Many home-schoolers are following a similar path -- having their children take one or two courses a semester at community college during their "high school" years. This is especially helpful for science lab courses that can be more challenging to carry out at home. By the time they are "ready for college" (by traditional definitions) they already have a number of courses completed. The educational establishment in NY didn't like this and took steps to prevent students from registering (apparently due to the fact that it made the government system look bad in comparison, as opposed to any perceived problems with the students, who tend to be advanced in terms of reading and independent learning skills). However, that seems to have been resolved.
Many home-schoolers are following a similar path -- having their children take one or two courses a semester at community college during their "high school" years. This is especially helpful for science lab courses that can be more challenging to carry out at home. By the time they are "ready for college" (by traditional definitions) they already have a number of courses completed. The educational establishment in NY didn't like this and took steps to prevent students from registering (apparently due to the fact that it made the government system look bad in comparison, as opposed to any perceived problems with the students, who tend to be advanced in terms of reading and independent learning skills). However, that seems to have been resolved. Very interesting. Going from high school to a CC, for me at least, was like night and day. The quality of the instruction was better and we sped through the material. The courses were ten times more interesting and the tests seemed gear toward to getting a right answer.
I once turned in a thirty page english paper during my sophmore year in high school. I received a zero on it. When I inquired as to why. I was told that my thesis did not reconcile with any of the current literary criticism of the work. And then the teacher added smugly "And I stay current with all known literary criticisms of this work." It was at this point, I strongly considered dropping out. I mean, who says something like that?
Not to totally insult all high school teachers, but my theory is most of them haven't emotionally gotten past that stage in their lives, thus their first career inclination is to return to their level of comfort.