Rigor as a curriculum concept must be connected to relevance. Early in the 20th century, we gave up teaching Greek and Latin as required courses in high school for a reason: Mastery of those languages was no longer considered essential. Yet, we have not really reconsidered the "Carnegie unit" as a framework for thinking about what students need to know in high school since the inception of that measurement of high school coursework in 1906. We need to better connect today's secondary school curriculum to the interests and needs of the students we teach, as well as to the skills they'll need as adults.

The traditional college-prep, lecture-style curriculum is not connected to the world from which many students come; nor does it align with the worlds for which students must be prepared.Such curricula exist in many highly successful secondary schools that use what I call a "merit badge" approach as a way for students to rigorously demonstrate mastery of core competencies. Even inner-city "merit badge-based" schools find that more than 90 percent of their students graduate, and, of those, more than 90 percent go on to two- and four-year colleges. This is in contrast to traditional high schools serving the same populations, where fewer than 50 percent of the students graduate. (I include a description of the merit-badge approach to curriculum in Making the Grade: Reinventing America's Schools.)

But rigor and relevance aren't the only explanations for the successes of these "reinvented" high schools in New York and elsewhere. They are also built on the principle of establishing and maintaining strong relationships between students and adults who care and are knowledgeable about what students are learning. When one conducts focus groups with today's adolescents, as I have, their persistent complaint about school is that "no one cares." Even students in Advanced Placement courses tell me that adults seem too busy to listen to them. Growing up in single-parent or dual-career families, today's students have much less of an adult presence in their lives. They need connections to caring adults in order to be motivated to master an academically rigorous, relevant curriculum.

Good elementary schools, where students spend most of their day with the same teacher, have always been built around caring relationships. Introducing rigor and relevance at that level has involved curriculum and professional-development challenges, but the nature of the changes is comparatively modest. Reading had to be more focused around material that students wanted to read, and teachers have had to learn how to raise expectations for all students. The elementary "scope of work" was and is reform, not "reinvention." The changes required do not challenge teachers' and parents' conceptions of school. We have known what good elementary school classrooms look like for some time. The challenge is replicating at scale, and few have to be convinced of the need. Most people understand the importance of ensuring that all children learn to read and to do math.