The baby boom echo kids (born between 1982-1995) are almost out of high school on average. It will be another 5 years of reduced enrollments until the baby boom echo echo kids start showing up in the schools. This will have implications for optimal school policy. Underlying this is a richer, better prepared, better nourished, healthier population that is increasingly going to college after high school. The high schools will increasingly adopt the trappings of junior and four-year colleges in order to adapt to the academic and funding environment.

With the schools having a temporarily sufficient capacity, there is a strong incentive for school to heavily recruit students for transfers under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The facilities costs are largely fixed. The money brought in by additional students would be marginal profit for the school system. That money could be used to provide enrichment activities for the existing student body and hold the line on general cuts in services as enrollment subsides.

NCLB encourages high schools to take a step in the direction of becoming like universities by having admissions requirements. College admissions are brutally competitive. High schools develop brands that influence college admissions officers much as the college brands influence employers. A high school needs to have high scores, achievement and diversity from its student body for the school brand to positively influence a college admission decision. It follows that a high school admission requirement be put in place to increase the academic and cultural luster of the high school.

High schools also face a budget squeeze. Money from state and federal sources is often keyed to the number of students. As the number of students fall, budgets come under pressure. Many jurisdictions have property tax caps that prevent further tax increases. School financing has a difficult battle at the ballot box as empty nesters and newlyweds grow in the demographics compared to parents of school age children. Financing pressure leads schools to turn to parents and community to establish and fund foundations and build alumni associations to assist with high school excellence. As contributions go to the foundations and the schools, the money can be used to further improve the brand and upgrade the teaching quality, supplies and equipment.

The curriculum must also evolve to become more relevant to the knowledge age. Vocational tracks should encourage students to become software developers and enter other high wage careers. As computers and the internet have nullified or inverted age stereotypes in many industries, we have already seen high school students driving new SUVs with money they earned from software development. This may be a critical national resource to tap as overseas competition forces older workers even higher up the value chain.

It will no longer be enough to simply offer AP courses. High schools will need to start considering hiring ever more qualified and illustrious professionals to teach their college courses. If many students are taking AP courses, the school must compete with the junior colleges, community colleges and four year universities for staff. With those staff will come research opportunities for students that rival those at highly rated universities. Those will be necessary to match the bios of the Intel Science Talent Search winners. As hundreds of schools aspire to be the next Bronx Science, Bronx Science is aspiring to be the next Caltech and already boasts six Nobel Prize winning alumni. High school researchers from the baby boom echo echo may well be the source of the next shot heard round the world.

This is a pipe dream unless you can remove the teachers unions out of the equation, and implement merit pay to replace tenure. Otherwise it's just more money down a rat hole.

True, it won't happen everywhere.

I have taught in the public schools of Texas and the problem has nothing to do with teachers or teacher's unions. The problem has everything to do with the loss of local control and local accountability in our public schools.

In the old days, local communities elected school boards which were active in developing local curriculums. If the local community didn't like what was taught or the way it was taught they could vote on a new board and change things. Today, local school boards serve little function. With regard to curriculums, local boards and the schools are not accountable to their local populations. They are granted no leeway in developing their own curriculums. They must teach what is handed down to them by their respective State Boards of Education. They rubberstamp budgets and personnel policies but little else.

The problem lies with these autocratic state boards of education. The boards are composed of persons who have no clue what the future economy or universities need. They proscribe a curriculum that affects millions of schoolchildren. Until you eliminate the power of a very powerful few(usually a dozen or less) to dictate a one-size fits all curriculum for millions of children, you won't see any real change.

Basically, it's a communist framework. You have a detached, central planning committee which proscribes a single policy for everybody. Local commissars make sure that the policies are implemented uniformly regardless of any local realities.