reform on the lowest-performing students and schools. This focus continues to be critical for maintaining America’s social fabric and ensuring that all children have an opportunity to succeed, but it is not enough. In this paper, we urge that America must embark upon a second phase of education reform that squarely focuses on dramatically improving achievement in the middle-class schools that the majority of children attend.
Our findings show that middle-class schools seem to be forgotten in the education debate. There is a paucity of academic literature on their performance, expectations, and on ideas for reform. Yet, they produce the students who are the backbone of the U.S. economy. Among parents of school-aged kids in middle-class jurisdictions, there is a strong belief that these schools are educating students at the highest levels. More than seven of ten parents with children in the public schools grade their kids’ schools as either an A or a B,1 and nine of ten parents of school-age children expect their kids to go to college.2 But that is far from the reality. Middle-class schools are falling short on their most basic 21st century mission: to prepare kids to get a college degree.
In order to maintain a prosperous middle class, grow our economy, and foster a public education system that taxpayers deserve, it is necessary to shine a light on the experience of middle-class students. These are students that don’t attend America’s best schools but also don’t attend the worst. They attend the schools that are in every city, town, and suburb. For our nation to succeed, their schools must be college factories–graduating high school students who are prepared to get to and through college.