Interesting article in the New York Times says that urban high schools are centered on preparing all of their students for college. The article says that many urban high schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum that previously had pointed only a fraction of students to college and now have a program in which every student is considered to be on a college track. Excerpts from the article:
- There is a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.
- In affluent suburbs, where college admission is an obsession, some educators worry that high schools, with their rigorous college preparatory curriculums, have become too academically demanding in recent years.
- By contrast, many urban and low-income districts, which also serve many immigrants, are experimenting with ways to teach more than the basic skills so that their students can not only get to college, but earn college degrees. Some states have begun to strengthen their graduation requirements.
- “This is transformational change,” said Dan Challener, the president of the Public Education Foundation, a Chattanooga group that is working with the area public schools. “It’s about the purpose of high school. It’s about reinventing what high schools do.”
- “We don’t know yet how to get everyone in our society to this level of knowledge and skills,” said Michele Cahill, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, which, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is financing many of the new efforts. “We’ve never done it before.”
- Although federal studies show that most students yearn for a college degree, each year tens of thousands will not even make it through high school. In New York City, for example, roughly half the students complete high school though the new small high schools have shown substantial improvement in graduation rates.
- Of the 68 percent of high school students nationwide who go to college each year, about a third will need remedial courses, experts say. For various reasons, from financial to a lack of academic preparedness, thousands of low-income students drop out of college each year.
- Fewer than 18 percent of African-Americans and just 11 percent of Hispanics earn a bachelor’s degree, compared with almost a third of whites, ages 25 to 29, experts say. Of families making less than $25,000 a year, 19 percent complete an associate degree or higher, compared with 76 percent of families earning $76,000 per year or more.
- The innovations range from creating high schools that offer an opportunity to take college courses for credit, to devoting senior English classes to writing college application essays, and holding parties to celebrate students who complete them. New York City has a $10 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation to develop extensive college counseling and connections with higher education institutions at 70 small high schools and three redesigned large ones.
- By the 1970s, academic standards were being lowered to make it easier to move large numbers students of different abilities toward the diploma that was considered sufficient education for most, the historians say.
- Today, however, some states are putting in place more rigorous high school exit exams, and students understand that a diploma no longer provides entry to the middle class. Over the past two decades, the percentage of low-income students who say they want a four-year degree or higher has tripled, rising to 66.2 percent in 2002, from 19.4 percent in 1980, according to federal statistics. And parents are stoking their children’s hopes.
- John Deasy, superintendent of public schools in Prince George’s County, said that he wants the students in his overwhelmingly low-income and minority district to have the same academic advantages as students in, say, Greenwich, Conn.
- So the district has added eight Advanced Placement classes to all 23 high schools, including some in schools that had never offered one. The one high school that has drawn students from the upper middle class already had 26 A.P. classes.
- “For a long time we believed in the ‘some kids’ agenda,” Dr. Deasy said. “Some kids will go to college, some kids will go to the work force, some kids can go to the military. That’s garbage. We believe that every kid can learn at a high level and that college is for every child.” He added, “If a student chooses not to go to college, that is O.K.”
- Many of the new efforts involve building close relationships with local higher education institutions. North Carolina, for example, is creating 70 new “early college” high schools, where students can take college classes.
- In 2005, 74.2 percent of the graduating seniors went on to post-secondary education: of those, 56 percent went to four-year colleges, 33 percent to two-year schools and 11 percent to advanced training, Mr. Travers said. The colleges at the top of the list: Bunker Hill Community College, the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Massachusetts Bay Community College.
From The New York Times, Urban Schools Aiming Higher Than Diploma, written by Sara Rimer
