How Can High School Better Prepare Students for College
Is at that place a better way to prepare students for life after high school?
May 17, 2019
With support from UM-Dearborn and other community partners, Dearborn's Fordson High School is shaking up how information technology thinks of a high school educational activity.
'What'due south the point of high school?' It'due south a fourth dimension-honored gripe that you're probable to hear from most American teenagers at some betoken. It's non something, withal, you expect to hear from their principal. That's more or less the question, though, that Heyam Alcodray has put to her staff since taking over as head of Fordson High Schoolhouse in Jan 2016. The UM-Dearborn alum ('80 B.B.A.) came in every bit a reformer (her mantra is "education with a purpose"). But she remembers a moment from her starting time graduation day equally principal when fleshing out that purpose started to feel specially urgent. "I was walking around, chatting with students, saying, 'Congratulations guys!' And this i detail grouping of students said to me: 'Thanks. But we really have no thought what we're supposed to practise at present.'"
The question of what students should aim for mail service-high school is arguably more complicated than e'er. Long gone are the days when merely crossing the finish line was your ticket to a lasting career and a middle-class income. And the prototype that seemed to supplant it — that high schoolhouse should be preparing every pupil to go to higher — is also showing some wear at present, Alcodray says. There are several reasons for that. The ascent costs of higher ed is putting college out of reach for many working class families. (At Fordson, more than eighty percentage of students qualify for gratuitous or reduced tiffin.) And many are seeing viable alternative career options in the skilled trades and manufacturing — where labor shortages are real, the wages are solid and in that location's oftentimes no requirement for a iv-yr degree.
Given these new realities, Alcodray argues high schools can't afford to be focused exclusively on higher prep; rather, they should be preparing students for "what next." And what'due south side by side should be defined in terms of the spectrum of real opportunities that's probable to greet them post-graduation day.
Then what does that wait like? At Fordson, 9th graders at present first their high schoolhouse careers past choosing one of four "academies," which are subject area-expanse tracks that roughly correlate to UM-Dearborn's four academic colleges. That rail so helps guide students' choice of elective courses, with at least one elective per semester coming from the called rails. All of the academies offering options for either college prep or career prep. For example, a student who's aiming to study at a four-year academy might fill her junior- and senior-year schedule with AP or dual-enrollment courses. A kid on a career-focused track, meanwhile, might concentrate on electives tailored for passing the certification exam for a skilled trade program. Kids are as well costless to mix and lucifer classes from both the career and college tracks.
"The trouble we noticed was that a bulk of students were choosing electives that offered the easiest path to graduation," says John Bayerl, supervisor at Fordson'southward Career and Technical Education Office. "But if you're taking 16 dissimilar electives that all showtime with 'Intro to,' then there's a hazard that it doesn't add together up to anything concrete." Meanwhile, Bayerl says the students who were taking a lot of AP courses and prepping for college, and the career-focused kids who were working toward professional person certifications, both had a much easier time answering the "what's next" question. And their post-high school outcomes were consistently meliorate.
The hope at Fordson is the new structure gives every student that kind of focus. Moreover, the school is working with dozens of community partners to go on the curriculum in sync with the real globe. Teachers and school leaders regularly meet with more than 120 area businesses to learn most what careers and skills are nigh in demand. And partners like UM-Dearborn and Henry Ford College are offer guidance near how to best prepare students for their bookish programs. Partner groups are also offer students all kinds of supplemental experiences, including workplace or higher tours and mock interviews, to further prep them for their adjacent footstep.
UM-Dearborn'due south College of Education, Wellness and Human Services Interim Dean Ann Lampkin-Williams, who's helping advise on the new curriculum at Fordson, sees big potential in the changes. She says in some means it mirrors the rigorous higher prep models that take go standard in well-resourced school districts, with the added do good of a career prep path. And the progressive curriculum, in which students are building toward a four-year goal, could help ease another regional education problem. Schoolhouse choice policies have made frequent school changes more common for metro Detroit students, which educators say can haveadverse impacts on both students and classrooms. The model at Fordson, she says, could incentivize parents sticking with the same schoolhouse for their child'due south entire high schoolhouse career.
Lampkin-Williams says tightening our human relationship with Fordson'due south students likewise has potential benefits for UM-Dearborn.
"Many are time to come first-generation higher students, they're coming from an array of backgrounds, and they're right in our lawn," Lampkin-Williams says. "That describes much of our enrollment population. So if we can become a player in their educational lives in middle and high school, it's inevitable that more than of them volition start dreaming about higher. I recall they'll also start dreaming well-nigh doing it right here at UM-Dearborn."
Source: https://umdearborn.edu/news/all-news/articles/there-better-way-prepare-students-life-after-high-school
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