Prioritizing the Measures of K-12 Success That Matter Most

As the American economy has shifted, so too has state leaders’ understanding of what education systems and institutions need to provide students to set them on a path to long-term success. Is the education system meeting those needs? The true indicator of success is not whether students cross the graduation stage; it is what happens next for them. By prioritizing the most important outcomes in state accountability and reporting structures, state boards of education have a tremendous opportunity to set a new path forward for districts, schools, educators, and the students they serve.

In a 2024 report titled Measurement for Mobility, my coauthors and I examine how all 50 states are approaching measuring long-term success in both K-12 and higher education.[1] While many states include college and career readiness metrics in their performance goals for high schools, just eight states track how high school graduates ultimately do after they graduate and get to college and the workforce. And although many states are making good-faith efforts to capture data on how education impacts the next phase of students’ lives, the report finds, too few are rewarding schools and colleges for improving students’ postsecondary and workforce success.

Leaders can only improve outcomes if they first know what they are. If state leaders at all levels of the education system want to ensure that K-12 graduates do well in college and careers, and that college graduates, in turn, do well in the labor market, they need better, timelier, more detailed information about those outcomes. To drive change, that information also needs to be attached to real incentives.

Metrics That Span the Transition from High School

As a descriptor of how to think about success in K-12, the term “college and career readiness” has been in vogue for more than two decades. Because a high school diploma has no longer been enough to secure a well-paying career with advancement potential, state leaders and advocates have argued that getting students across the high school graduation stage was no longer proof that the education system had served students well. Rather, measures of students’ readiness for college—including things like advanced coursework completion, scores on college-aligned assessments, and more—were better indicators of success.

Today, with millions of Americans bogged down by student debt and as debates about the value of postsecondary education gain steam, “readiness” is no longer the primary measure of K-12 success. Being prepared for college is not the ultimate outcome; completing a postsecondary program and landing a well-paying job is. State leaders who seek to improve education systems need to be thinking longer term in their efforts to measure and enhance the effectiveness of K-12 schools.

While states have made progress in the public reporting of college and career readiness metrics, Measurement for Mobility found that few are weighting those measures heavily within accountability systems or centering longer-term outcomes in their efforts to improve education.

The report divides the range of potential long-term success measures that states could use into two main categories. The first category is the well-established set of college and career readiness metrics: the rates at which students participate and succeed in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, dual credit, and industry-recognized credential opportunities, among others. These metrics are known to influence and be predictive of students’ later success in higher education. States, districts, and schools should unequivocally continue tracking and using them.[2]

But if the ultimate goal of education is to set students on a path to economic opportunity and mobility, more states need to be emphasizing a second category of K-12 metrics: postsecondary outcomes. Postsecondary outcomes capture students’ progress and success in higher education and the workforce. Specific measures in this category include postsecondary education enrollment (including in two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and short-term certificate or training programs), persistence, and credential attainment. They may also include measures related to military enlistment, employment, and earnings.

Accountability versus Public Reporting

Far more states are pinning their metrics on college and career readiness than on postsecondary outcomes. Although nearly all states collect and publicly report data in both categories, they diverge dramatically when it comes to formal accountability. Forty-one states and the District of Columbia include college and career readiness metrics in their accountability systems; just eight states use postsecondary outcomes metrics for accountability (figures 1 and 2). And fewer than ten states currently weight either metric—or even the two together—to account for 20 or more percent of a high school’s rating.

When they encompass the right metrics and incentives, state accountability systems can be a powerful lever for driving behavior in K-12 districts and thus improving student outcomes. Several states have demonstrated this by making FAFSA completion a high school graduation requirement. After Texas and Alabama started requiring FAFSA completion for high school graduation in the 2021–22 school year, statewide FAFSA completion rates rose by about 12 percentage points, increasing their respective ranks among US states from 23rd to 5th and from 34th to 9th.[3] In their first years of implementation, Illinois rose from 10th to 4th, while Louisiana rose from 12th to 2nd.

In California, K-12 funding, accountability, and reporting are closely connected. As part of the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, all districts must develop local control and accountability plans that outline how they will make progress toward state priorities and specify numeric improvement goals. They must also publish aligned school accountability report cards annually. Complementing these elements is a public-facing school dashboard, whose academic readiness component includes a college and career readiness indicator.[4] Despite external concerns around the dashboard itself, districts report that this interconnected system of state priorities, district plans, and public reporting—combined with clear admission requirements to the University of California system—strongly encourages them to prioritize postsecondary success.[5] In 2023–24, this alignment helped drive statewide improvements in the percentage of students classified as prepared for college and career success for all but one student group.[6]

Funding Incentives

Funding incentives related to student outcomes are still nascent in K-12, and incentive programs that incorporate postsecondary outcomes are extremely rare. Seven states have funding incentive systems that incorporate either college and career readiness metrics or postsecondary outcomes.

In four of the seven states that offer funding incentives to districts or schools that produce strong long-term outcomes for students—Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin—funding incentives are based primarily on the extent to which students earn industry-based credentials while in high school. In Ohio, districts receive $1,250 for each qualifying credential students earn. In Colorado, where districts receive up to $1,000 for each student that completes an industry credential or qualifying work-based learning experience, the number of industry credentials earned by graduates quadrupled in the six years following the introduction of incentives. The state allocates a fixed amount of incentive funding and distributes it in order of credential “tiers” linked to high-demand, high-growth jobs. Students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch generate 20 percent more incentive funding per pupil than students who are not.

In three states, funding incentives go beyond industry credentials. Texas’s College, Career and Military Readiness Outcomes Bonus, created in 2019, enables districts to earn extra funding for every student who meets certain thresholds.[7] Districts across the state can receive bonuses that range from $2,000 to $5,000 for each student who meets certain readiness criteria and enrolls in college, earns an associate degree, or gains an industry-recognized credential within a year of graduation. Bonuses are higher for the success of economically disadvantaged students, encouraging districts to prioritize extra support to meet their needs. The program has already resulted in hundreds of millions of additional dollars flowing to districts across Texas.

Student and Family Empowerment

Long-term outcome measures are important for driving more than education institutions’ performance alone. This information needs to be shared with students and their families so that they can make informed choices about which options to pursue.

Some of the states with the best information are taking steps to empower consumers, particularly when it comes to making informed choices about higher education. In addition to college enrollment and persistence, the Massachusetts College and Career Outcomes Report includes average real earnings six years after high school graduation, disaggregated by race/ethnicity and by gender.[8] It also lets users drill down into average annual earnings in each successive year following high school graduation and to disaggregate these outcomes by race/ethnicity, gender, and industry of employment for every high school graduating class since 2010.

Recommendations for State Boards

While the federal government is unlikely to require states to update their accountability systems in the next few years, state leaders—including boards of education, chief state school officers, and legislators—can lead on this issue. Even as students and families are asking for greater pathways to economic opportunity, state accountability and reporting systems are largely still focused on high school graduation.

State boards can create the conditions for long-term student success by prioritizing these high-impact strategies:

Build a strong data foundation. The ability to use postsecondary outcomes data to support improvement statewide hinges on the state’s ability to access the data. State boards can work to bring this vision to reality. For instance, they can drive statewide adoption of contracts with the National Student Clearinghouse (more than 40 states currently have such contracts) to access postsecondary enrollment data for public school graduates, sign memorandums of understanding with other state agencies to access pertinent employment records, or support state participation in a work group with the Department of Defense to better facilitate the sharing of enlistment information.[9] States should also consider collaboration with other states to address structural data gaps that emerge when students are educated in one state but work in another—for example, via the PSEO Coalition.

Approve accountability systems that prioritize the measures that matter. State board members should ensure that their accountability formulas include—and substantially weight—both college and career readiness and postsecondary outcomes measures. Every state should report both sets of measures—including enrollment and persistence in postsecondary education, job placement, and wages—and incorporate them into K-12 accountability. States should give greater weight to long-term student outcomes than high school graduation in accountability. These outcome metrics should make up at least 20 percent of the calculations.

Align high school accountability measures and student graduation requirements. States increasingly are moving from traditional high school graduation requirements to college- and career-ready graduation requirements.[10] Student expectations sometimes, but not always, mirror the measures for which high schools are being held accountable. A lack of alignment can create confusion and lead to unintended consequences, such as limiting certain opportunities (for example, work-based learning). Any college and career readiness measures in one system should be included in the other.

Commit to an annual review of students’ long-term outcomes. Regardless of whether a state has yet included long-term outcome measures in its high school accountability system, the state board should annually review students’ postsecondary enrollment, military enlistment, and employment, disaggregated by student group, geography, and district, during a public meeting. These data can illuminate where success is taking root and where improvement is needed. Students and families can also use them to push for more local support around students’ postsecondary transitions.

Create incentives for improvement over time. Accountability and reporting are too often solely viewed from a negative lens. When designed well, these systems can and should be used to lift up successes and enable continued flourishing. Schools and districts that have demonstrated year-over-year improvement in postsecondary outcomes should be eligible for recognition, as Kansas has done, and even additional financial awards, as in Texas. These incentives must be designed to prioritize improvement, especially among target student populations, so that the incentives do not simply award the best-resourced schools or districts.

Approve high-quality, state-defined programs of study. States need to provide all students with pathways from high school to credentials with labor-market value. While separate from the accountability and reporting systems highlighted here, state boards also have an important role in ensuring that all students can access the high-quality opportunities that make up the recommended measurement systems. State boards can use their authority to require that any programs of study offered in high schools throughout their state include specific opportunities for students to earn industry-recognized credentials, complete work-based learning opportunities, or engage in coursework that can lead to early postsecondary credit, such as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or dual credit.

[1] Education Strategy Group, Measurement for Mobility: How US States Can Use Data to Incentivize Postsecondary and Workforce Success in Public Education, report (May 2024).

[2] Education Strategy Group, From Tails to Heads: Building Momentum for Postsecondary Success, report (August 2020). See also Bill Tucker and Sylvia Symonds, “Maximizing the Potential of Dual Enrollment,” post (Gates Foundation, March 2024).

[3] Rusty Monhollon and Jessie Lynn Nichols, “Increasing FAFSA Completion: Comparisons of Projects across SREB States,” Journal of Education Practices and Trends (SREB, July 2024).

[4] California School Dashboard, “College/Career,” web page.

[5] University of California Admissions, “Subject Requirement (A-G),” web page.

[6] California School Dashboard, “Understanding the College/Career Readiness Measure: Prepared,” web page (October 2019).

[7] Texas Education Agency, “CCMR Outcomes Bonus Reports Updates,” web page, September 19, 2024.

[8] Massachusetts Executive Office of Education, “2023 Massachusetts College and Career Outcomes Report,” web page, updated December 2023.

[9] Education Strategy Group, “Visualizing the Pipeline: The Importance of Cross-Sector Data,” brief (March 2022); Council of Chief State School Officers, “CCSSO, on Behalf of States and Territories, and U.S. Department of Defense Join Efforts on Standardizing Student Military Affiliation Data,” press release, October 8, 2024; National College Attainment Network, “Landscape of State-Level College and Career Readiness Policies and Practices,” website.

[10] Education Strategy Group, “Rethinking High School Graduation Requirements,” brief (October 2024).