Rigor, Relevance Reconciled?

In article about a legislative proposal in Florida to require high school students to declare a major, Governor Jeb Bush says:

"We don't want them to drop out of school or be unprepared to take on the challenges of the 21st century. It's a really smart way to make high school more relevant and prepare young people for what college will hold."

I'm not sure if the major-declaration thing itself is a good idea or not. But in framing the issue this way, Bush touches on an extremely important dimension of the latest round of high-profile high school reforms: after more than a hundred years of back-and-forth, the once-competing goals of making high schools relevant enough to keep kids from dropping out and rigorous enough to prepare them for college are being fused into a unified whole. As Craig Jerald writes in a new Education Sector report:

"the most significant improvements in high schools come from combining strategies and solutions long thought to be ideologically disparate or even mutually exclusive. Research suggests that more rigorous curricula and tougher graduation standards might not hurt graduation rates, and might even help improve them. Rigor and relevance are not zero sum tradeoffs, but actually work best in combination."

Anyone looking for a thorough but readable summary of the newest ideas and latest research findings on high school reform should check it out.