For Needy High Schoolers, Free Classes at UDC Mean Time and Money Saved
By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Flonora Merritt, a 15-year-old District high school sophomore with a 3.9 grade-point average, is already planning for college graduation. That's when she finally can become a forensic detective like superstar DNA sleuth Gil Grissom on her favorite TV show, "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."
Working as a forensic detective "is better than being a lawyer," she says. "Instead of lying, you tell the truth through science."
She might be closer to realizing her career goals than most of her peers. For Flonora, with 12 credit hours already completed and six more underway, college isn't tomorrow's dream but today's reality.
Flonora is among 69 students at Friendship Public Charter School's Collegiate Academy in Northeast Washington who are enrolled in the school's early college program. It allows them to take courses without charge at the University of the District of Columbia. If her plans fall into place, Flonora, upon graduation from Friendship in June 2008, will have earned about 60 credit hours from UDC, saving her parents thousands of dollars in tuition and giving herself a two-year head start on college.
"It would be nice to graduate quicker than everybody else and get to the career I want earlier," she said.
For now, the UDC professors come to her and other 10th-graders at Friendship. When she reaches 11th grade, she will travel to the university's Northwest Washington campus to take her courses.
Friendship is one of two D.C. public schools offering the early college program. At Bell Multicultural Senior High, a traditional public school in Northwest, students have the opportunity to enroll in Northern Virginia Community College.
Both schools are part of a broad movement nationwide to reinvent high schools, boost college graduation rates among low-income minority students and provide a seamless transition from elementary and secondary schools to post-secondary studies and the work world.
The concept of linking high school and college programs was launched in the 1970s with "middle college" and "2+2" programs. In those long-standing programs, high school students largely enroll in community college courses.
In 2002, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation introduced the Early College Initiative -- which includes the Friendship program -- aimed at reducing the high school dropout rate among low-income minority students and boosting the number of such students going to college. The foundation is providing more than $120 million in grants to help high schools become smaller and more rigorous so they can better prepare students for college and employment.
Unlike the middle colleges, the Gates program, which operates in more than 20 states, enrolls high school students mainly in universities and four-year colleges.
So far, the initiative has established 67 programs enrolling about 12,000 students. By 2011, officials plan to have more than 165 programs enrolling 62,000.
If the students are able to "demonstrate success on college-level courses while still in high school, then they are on their way to making it over the hump to getting a baccalaureate degree," said Rob Baird, vice president for school-university partnerships at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, N.J., which funnels $400,000 in grants from the Gates foundation to Friendship. The money is used to pay the students' tuition at UDC.
"I was a little leery about this program," said Flonora's mother, Jean Merritt, who said she worried about whether her daughter could handle the college work. "But she went right to it. It's challenging her, and she's doing well." And the free tuition, she added, "is a godsend."
Educators in the national early college movement say they hope to target another problem in urban high schools that have large enrollments of low-income minority students: fewer offerings of Advanced Placement courses than their more affluent suburban counterparts have. The AP courses, which can boost students' GPAs to as high as 5.0, dramatically increase their chances of getting accepted by an elite college or university. If the students score high enough on the AP test, they can save money and time in the long run by receiving an exemption from the courses in college.
But the early college program, advocates assert, prepares high school students for college better than AP courses do. Unlike in AP programs, professors -- not high school teachers -- teach the early college courses.
"I teach the high school students as though they were college students," said Ben Abellera, a UDC professor who teaches introduction to logic.
In the second-floor technology lab at Friendship, several early college students recently were playing with a "ball shooter" -- a rectangular three-foot-tall robot -- that they had built.
Joseph Brooks, a 17-year-old junior, flipped a switch, and a light in the internal wiring, visible through four glass panels, began blinking. A large, rectangular basket flipped down. Joseph worked a joystick, making the robot lurch forward and backward on baby-stroller wheels. One of his partners, Seana McDuffie, 17, dropped a small basketball into the top of the robot. The ball shot out of the basket, ricocheting off a wall across the room.
In college, "there's a lot of independent work," said Joseph, whose team built the robot as part of an extracurricular project.
"I'm applying for a program at MIT now," he added. "I'll know more about college than the average freshman."
Arsallah Shairzay, dean of Friendship's early college program, said the project develops the students' critical-thinking, problem-solving and team-building skills, all of which are needed to excel in college.
The students -- who are admitted into the program based on GPA (the minimum is 3.0), standardized test scores, writing ability and families' low incomes -- take advanced academic courses as part of their high school program at Friendship. More affluent students are not permitted in the program. The school also provides Gates-funded after-school, weekend and summer tutoring programs for the students, Shairzay said.
Still, Shairzay said, leaders of the program, which is in its second year, are finding that students need better preparation to succeed. Although 56 percent of the students in the 2004-05 school year earned A's and B's, he said, 35 percent received C's and 9 percent got D's in college courses.
During the summer, Friendship will begin beefing up the academic program at its two middle school campuses. Moreover, Shairzay said, Friendship is considering doing the same for two other schools that send large numbers of students to its high school: Paul Public Charter School in Northwest and Stuart-Hobson Middle School, a traditional public school in Northeast.
"We are now able to determine the kind of skill set and content knowledge that is necessary for students to be successful in college," Shairzay said. "We want to make sure the students are proficient in critical reading and writing and algebra."
After a morning of classes at Friendship, the older students take a 40-minute Metro ride on the Orange and Red lines to the UDC campus.
In one class, students read aloud a piece by 1950s humorist Max Shulman called "Love Is a Fallacy." It introduced them to common hindrances to scholarly reasoning: dicto simpliciter, post hoc, contradictory premises, false analogy, hypothesis contrary to fact and poisoning the well.
The lesson "shows us how to avoid making an incorrect argument in our senior thesis," said LaMika Robinson, a 17-year-old senior. The students will be evaluated on making "a succinct argument that is backed up in all areas of your paper," she added.
She said the skill should help her get a good grade on her euthanasia paper and in the long term help her succeed at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where she won a full scholarship.
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