An article by Tamar Lewin this week in the New York Times (front page, no less), “For Students at Risk, Early College Proves a Draw”, deserves a close read. The title alone signals the unusually progressive outlook of the program described in the piece; “At risk” kids and “early college” opportunities? A rare combination.
Normally, as the article notes, small classes, long-term curricular planning, and accelerated and intensive programming in America are reserved for high school students with proven academic abilities. I would add that this is the classic m.o. of many honors colleges, as well as of initiatives that seek out and support the talented, underreresented minority high school students said to be “missing” from undergraduate STEM programs. And that may work for those students who have already found a way to succeed in school and display their energy and talents. But the Early College High School Initiative, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other prominant funders, breaks with convention: It gives more resources, more opportunities to students with fewer conventional attainments…the ones we perhaps never even thought of as missing. The intervention seems to work: Drop out rates plunge, the number of college degrees grows, among students in the Early College High Schools.
In the Early College High Schools, 20,000 students in 24 states undertake college-focussed classes to complete both high school and a large number of college courses in five years, at no cost. The initiative’s website tells us that 2/3 of those students are African American and Latino. I’m not sure how I feel about the organization’s catchy emphasis on “challenge not remediation,” since remediation can also offer a politically progressive educational approach. But the initiative is, at least on the surface, a welcome confrontation to the ways in which ideas of merit usually function in our educational system…and I’ll be looking for that aim in other initiatives supported by these patrons.