http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/opinion/18herbert.htmlA Very Bright Idea
By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 17, 2010
We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?
That is happening in New York City. I had breakfast a few weeks ago with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, to talk about Bard High School Early College, a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that gives highly motivated students the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year associate of arts degree in the four years that are usually devoted to just high school.
When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.
The school, a fascinating collaboration between Bard College and the city�s Department of Education, was founded in 2001 as a way of dealing, at least in part, with the systemic failures of the education system. American kids drop out of high school at a rate of one every 26 seconds. And, as Dr. Botstein noted, completion rates at community colleges have been extremely disappointing.
Many bright and talented youngsters are lost along the way. �We seldom capture the imagination and energy of young people until somewhere well along in the college years,� said Dr. Botstein.
A visit to the school is a glimpse into the realm of the possible. I stopped by on a gloomy, rainy morning, and the building�s exterior seemed fully in synch with the weather. But inside you�re quickly caught up in what seems almost the ideal academic atmosphere. In class after class, I was struck by how engaged the students were, and how much they reflected the face of the city.
These were kids who had come to the school (mostly by subway) from every borough and from just about every background imaginable.
The first class I visited was a college-level biology course. The students were deep into the process of dissecting fetal pigs. One of the students, who hopes someday to be a doctor, explained to me how essential it was for the students �to understand the organ systems in mammals.�
In another class, a fiendishly difficult math problem was being worked out. When the class ended without the problem being brought to a satisfactory conclusion, the students groaned as if a movie had been interrupted at the climactic moment. The instructor assured them that �we�ll pick it up right here� the next time the class met.
The Bard High School Early College model has been around long enough and has given a first-rate education to enough students to warrant significant expansion and close study to determine just how far this promising innovation might be able to fly. (A second school, Bard High School Early College Queens, opened in 2008.)
Dr. Botstein would like to see 150 such schools created across the country, which would reach roughly 100,000 students.
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