A couple weeks ago the Center for American Progress released a report looking at what happens to students in “Year 13,” the year after they leave high school. The piece is informative and useful, and has some particularly helpful tips if you’re a school district looking to be able to track your high school graduates once they leave (did you know there’s a $425 service offered by the National Student Clearinghouse, which has data on more than 92 percent of all college students nationwide, that tells high schools whether their graduates enroll in post-secondary education, how long they stay in school, whether they transfer or graduate, what degree they earn, and what they studied?) or implement curricula based on what you find, but the report, and today’s NY Times op-ed by its authors, suffers from two main flaws.

First, the report completely ignores the second half of the “college- and career-readiness” moniker that has become so popular. In defending this stance, it says, “higher education’s necessity means now all schools must be prep schools,” or, in other words, everyone should go to some form of post-secondary education.

Granted, a broad definition of “post-secondary education” would leave room for vocational training or apprenticeships, but only if they occurred in formal educational settings. This seems off, and it discounts more informal training on-the-job and the educational merits of learning to live on one’s own. And, while nearly two-thirds of high school graduates now enroll in a college or university immediately after graduation, that still leaves a large population of students who opt out.

Second, and most importantly, the report never gets into the thorny issue of how all this new data should be used. It talks about how schools with the data are empowered to make curriculum changes, but these are the cream of the crop, the ones who want to know what their graduates are doing and continuously improve their practices. What about the thousands of high schools that are perfectly content under the current regime? They get their students to pass 9th or 10th grade standardized tests (or not), and then usher them out the door with a high school diploma (or not). Educators will respond to the incentives at hand, and without explicit strings linking college- and career-readiness with high school diplomas, most school leaders will continue to aim for the benchmarks on which they’re measured: standardized tests and graduation rates.

Making high schools accountable for the outcomes of their graduates is not a pipe dream. In fact, 20 states are already publishing college enrollment rates for every public high school and at least one other variable ranging from the percentage required to take remedial courses, the number taking dual enrollment classes, average ACT or SAT score, the number participating and/ or passing at least one AP course, average first-year college GPA, the percentage who return for their second year, and the percentage who eventually graduate with a post-secondary degree. Two states are looking at employment outcomes by public high school. These numbers are for states that are already publicly reporting college- and career-readiness measures; the number who can compile the data internally is even higher. And with Congress appropriating $245 million in stimulus funds for state data systems and Secretary Duncan setting high school and college alignment as an important criteria in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund, states are poised to begin using this data in new ways.

Look for more information on this topic from Education Sector in the coming months.