What Makes a High School Great?

Prepare for Work

Most high-paying jobs require some education beyond a high-school diploma, but kids from many families often struggle to get a college education. Early-college high schools can get them on track. By taking a combination of high-school and college courses over four or five years, students graduate with both a high-school diploma and an associ—te's degree-the equivalent of the first two year— of college-at no additional cost. From there, they can enter the work force or finish the last two years of college. In North Carolina, Gov. Mike Easley is trying to expand that concept to include students from all of the state's 100 counties by 2008 (there are just 13 of these schools now). North Carolina's Learn and Earn schools, Easley says, are based on the theory that if you learn more, you earn more. "In North Carolina, a lot of people grew up expecting to work in the textile mills, just like their parents did, and their grandparents did," says Easley. "But now, those jobs have gone to Asia." Education is the answer, he says: "We're trying to create the best work force in the world."

The early-college concept has its critics. "No one knows what the right model is," says Saroki of the Philanthropy Roundtable. "We're still very early in the process." Many admissions officers at elite colleges don't like it much, either, because they generally want students to take all their courses on campus. "I think they're just trying to rush them through all of this quicker," says Cliff Sjögren, former dean of admissions at the University of Michigan. "If this is the way we're going to go, then I feel sorry for the future of the country." But early-college supporters say the concept could inspire students. "This may be enough to flip the switch for some kids and provide them with a sense of motivation," says Vander Ark.

Help Boys an— Girls Succeed-Separately

The first American public high school, established in Boston in 1821, was only for boys. But as the high-school movement spread, new schools quickly became coed, says David Tyack, an education historian at Stanford University. "Almost right from the beginning, society believed in integration by sex," he says. Now a small gro—p of educators-bolstered by studies that show boys and girls le—rn differently-are turning to single-sex classrooms as a way to re-engage students, especially in low-income communities. One of the first to gain national attention was the Young Women's Leadership School in New York's East Harlem, now considered one of the best public schools in the city. Research on the effect of single-sex schools is mixed, and there are no studies on single-sex classrooms in schools. Experts who study single-sex schools say there's considerable evidence that smaller class sizes would help just as much, especially for middle-class kids. But for boys from poor families, that extra attention and focus can make a difference, says Cornelius Riordan, a sociology professor at Providence College who is directing a study on single-sex schools for the U.S. Department of Education.

Schools all over the country are experimenting with the idea. At Lloyd Memorial High School in Erlanger, Ky., freshmen and sophomores were separated by gender last fall for all classes except one, their elective. At the end of the year, the consensus among teachers and the principal is that single-sex works. Students have mixed views. "You don't have the distraction of boys sitting in your classroom," says Katie Brown, 15. "You can just come to class and you're actually in it to learn, not to impress." But after an exuberant all-boys science class (the centerpiece was a generator sending off electric sparks), 14-year-old Zack Craddock thought he would have had just as much fun if there were girls in the class. "I think it's personal," he says. "Some guys would have acted the same and some guys would have acted different. I would have been the same." Principal John Riehemann originally backed the idea as a way to help boys, who were consistently lagging behind in reading. One issue: too much of the material was girl-oriented. That led to the even more radical move of segregating almost all classes. Riehemann said there were no objections from parents or teachers, and the experiment has worked so well that they're expanding it to juniors in the fall.