Early College High School:
Lessons Learned in New School Creation

A Forum — June 10, 2005

Background

Early college high schools (ECHS) allow students to graduate in four or five years with both a high school diploma and up to two years’ worth of credits toward a bachelor’s or associate’s degree. The Early College High School Initiative (ECHSI) funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation and The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, is designed to support the creation and expansion of early college high schools throughout the United States. ECHSI is managed by Jobs for the Future (JFF), a national non-profit based in Boston, MA, which is also collecting longitudinal data on the outcomes for ECHS participants. This forum included speakers from JFF, as well as one of the ECHSI schools, Dayton Early College Academy (DECA), Dayton, Ohio.

Joel Vargas is Senior Project Manager with Jobs for the Future. He explained that the mission of JFF is to get more young people into jobs with family-sustaining wages; this includes a focus on strategies to improve the number of youth from underrepresented groups (minorities, low-income families and English language learners) who enter and graduate from college. Currently, there are too many gaps and failures at critical points in the education pipeline. For every ten students who start high school, fewer than seven will get a high school diploma; four of those will enroll in college, and fewer than two will complete an associate’s or bachelor’s degree within six years.

One key problem according to Vargas is the structure of high schools themselves. Vargas said high schools are not designed to meet the demands of the new economy or create a seamless transition from high school to college. Additionally, states set high school exit exams that are not aligned with the requirements for getting into credit-bearing college courses, and students are often discouraged by the maze of admission and financial aid processes as well as the perception that college is simply too expensive.

Early college high schools address some of these problems by creating a formal partnership between secondary and postsecondary institutions. They provide academic coaching for students, an intensive focus on reading, writing and math, and collaboration between high school and college faculty. They include charter and non-charter schools, two- and four-year colleges, locations in high schools and on college campuses, 6-12 and 9-13 grading structures, as well as schools in which advancement is based on competency rather than promotion from grade to grade; there may also be a theme or special curricular focus. The ECHSI includes 11 organizations [1] that are establishing at least 170 high schools over the next five to seven years. Some of the participating organizations focus on four-year colleges, while others focus on statewide initiatives or particular populations such as Native Americans or Hispanics.

The oldest school in the ECHSI has only been operating for two years, but Vargas said there is some early positive evidence from the initiative. Attendance rates are high which suggests that students feel connected to the school, and students have been “pretty successful” when taking college courses. There is also some evidence from programs such as the College Now (City University of New York) initiative that when college-level courses are offered to a broader population of high school students with the proper support, students are largely successful and encouraged to enroll in postsecondary education.

Vargas identified several policy issues facing the creation of ECHS. Schools and universities are not set up to facilitate the transfer of credits, and there is no guarantee that students will actually obtain college credit for the courses they take. It is difficult to find and blend sources of funding to support high school/university partnerships, raising the question of whether state and federal governments should provide incentives to break down funding silos and encourage cooperation. North Carolina, for example, has a high school innovation fund specifically to facilitate such partnerships. Vargas further suggested that if the new economy requires postsecondary credentials, it may be wise to consider “hardwiring” a requirement of two years postsecondary education for all students.

Thomas Lasley is the Dean of the School of Education and Allied Professions at the University of Dayton (UD). He described the environment which prompted UD’s participation in the ECHSI: the University has a middle to upper-middle class, mostly white student body; it sits between the affluent community of Oakwood and the city of Dayton, which has a struggling public school system. “The future,” said Lasley, “is based not on where the university has been but where the city is right now. We need to help the city solve some of its problems.”

The decision was made to create a public school on the UD campus. Lasley said it would need to be radically different, so that students would have a context for their learning and not drop out at the 50-60% rate seen in public schools in Dayton. There were upfront negotiations with the teachers’ union, which agreed to allow UD to hire teachers with non-traditional backgrounds (alternative license teachers, Teach for America, etc.). An “out-of-the-box thinker” was brought on board to hire teachers who could create an alternative structure that would attract urban students and enable them to become competitive.

Lasley continued that DECA was designed as a competency-based school, with no grades or grade levels. The school also maintains a strong emphasis on reading and writing to improve student performance in all disciplines. The curriculum is accelerated and compacted to fit in all the necessary courses for graduation and is based on Ohio’s academic content standards. The school also provides opportunities for students to develop social and intellectual capital that is commonplace for students who come from middle-class neighborhoods. Students also need to know why they are learning particular information; they are not willing to learn for the sake of learning or even to pass a course, and the school helps to provide a community-based context for learning.

Judy Hennessey, a former Superintendent of Oakwood City Schools, is now Principal of the Dayton Early College Academy. DECA has a strong focus on developing family involvement and support of their students. Teacher-advisors are assigned to students and become surrogate parents, confidantes, guidance counselors, and content instructors. The teacher-advisor visits the home of each student before school starts to meet with parents and talk about what excites that child and what helps him/her learn. Personalized, project-based learning plans are created to support the intellectual and social development of each student. Examples include a sports writing seminar for seven young men who have an uncanny memory for sports data. These students read Sports Illustrated to determine the thesis and supporting details of individual articles. Next year these students will shadow a Dayton sports writer and learn how to write news stories. These skills will help the students be prepared for the writing requirement on the Ohio Graduation Test (OGT). DECA expects to have an increasing focus on community-based learning through internships to help students see the connection between what they are learning and real life situations.

Hennessey says DECA students have a “Swiss cheese profile.” They figured out how to pass in elementary and middle school, but by ninth grade, there were big gaps in their knowledge. Hennessey believes this is the cumulative effect of low expectations. She mentioned one student who said, “Never has any teacher read a paper of mine line by line and had me review it.” At DECA, she says students are being prepared for the OGT and college board tests. DECA ran OGT boot camp for seven weeks before the tests: 30 students attended seven days a week. All but one of the sixteen students eligible to take the test passed all sections: reading, writing and social studies. “What students are saying informally to each other,” noted Hennessey, “is that if you work hard and you’re focused, you can pass these tests.”

Video

During a short video from DECA, students and teachers talked about what makes the school work. Teachers said they enjoyed working with students who have a passion for learning. They feel they are able to make a difference because they know students individually – “students can’t sit there and get by; here you can’t hide.” Students said the work was hard, but the teachers “know how to put it in our hands so we’ll get it.” Besides, said one young woman, “my mom says the more education I have, the more money I’ll make.”

Questions

The first questioner wanted to know why the teachers’ union agreed to make concessions to DECA. Tom Lasley said he believed the union saw the need to make accommodations to help insure the long-term viability of Dayton Public Schools and the union itself. He noted that next year the Dayton school system will have more charter schools than public schools – but some of the charter schools are asking to come back into the school system with the same accommodations provided to DECA.

In response to a question about sustainability, Judy Hennessey said DECA is not self-sufficient in its second year. She says DECA needs to become more efficient and effective in delivering the breadth and depth of college content to a larger pool of students; there is also a need to resolve the tension between high stakes testing and creating an engaging curriculum around student interests: they aren’t mutually exclusive, but they aren’t always compatible on a day-to-day basis either. She wants to build stronger relationships between DECA and the community, particularly the Air Force base in Dayton, so that students see the need for learning at higher levels.

One participant asked if teacher preparation at UD included training to work in an early college high school. Lasley said the faculty was not enamored with the idea initially but that is changing quickly; he believes UD now attracts better candidates for its faculty positions because of the early college program.

Asked about agreements between UD and other postsecondary schools, Lasley said there is a good relationship between UD and Sinclair Community College, the local community college. He intends to develop articulation agreements with Ohio State, Wright State and Central State so that credits from DECA will be accepted for transfer to these institutions and, hopefully, fulfill general education requirements. He is also working to get community sponsors for scholarships for DECA students to UD, hoping that eventually enough students from inner-city Dayton will attend UD that it will have a positive impact on the public school system.

There was a question about admission requirements for DECA. Hennessey said there is a standard application with teacher recommendations, an on-site interview with families, and a requirement that families participate in eight out of ten meetings. She said “we are looking for diamonds in the rough that show spark but would not be successful in a traditional high school.” Another forum attendee pointed out that as long as there is not a randomly selected population in the early college high schools being evaluated next to a control group, it will be impossible to do objective longitudinal research on the impact of the various programs and models. Joel Vargas acknowledged that a randomized control group would be available only when a particular early college high school admits participants by lottery (as is the case in several schools) and is oversubscribed.

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[1] The 11 organizations involved in the ECHSI include: Antioch University (Seattle); Foundation for California Community Colleges; University System of Georgia and Georgia Department of Education; KnowledgeWorks Foundation Ohio; Middle College National Consortium; National Council of La Raza; City University of New York; Portland Community College; SECME, Inc.; Utah Partnership for Education; and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. There are also affiliated initiatives in North Carolina and Texas funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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