Sphere: Related Content
New York Times
January 17, 2008
Urban Schools Aiming Higher Than Diploma
By SARA RIMER
BOSTON — At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.
And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.
Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect 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.”
What is required, educators say, is nothing less than revolutionizing schools built for another century, when a high school diploma was a ticket to social mobility in a manufacturing economy, and students with only basic skills could make it into the middle class. But the task is daunting, and the outcome uncertain, experts say.
“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.
Although affluent suburban schools have been increasing academic rigor in recent years, many large urban schools have been organized around the same low academic expectations for nearly three decades, experts say. When these schools opened their doors about a hundred years ago, relatively few teenagers even went to high school, education historians say. Enrollment in high school was not universal until the end of the 1950s.
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.
“Parents are coming home every day and saying, ‘I’m working and sacrificing so that you can do better than me,’ ” said Melissa Roderick, a co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.
“Parents want the same thing parents in the past wanted,” Professor Roderick said. “They want their kids to be middle class. The problem is that the economy has changed, so doing better now means going to college. And someone has to help them figure out how to do this because the parents don’t know themselves.”
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.
A new ritual in Boston schools is College Month, which culminated last fall in “Represent Your Alma Mater Day,” when teachers from kindergarten to high school wore their college T-shirts to work.
At Brighton High in Boston, for the first time this year, John Travers, the head of counseling, and his staff visited every freshman English class to begin mapping out the steps toward college: Maintaining a high grade point average. Taking tough classes. Building a résumé.
After Mr. Travers’s pitch, 14-year-old Katherine Nunez, who juggles her homework with helping her Dominican immigrant parents at their convenience store, said she was determined to make the honor roll. “My parents talk about it every day — the economy, money makes the world go round,” she said. “If I want to be successful, I have to go to college.”
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.
Mr. Travers leads students on trips to colleges many of them pass every day on the “T” to high school, but have never visited.
“We all went to Bentley on the bus together,” said Rashell Wilson, 18, vice president of Brighton’s senior class. “We had a beautiful tour.”
Ms. Wilson and her classmates ride the T over an hour after school to nonprofit programs where they get extra help with tutoring, and with their college applications. They take free SAT prep classes at night.
Ms. Wilson is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her mother is a nursing assistant. Her father works in maintenance.
“My parents instilled in me from Day One, ‘You’re going to college,’ ” she said. But her parents, she added, have not been to college and so cannot help her figure out how to get there.
So she has enlisted the help of her guidance counselor and teachers, her co-workers at the Boston law firm where she has an internship, and any other college-educated adult she can find. She has spent hours researching college admissions on the College Board Web site.
“I want a whole lot more,” Ms. Wilson said. “I want to be financially stable. I don’t want to be struggling on $30,000 a year.”
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Rigor in the classroom and not watering things down is the key to a better education...
Sphere: Related Content
New York Times
January 17, 2008
Urban Schools Aiming Higher Than Diploma
By SARA RIMER
BOSTON — At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.
And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.
Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect 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.”
What is required, educators say, is nothing less than revolutionizing schools built for another century, when a high school diploma was a ticket to social mobility in a manufacturing economy, and students with only basic skills could make it into the middle class. But the task is daunting, and the outcome uncertain, experts say.
“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.
Although affluent suburban schools have been increasing academic rigor in recent years, many large urban schools have been organized around the same low academic expectations for nearly three decades, experts say. When these schools opened their doors about a hundred years ago, relatively few teenagers even went to high school, education historians say. Enrollment in high school was not universal until the end of the 1950s.
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.
“Parents are coming home every day and saying, ‘I’m working and sacrificing so that you can do better than me,’ ” said Melissa Roderick, a co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.
“Parents want the same thing parents in the past wanted,” Professor Roderick said. “They want their kids to be middle class. The problem is that the economy has changed, so doing better now means going to college. And someone has to help them figure out how to do this because the parents don’t know themselves.”
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.
A new ritual in Boston schools is College Month, which culminated last fall in “Represent Your Alma Mater Day,” when teachers from kindergarten to high school wore their college T-shirts to work.
At Brighton High in Boston, for the first time this year, John Travers, the head of counseling, and his staff visited every freshman English class to begin mapping out the steps toward college: Maintaining a high grade point average. Taking tough classes. Building a résumé.
After Mr. Travers’s pitch, 14-year-old Katherine Nunez, who juggles her homework with helping her Dominican immigrant parents at their convenience store, said she was determined to make the honor roll. “My parents talk about it every day — the economy, money makes the world go round,” she said. “If I want to be successful, I have to go to college.”
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.
Mr. Travers leads students on trips to colleges many of them pass every day on the “T” to high school, but have never visited.
“We all went to Bentley on the bus together,” said Rashell Wilson, 18, vice president of Brighton’s senior class. “We had a beautiful tour.”
Ms. Wilson and her classmates ride the T over an hour after school to nonprofit programs where they get extra help with tutoring, and with their college applications. They take free SAT prep classes at night.
Ms. Wilson is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her mother is a nursing assistant. Her father works in maintenance.
“My parents instilled in me from Day One, ‘You’re going to college,’ ” she said. But her parents, she added, have not been to college and so cannot help her figure out how to get there.
So she has enlisted the help of her guidance counselor and teachers, her co-workers at the Boston law firm where she has an internship, and any other college-educated adult she can find. She has spent hours researching college admissions on the College Board Web site.
“I want a whole lot more,” Ms. Wilson said. “I want to be financially stable. I don’t want to be struggling on $30,000 a year.”
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