Diplomas count 2016: remaking high schools.

• Position: Education

Even as the nation's graduation rate has reached an all-time high of 82%, remaking the American high school is a challenge that has perplexed generations of education leaders. A report from Education Week draws on the field's long reform history to identify lessons learned about what it lakes to provide a high school experience that meets the needs of today's students.

"Graduation rates have steadily improved during the past decade, a period when the Federal government, states, advocates, and many others brought heightened attention to the condition of the nation's high schools," says Christopher B. Swanson, vice president of Editorial Projects in Education, Washington, D.C., the nonprofit organization that publishes Education Week. "Inequities remain, but the overall picture is one of progress."

Decades of reform have produced mixed results, and specialists and practitioners can point to a long list of best practices from high-performing high schools, but how can we make sense of these varied and sometimes contradictory approaches? Two factors stand out: coherence and diversity. While all high schools should be great, they all do not need to be great in the same way.

A rural Vermont high school, for instance, has remade itself around the idea of "student voice," while schools in El Paso, Texas, are focusing on pathways to college and aligning coursework with the demands of the state university system. A school in Omaha, Neb., is exposing its...