If you’ve ever taught at an urban high school in a disadvantaged area, as I have, you’ve been confronted with the challenge of many disinterested students. The reason is simple. They don’t see the connection between what they are learning, Algebra II and Chemistry, and either their present lives or their future lives. Their attitude makes a lot of sense. They come from an environment where nobody they know makes a living from having earned a college degree. They already have jobs — out of necessity — which have given them new freedom and self-respect, and which earn money to buy clothes, food, and fun that they before had. All of this makes high school an annoying distraction they just want to get through.
The challenge is to shorten the timeline and shrink the “skills divide” school and their real life. To do this, some high schools offer programs that combine the usual academic coursework with learning tracks that teach career skills, such as construction, multi-media, or emergency medical services. Another possibility is early college-high school programs. High school seniors at SandHoke Early College High School and 70 other early-college schools are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma AND up to two years of college credit in five years, for free, as part of their high school education. Previously, such programs were aimed at affluent, overachieving students as a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But these schools target at-risk students; the goal being to eliminate the divide between high school and college. The results seem to be quite promising, and the model is spreading to other states.
Please read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/education/08school.html