Truth be told, to me, it’s fingers on the proverbial chalkboard – remember chalkboards? – whenever I hear college counselors, school administrators, or even parents assuredly say: “But we can’t teach X because the selective colleges want to see how our students perform on Y.”

The time has come for secondary-level educators to cancel the monopoly long held by college admissions departments in dictating our curricular priorities.

A more holistic approach to middle and secondary education will ultimately produce better college students, not to mention more fulfilled adults. What’s more, once they get used to the change in priorities, the colleges themselves will be better places in which to study, teach and live.

Suffice it to say that the idea of educational reform has been an American obsession for a long time. As a second-generation educator, my first memory of the “latest thing” goes back to my 1960s childhood, when I heard my parents talking about something they called the “new math.” (I think my ears perked up because I had already had enough trouble with the old version; I shuddered at the assumption that the revised edition would be any harder.)

Since the advent of new math, the graveyard of attempts at school improvement initiatives designed to meet our long-standing college-centric priorities has mushroomed.

In fact, it’s been quite the revolving door: Values clarification, progressive ed., open classrooms, mainstreaming, self-pacing, bussing, special ed., back-to-basics, bilingual, the ever-evolving alphabet soup of learning differences (ADD, ADHD, ASD, ODD, etc.), experiential learning, a nation at risk, merit pay, No Child Left Behind, anti-bullying, charters, magnets, multiple intelligences, “testmania” (my word), SEL, e-learning, distance learning, home-schooling  … whew. That’s a lot of coming and going.

It’s time for a time out. Time to address, with uncompromising honesty, this question: What is the true objective driving these attempted reform initiatives? Are we serving schools and colleges? Or … kids and families? Sometimes we get the two priorities mixed up.

Hey, college is great. The goal of gaining admission to a “good school” was healthy and productive for me to strive for as a youngster. And the four years I was fortunate to spend at Bowdoin were profoundly enriching in multiple ways. The pursuit of and the benefits derived from college had a similar positive impact on my own children. Furthermore, my 45-year career has been spent in college preparatory schools and I believe strongly in the intrinsic value of rigorous college preparatory academics. However.

Many of our schools seem to have ended up in a catch-22 trap where they become preoccupied with getting kids to be good at school in order to prepare them for … more school. We live in a time where our students, parents and even the schools sometimes seem unsure of themselves when it comes to separating genuine curiosity from credential accumulation. College might well be a much more exciting adventure if our high schools were less conscious of college preparation and more focused on providing a uniquely enriching experience.

And if we all did it, the colleges would go along. Not only are there a lot more of us (high schools) than there are of them – by a factor of over 4-to-1 – the numbers of actual students balance each other out, suggesting an exciting potential for mutual leverage and benefit. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the current school year shows 6,000 colleges serving 16 million undergraduate students. It also shows 27,000 high schools (both public and private) serving 17 million students.

If our schools can declare some independence and our colleges can surrender some rigidity of admissions expectations, we just may find a middle ground ultimately serving both parties – and our national culture at large.