Nation's early colleges in spotlight during weeklong celebration

As North Carolina prepares to celebrate a wave of students graduating from several pioneering innovative high schools, groups across the nation are joining forces next week to highlight this type of innovative school and North Carolina's leading role in creating it.

Early College High School Week, from May 4 through May 10, aims to raise the profile of the break-the-mold schools that give college access to many students who historically would be frozen out of two- and four-year schools.

 

No state has made a larger investment than North Carolina in the innovative schools located on community college and university campuses. The state's 60 early college high schools now account for nearly one third of the 200 similar schools nationwide; North Carolina's nearly 8,000 students represent about one of every five enrolled this year in early college across the country.

"These numbers prove that challenge -- not remediation -- is an approach to education that works," said Marlene B. Seltzer, CEO of Jobs for the Future, which leads the Early College High School initiative nationally.

Early college high schools blend high school and college to challenge -- and support -- students to ensure that they succeed in tackling college-level work. The schools also help students and their families save time and money by allowing students to graduate with a high school diploma and an associate's degree or two years of transferable college credit within four or five years. The college credit is tuition free, at a time when one year of public college nati0nally costs an average of $6,600. Students with two years of credit or an associate's degree would save, on average nationally, about $13,000.

Six of North Carolina's first dozen early college high schools to enroll 9th graders in 2005-06 will graduate their first four-year cohort of students later this month. The other six schools run on a five-year program and will graduate their first class in 2010.

Just about all the state's early college high schools will be focused on exams next week, so they won't have a lot of time to crow during Early College High School Week. But their accomplishments should not be neglected:

 

The kind of powerful teaching and learning found in North Carolina's innovative high schools couldn't happen without innovative, stand-out teachers. Several of them have been recognized in recent weeks as instructional leaders.

Brian Freeland, who teaches history at New Technology High School at Garinger, has been named 2009 Teacher of the Year for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, the state's second largest, with 134,000 students, 172 schools and more than 9,000 teachers.

Freeland, chosen from among seven finalists,  grew up in a poor urban community and saw education as his way out of poverty.

"The classroom became my place to think and prepare for a better future where I controlled life's circumstances on my own terms," he said. "I looked to teachers as instruments to obtain knowledge, wisdom and understanding."

Now he conveys those ideas to his history students at the New Technology High School.
"I teach my students to use the classroom as a place of opportunity constructed from their personal effort," Freeland said. The New Tech approach, which puts a high premium on such effort, is ideal for delivering that kind of instruction, Freeland said.

"It allows them to take control of their learning," he said. "They can find the answers themselves. They're able to get immediate feedback. It makes them more interactive learners and makes them more responsible for their own learning."

"I inspire my students to believe that dreams can be achieved by developing a learning process that enhances their intellectual aptitude. I use this acronym daily: REALITY: Real Educational Aptitude (involves) Learning (to) Intelligently Think (for) Yourself."

Freeland thinks outside the box to bring history alive for students, said Principal Barry Blair.

"He has the ability to make sure students employ their senses to feel, hear, see, smell and taste the past worlds and, ultimately, their impact on us as the next generation," Blair added.

Freeland joined the faculty at Garinger High five years ago and the New Technology School last fall.  "I really do like the small-school model," Freeland said. "You're able to really help students. As much as you'd like to do that in a larger school, you often can't."

Katie Sunseri, who also teaches on the Garinger campus, which now includes five redesigned high schools, was recognized by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district as its outstanding first-year high school teacher.

Sunseri teaches science at Business and Finance High School at Garinger and is a graduate of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and a member of Teach for America.

She said the small size of the school not only allows her to know every student by name, but also helps foster common expectations among all teachers, which in turn, helps make her a more effective teacher.

"Having such a small staff allows consistency from classroom to another is helpful to students and teachers," Sunseri said. "In a large comprehensive high school that would be hard to have."

Teachers from two other innovative high schools in the state also won recognition recently when they were named among the latest class of the Kenan Fellows Program for Curriculum and Leadership Development at N.C. State University. In all, the five teachers from the two high schools represent a third of the 15-member Kenan Fellows class of 2011.

The competitive, two-year fellowship gives teachers the opportunity to interact with other outstanding teachers, policy and business leaders and research scientists, and offers professional development aimed at building strong instructional leadership skills. Teacher-fellows remain in their classroom and develop curriculum projects in conjunction with research mentors at N.C  State University or in private industry. 

Three teachers from Lee Early College High School in Sanford were selected: Dave Nourse, Rodney Schmitz, and Staci Whitton. Two teachers from Hillside New Tech High School in Durham also won fellowships: Fredrica Nash and Angela Taylor.

Four teachers from innovative high schools are halfway through their Kenan Fellowships as part of the class of 2010. They are Jeffrey Edwards, Surry Early College High School; Miriam Morgan, Southern School of Engineering; Susan Randolph, Wayne School of Engineering; Amanda Warren, Wayne Early/Middle College High School.

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Only 39 percent of students score high enough to demonstrate they "understand complicated information" in reading and 59 percent can handle "moderately complex procedures and reasoning" -- the second highest of the five performance levels on the long-term NAEP.

At a time when the United States is grappling with staggering economic losses, new research draws a sobering connection with the nation's lost productivity due to lagging student performance reflected in achievement gaps among students and other nations.

"The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools," a report issued last month by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, compares the effects of the nation's educational underachievement to "the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession."

The report estimates the impact on the nation's Gross Domestic Product from persistent achievement gaps between white and minority students as well as between the United States and other nations with higher academic performance, such as Finland and Korea.

In fact, the authors of the report assert, "the recurring annual economic cost of the international achievement gap is substantially larger than the deep recession the United States is currently experiencing."

The report outlines this scenario: What would have been the economic impact if during the 15 years following the publication of the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" the United States had lifted lifted lagging student achievement to higher, but attainable, levels of performance comparable to high-scoring nati0ns? The result, the report says, would have been a GDP in 2008 that was greater by $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion -- representing a difference of 9 to 16 percent. In other words, a recurring loss of output that is greater than the current economic crisis.

And just as the recession is hurting people at all income levels, the nation's educational deficit isn't just a problem for the poor, the report warns.

"In our observation, parents in poor neighborhoods are all too aware that their schools are not performing well; but middle-class parents typically do not realize that their schools are failing to adequately prepare their children for an age of global competition."

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman found a compelling illustration of that disconnect when he probed that point with one of the authors in column last week on the McKinsey report.

"There are millions of kids who are in modern suburban schools," Friedman wrote, " 'who don't realize how far behind they are,' said Matt Miller, one of the authors. 'They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs -- not $40 to $50 an hour.' "

Yet, as troubling as the report's analysis is, the authors say the nation can reverse the trend. They say there are numerous examples of schools, districts and states that are closing the gaps.

"Many teachers and schools across the country are proving that race and poverty are not destiny;" the report says, "many more are demonstrating that middle-class children can be educated to world-class levels of performance."

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Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter wants to cut the city's dropout rate in half by 2014. A report released last week provided fresh ammunition to wage that fight on the basis of harsh economic realities. The magnitude of Philadelphia's dropout problem might be more severe than North Carolina's, and the dollars and cents might be different, but the general analysis applies anywhere.

The report, released last week by the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board, found these stark statistics:

• A high school graduate earns almost twice the lifetime earnings of a dropout -- about $871,000 compared to $457,ooo, while those with a bachelor's degree or higher earn more than four times as much -- $2.5 million.
• Just 39 percent of the high school dropouts in Philadelphia were employed in 2006, compared to 58 percent of the city's high school graduates, 70 percent who had completed some college and 82 percent with a bachelor's degree or higher.
• Nearly 49 percent of city residents who were high school dropouts received one or more cash payments, compared to29 percent among high school graduates and 14 percent among college graduates.
• High school dropouts in Philadelphia make a combined tax payment -- local, state and federal -- of $4,250, compared to $10,320, the mean combined tax payment of all city residents.
• For every $1 in taxes paid, on average, by a high school dropout in the city, high school graduates paid $2.19; college graduates paid $4.04.