A New Tack to Help High-Schoolers At Risk: College

Students in the programs can get tutoring and other help. Every Friday, Bell's collegegoers take a college readiness class that covers such subjects as office hours, time management and note-taking, said Adaora Nwigwe, the school's early college program coordinator.

At Montgomery College, the accelerated program works well for Karmen Holman, 16. She got good grades in school but had a baby in ninth grade and dropped out a year later. At college, she can take night classes, which helps with day care. She's treated like an adult and said she does not feel stigmatized for being a teenage mother.

James Kennedy, 16, said he was on the verge of dropping out of school when he got into trouble in a drug-related incident.

At his previous school, Kennedy said, "teachers would spend more time yelling at their students. They didn't care about what they were teaching." Before, he didn't really think of college as a possibility.

At Montgomery College, he's more engaged in his classes, he said, because they are taught by experts in their fields.

Some educators believe that the traditional high school, with its social pressures and focus on discipline, is a waste of time for a large number students.

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, which partners with an early college high school in Manhattan, contends that high school should end after 10th grade. Afterward, he said, students should be able to choose what they want to study, to motivate them to pursue their educations.

"High school is an outmoded, obsolete structure," Botstein said. "It is inadequate to deal with young adults who grow up in our society with an immense amount of freedom they don't know how to handle."

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, who is a champion of the movement through his foundation, also called high schools "obsolete" in a widely quoted speech to governors early last year.

After class at UDC, a few of the Bell students said criminology interests them in part because they have relatives who have been incarcerated or because they are used to being stopped on the street by police for violating the city's curfew. They said those experiences made them want to know their rights and to pursue jobs as lawyers or possibly as investigators for the FBI.

Many adults consider youths troublemakers, Omar said. "But there's some honestly good students. Look at us. We are taking college classes."