Alternative Pathways to College

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Although the state allows credits for a few academically dubious achievements, such as gaining a driver’s license and “life experience,” a visit one afternoon to Language Arts teacher Jennifer Block’s classroom finds serious students like Dormevil, her 55-year-old classmate Iris Rivera and 19-year-old Timmy Anderson, a dropout from Trenton High School, learning about irony, defining the word “cunning,” answering questions about inference—and pleading to take that day’s text, the novel Black Girl Lost (All America Distributors Corps, 1999) by Donald Goines, home to finish.

After class, black hair pulled back from her round ebony face into a short, flippy ponytail, Dormevil exudes joy.

“I thought I’d never see the day when I would get a letter saying, ‘You’re accepted to college,’” she says. Her exuberance at receiving such a letter from Mercer Community College in Trenton so touched guidance counselor Alfred W. Bridges that he posted it in the school’s hallway, later adding 80 more student acceptances. “I’m trying to create a college-going culture here,” says Bridges, a former vice president of the College of New Jersey.

Horizonte Instruction and Training Center, an alternative public high school in Salt Lake City, similarly
allows students to finish high school at their own pace. Serving 800 inner city 7th-to-12th graders at nine sites, Horizonte was an adult school that added a program in the 1980s for students who felt socially or culturally alienated from their high schools. It offers a flexible year-round schedule of small classes from early morning to nine p.m. If students don’t finish high school by age 18, “we roll them right over to our adult high school completion program, which has the same core curriculum,” says principal James Andersen.

Horizonte students complete a “service learning” project, studying a community issue, performing a task
to meet that need and writing up what they learned from the project. While the school does not keep exact college- going statistics, 72 of its 200 youth graduates in June 2003 applied for college and the school’s $500 college “starter” scholarships.

Even more flexible than Daylight/ Twilight High School and Horizonte are the dozens of virtual schools operated by at least ten states, eight universities and several public school districts nationwide. Some students take only one or more courses, but others complete an entire curriculum online. There are also online high schools run by private schools, regional agencies and consortia, as well as by nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Patching Up the Patchwork
Today’s efforts to smooth the pathway into college may seem like an attempt to recover a halcyon educational past. However, history suggests otherwise.

In 1900, only ten percent of American 14-to-17-year-olds attended high schools. By 1980, 90 percent of youth in that age bracket were enrolled. As students flooded in, public high schools grew into large institutions with curriculum tracks separating college prep students from those taking the increasingly numerous “commercial” or “vocational” courses. “This was done,” explains Anthony Marx, “on the false idea that not all students are capable of academic work.”

Thus schools that in the past provided college prep education only for a minority are now being asked to do so for the great majority.

Furthermore, the experimental pathways emerging for this majority are not replacing a rationally designed system. The American “K-12 + college” configuration arose, notes Bob Orrill, executive director of the National Council on Education and the Disciplines, by “historic accident”—as a patchwork of institutions.

In the 1800s, state governments allowed both high schools and colleges to grant either a B.A. or a certi-
ficate, explains Carnegie Corporation Education Division Chair Daniel Fallon. Those awarding a B.A. were called colleges, and those granting a certificate were called high schools—even though they might have had the same curriculum. The high school course might even be more rigorous. Exactly where students should study the liberal arts was unclear.

That confusion grew with the founding of the American research university in the last half of the 19th
century. While colonial American colleges were modeled after Oxford and Cambridge universities, with liberal arts at the core, the new research universities incorporated the German idea of lernfreiheit, the freedom to learn. Students chose electives rather than following a dictated curriculum. That choice implied, however, that they had learned the liberal arts in high school. Later, in reaction, higher education again took up the liberal arts. As a result, students today may build a liberal arts foundation either in a “college prep” high school curriculum or in college—or in neither place. The “neither place” option is becoming all the more likely as students increasingly attend several different postsecondary institutions, collecting credits as though at an educational buffet rather than a sit-down five-course meal.

This lack of coherent design in the American educational system has also meant, adds Orrill, that intellectual achievement for many students ends before 11th grade, as shown by the fact that high school graduation exams in most states rarely test beyond the 9th or 10th grade level. (Even the SATs, he adds, don’t test far above a 10th grade program.) That leaves what Orrill calls “a dangerously weak, even vacant ‘center’ in grades 11-14.” The major efforts to firm up those years—advanced placement (AP) classes and dual enrollment (high school students taking community college courses)—are thus growing rapidly.

But many consider AP and dual enrollment only stopgap measures. Grades 11-14 are still orphans, they contend, and the junior and senior high school years, in particular, are pointless. “For elite kids, it’s senioritis,” says Anthony Marx. “For kids who aren’t going on to college, it’s often a waste because they’re bored and the work is not sufficiently advanced.”

Institutionalizing multiple new pathways to college to clarify the grades 11-14 muddle will demand changes in public understanding and policy. Some educators are calling for a one-track curriculum ending at 10th grade,
after which students would be prepared to enter community college. They could also stay two extra years to remediate, or to take AP or International Baccalaureate Diploma courses or other advanced work before entering college. Others are advocating state legislation that will extend state K-12 financing into the 13th and 14th years, promoting the idea that, as LaGuardia MCHS principal Aaron Listhaus puts it, “college education is a right, not a privilege.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is encouraging systemic change on the high school level so that, as a society, we are not approaching the problem of helping youngsters make the transition from high school to college on a one-school-at-a-time basis. Indeed, the idea of creating alternative pathways to college is rooted in the pressures that an increasingly knowledge-based economy has placed on schools, students, teachers, administrators, parents, policymakers, business leaders—meaning just about everyone with a stake in the nation’s future. Says Barbara Gombach, program associate in the Education Division of Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has provided support for a number of early college strategies (as well as creating and funding Schools for a New Society, a major urban high school reform initiative that is also supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), “Our challenge now is to create systems of good high schools—places that prepare all of the nation’s adolescents for college, for employment, and for citizenship.”

There are reasons to be encouraged. High school, college and university policymakers, for example, are beginning to address together the need to restructure high schools and ease the transition to college. A resolution of the grades 11-14 problem—which Daniel Fallon calls “the unfinished business of American education”—may be on the horizon.

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