by Kathy Seal

The demarcation line between high school and college is beginning to blur as educators and students find new ways to connect institutions and educational experiences.

At one side of the cafeteria of Middle College High School on the campus of New York City’s LaGuardia Community College, four boys in baggy pants and black hooded sweatshirts roar in raucous singsong: “You were jumpin’ around / You were jumpin’ around / You were slappin’ heads on the floor.” Leaping up from their table, two of the boys start play punching each other.

Howling erupts as one of the play-fighting boys lifts a chair over his head, brandishing it at no one in particular. None of this noisy horseplay fazes Alex Panesso, an 18-year-old senior eating lunch on the other side of the cafeteria. Arms resting on the sticky pink cafeteria table in front of him, Panesso slides his eyes briefly toward the younger boys.

“There are some students who take too much advantage of our freedom,” he explains calmly. “As a sophomore, I messed up, I got bored. But then as a junior, I found out the only way I’m going to pass high school is by me doing it. That’s what I like about this school. We have to be responsible for ourselves. We’re interacting with adults and have more understanding with teachers. It changes your whole world,” says Panesso, who plans to go to college, major in business and then earn an MBA.

This juxtaposition of rowdy adolescent behavior with cool, goal-directed maturity is emblematic of Middle College High School (MCHS), which grants teenagers a judicious mix of freedom and structure as it propels them toward adulthood. Serving teenagers who otherwise might drop out of high school, graduate with substandard skills or try college and fail, MCHS allows students to take courses at LaGuardia Community College, and is also piloting a program in which students stay a thirteenth year and graduate with an AA degree. It’s one of a plethora of models arising in response to the 21st century economic demand that nearly every youth attend at least two years of postsecondary education. It may not be too much to say that an entire alternative system is evolving, poised to change the American high school and significantly broaden the college prep system as we know it.

Most of these new institutions are small schools embracing innovations such as project-based learning, portfolio assessments and internships. And though they come in many different shapes and forms, these initiatives are all responding to changes in the American economy that dictate a new paradigm for schooling. Before the United States began to de-industrialize in the 1970s, the lack of a college or even a high school diploma didn’t preclude a decent middle class life. But while factory jobs accounted for 32 percent of employment in 1959, that figure plunged to 17 percent by 1997. Gone are the days when auto, steel and rubber tire factories hired “warm bodies,” meaning just about anyone who could pass a physical.

The U.S. now has a service economy, marbled throughout with high tech. That means even Mr. Goodwrench needs 17 months of post-high-school training to work on today’s computer-filled cars. Jobs in health care and education have proliferated. Offices now account for 38 percent of all American employment and “are expected to add four million new jobs by 2006, compared to the 750,000 expected in the closely watched information technology sector,” notes Anthony Carnevale in Help Wanted…Credentials Required: Community Colleges in the Knowledge Economy (Educational Testing Service, 2001). The majority of those office jobs are professional—in management, accounting, sales and marketing. In other words, the fastest growing jobs require higher education.

“Two years of postsecondary education has become the minimum that young people must achieve if they are to enter jobs that pay enough to sustain a family,” says Hilary Pennington, chief executive officer and vice chairman of Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit research, consulting and advocacy organization that has received Corporation support for its work on new models of high school learning, including early college programs.

But policymakers and parents can’t simply snap their fingers and expect teenagers to finish high school and move on to college. Many families, especially in urban areas, can’t afford college tuition. Parents who haven’t attended college themselves aren’t familiar with the admissions and financial aid procedures.

Furthermore, just as teenagers are gaining the ability for complex abstract thought and need motivating cognitive challenges, they’re often stymied by the low academic expectations implied by the tracking that is common in America’s approximately 14,600 basic comprehensive high schools.

Compounding the problem, most of these schools still operate according to the factory model instituted after Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line in 1913. Designed to produce large numbers of standard-quality students, such schools fostered “punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence,” which Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond points out in her book The Right To Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work (Jossey-Bass, 1997) were the key habits for success in industrial society. Beginning about 1920, behaviorist theory also encouraged a curriculum focused on eliciting uniform responses, rather than on sharpening students’ thinking and their understanding of ideas.

As a consequence, many traditional American high schools—particularly in urban areas, where they tend to be large, “all-purpose” institutions that elementary, junior high and middle schools funnel students into, almost indiscriminately—are not equipped to provide the academic rigor or educational challenge and sense of purpose needed to provide all students with the opportunity to succeed in high school and go on to higher education. Like de facto sorting machines left over from an earlier age, the design of these schools is still rooted in the idea of sending high-achieving students on to college while allowing others to step off the educational track to pursue a vocation or, for nongraduates, to fill unskilled labor slots. That is an untenable model for a 21st century society rooted in a knowledge-based economy, where highly skilled and educated workers are becoming the norm.

There are other problems with this outdated model of high school, as well. Large, comprehensive schools provide little opportunity for teachers to get to know their students’ individual capacities or needs, let alone provide personalized attention and support. They offer little incentive for all students to achieve at high levels and few opportunities for teachers to work together to create learning communities that benefit both student and instructor.

Nor do the large factory-model schools usually meet the psychological needs of adolescents. As they start to form an identity and see what part they might play in society, teenagers need caring adults to serve as role models and give them guidance. They also need peers “with similar goals moving on to the next step,” adds Mike Nakkula, assistant professor of human development and urban education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Students in urban schools who don’t feel well-supported often feel like “they have to take care of themselves,” says Nakkula, “and to satisfy their need for economic gain they can’t wait two-to-four years, so they go out and get jobs.”

Next page: Many traditional American high schools are not equipped to provide the academic rigor or educational challenge students need to go on to higher education.

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