Posted on 02/08/2010 5:29:30 AM PST by reaganaut1
Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.
When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.
There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors 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 — completely free.
Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students — a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.
Here, and at North Carolina’s other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
“We don’t want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu,” said Lakisha Rice, the principal. “We want the ones who need our kind of small setting.”
Results have been impressive. Not all students at North Carolina’s early-college high schools earn two full years of college credit before they graduate — but few drop out.
“Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state’s high school reform.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If early college makes sense for "at risk" students, it should make even more sense for the best students.
The Left’s idea of “fairness” is one of the fundamental ways in which they go wrong. They make special rules for the people they consider especially deserving — and they call that being fair.
This makes sense because a lot of students who come from less than education focused households and poorer households will tend to drop out to get out of their home. If they can get a hold on college and see that it’s not just for ‘the rich kids’, some really smart kids might do well.
I’m also for ending high school in the 11th grade if the kids can pass a graduation test allowing them to move to a community college for a year. Especially since they start school at four years old now.
Just a few declared ‘goals’ of the Communist Party:
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
http://www.rense.com/general32/americ.htm
High school is a waste of time for most students. They should either go on to college or into apprenticeship or vocational training around the age of 15, IMO.
The last couple of years of HS are solely for social purposes and to keep teenagers out of the workforce, and are also - not surprisingly - the years when most of those who are going to get into trouble (or simply drop out) do so.
They never think about how this will impact the good kids at the college who deserve to be there.
Unfortunately, kids tend to degenerate to the lowest common denominator. It is VITAL to keep your kids away from bad influences, their friends have a MUCH greater impact on them than you will as a parent, it's just something about the way we are wired. Most parents instinctively know this and do everything in their power to keep their kids away from the bad ones, but government constantly tries to bring the bad ones to them wherever they flee to.
I think they should all go to Basic Training or an equivalent for 10 weeks or so, at 14 or 15, and *then* into college, work, or job training.
Programs such as the one in the article (which is also operating in my county) are a backdoor acknowledgement that the current government school model is an educational failure. However, a more open recognition of this would be resisted by the employees, the sports fans, and other constituencies who benefit from the pretense of an educational purpose.
I wholeheartedly agree! We have to change our thinking about a college education. Not every kid is college material...some kids who couldn't muster more than a 2.0 in college might be geniuses with a wrench, and that's just as important as degree. And an apprenticeship or vocational education should be treated on a plane with higher education.
By the way...
My 3 homeschoolers entered college at the ages of 13,12, and 13. By the age of 15 all three had finished all college general requirements and Calculus III. The two younger earned B.S. degrees in mathematics by the age of 18. The older of these two had a masters in math by 20.
The oldest was also highly successful academically but pursued work and national and international athletic competition. He worked in Eastern Europe for our church and is fluent in Russian. He will earn his MBA soon at an age typical for his institutionalized contemporaries.
My children are normally bright. It is the institutionalized child who is artificially retarded in their social and academic development.
I went to college @ 12. Best thing my parents ever did for me. CSULA EEP program.
Or perhaps we should actually teach high school subjects IN HIGH SCHOOL instead of in the first year or two of college???
My dad (born 1910) only went through the eigth grade, but he had studied subjects that I didn't get until senior year in high school (note..different states...). Public schools have been "dumbed down" by an incredible amount.
Why not sooner, if the hypothetical student can pass the test?
Excellent idea!
That is true. Kids should have all their basic learning done by the time they are in 8th grade (around the age of 13-14), and “high school” only exists because the schools have failed to teach them the full curriculum by that time and hope that a few more years will give them time to do so. But by that point, it’s too late.
just a way to get their hooks into more federal funding streams a year sooner
Well put.
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