Fast Track Out of High School
Tenth grade and out? That’s the plan behind a pilot program beginning next fall at around 100 public high schools in eight states, according to the New York Times. At the end of 10th grade, students who pass a battery of board examinations, covering a number of subjects, including mathematics, science and English, can opt to immediately enroll in a community college. Students who pass, but prefer to attend a university, can spend their junior and senior years taking college preparatory classes, the Times says. The program, modeled on board-exam systems in countries as diverse as Denmark, England and Singapore, is the brainchild of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington nonprofit.
Students will be given coursework to complete; if they master the material, they’ll likely do well on the year-end exams. “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready,” Terry Holliday, Kentucky’s education commissioner, told the Times. Kentucky is one of the eight states in the pilot; the others are: Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The center says the aim is to cut the number of students who need remedial education once they’re at college. Currently, more than a million do, and many of them end up dropping out.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
