Getting At- Risk Teens to Graduation Photos: Additional images of Performance Learning Centers (PLCs) in Hampton and Richmond, Virginia. Eighteen- year- old Tyriq Jones was fairly blunt about the mess he had gotten himself into before transferring to the Hampton, Virginia, online school where I approached him one chilly day this spring. I got backed up” in high school, he said. He had failed three classes in his junior year and, faced with the prospect of repeating a year, probably would have dropped out instead, he told me. Youngsters miss school and get “backed up” in class, so they miss more school because they’re bewildered or embarrassed, and fall further behind.
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Seeing few ways to recover, “they just silently drop out,” said Richard Firth, who showed me around the Hampton school and two others in Richmond that are using online learning to derail the cycle. In the three years the 7. Hampton Performance Learning Center has been open, it claims to have graduated 9. There’s a waiting list for admission, so the school opened a second shift, which also is near capacity.
Sherri Pritchard, the school’s social- studies “learning facilitator”—there are no teachers and no principal here—said 9. Virginia’s end- of- course history test, which would put them well ahead of both the Hampton school district’s and state’s pass rates.
And Tyriq: He has only a C average after a year at the Hampton PLC, he said, but he graduated in June—on time—and plans to enlist in the Army, his goal all along. The New Alternative. Online K–1. 2 education made its appearance in the mid- 1. It moved next into core high- school courses where districts found themselves with teacher shortages—math, science, foreign languages—and has been growing bumptiously, and in a dozen directions, ever since. The International Association for K–1. Online Learning, which goes by the acronym i. NACOL, estimates that 8.
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Thirty- two states have virtual schools where online offerings range from one class to an entire high- school curriculum, according to an annual report on online learning published by the Evergreen Education Group, a Colorado consultancy. At the Florida Virtual School alone, students collectively took 2. Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2. Twenty- six states have at least one full- time online school, and perhaps 2. John Watson, editor of the Evergreen report.
During a recent visit to the Richmond PLCs, Congressman Eric Cantor chats with Dr. Donna Scott. Two of the fastest- growing trends in online education converge in the Performance Learning Center project, which is why I called Communities in Schools, a nonprofit dropout- prevention program that devised the model in Georgia in 2. The PLCs call themselves an alternative to traditional schools and distance themselves from the credit- recovery factories that many districts have opened to boost their graduation rates ahead of state and federal sanctions. States are raising their graduation standards, but returning kids to the classroom for a second attempt at algebra often is counterproductive—Why should we suppose they’ll understand equations any better the second time around?—and gobbles up teacher time. The second trend is the “blended” approach, combining online learning with a teacher- led classroom (see “Future Schools,” features, Summer 2. Most instruction is online in the PLC model, but a teacher- coach is there to answer questions, direct projects, and keep kids on track. Communities in Schools linked those two trends with the small- school idea and has expanded the project to seven states and 3.
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PLCs have only four or five classrooms, four or five teachers, and fewer than 1. Teachers are district employees who are paid the district scale and apply for their jobs.
Kids remain part of their home schools, which has raised graduation statistics for those schools and generated buy- in from their administrators. PLCs generally receive the same per- pupil funding as traditional schools.
Their biggest expense, after salaries, goes to licensing fees for the online curriculum, which Richard Firth, the Virginia PLC director, put at about $3. Start- up costs for computers, teacher training, and to carve new schools out of old facilities can be a showstopper for financially pressed school districts. Richmond, which is building its first new high school in 4. PLC. Richard Firth, director of the Virginia PLCs, says dropping out of school for at- risk teenagers is not an “event” but a “process.”The only outside funding comes from Communities in Schools, which pays the salary of a services coordinator, who links youngsters with housing, day- care, medical, and other service providers and helps them plan what they do after graduation. The services coordinator at the Richmond career- center PLC keeps a closet of baby clothes in her office for students whose own children can attend Head Start or day care downstairs. Almost disarmingly, the PLCs reach out to youngsters that schools typically find the most troublesome.
Sherman Curl, the academic coordinator—i. Adult Career Development Center PLC in Richmond, handed me a brochure describing the students for whom the PLC is a good fit. Kids with “poor attendance,” “excessive tardiness,” “academic failure,” “apathy,” “social issues,” low motivation, and such “challenges to success” as pregnancy and poverty, it read. In a summary of its 2. Virginia’s Communities in Schools reported that one- third of the students at its four PLCs were at least two years behind in academic credits when they arrived. They were a year or two older than their conventional- school peers and, in the previous year, averaged six suspensions and 2. Several youngsters told me they’d fallen in with the wrong crowd at their old schools, or they felt bullied and isolated.
Hamner pointed out that there’s no security at his school and that the lockers don’t even have locks. Teachers sat in the back or in a corner of the classrooms, while students sat at computers, wearing headsets. Teacher Pat Sessions monitors student work via a “dashboard” on her computer. Teaching to the Student. At Hampton, I asked Pritchard, the social- studies facilitator, how she knew what her students were doing, so she opened a dashboard on her computer. It showed that on computer 3, a student was working on a U. S. The teenager on computer 6 was working on a module on imperialism for the same course, and the student on computer 7 was doing a review and practice test on the executive branch of the U.
S. The program tests a student at the end of each lesson, module, and course, and lets those who pass their tests with at least an 8. For those who don’t pass, the computer singles out the content they seemed not to understand, reteaches it, and retests. Administrators and teachers at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC: Sherman Curl (front right), Rani Gharseese (front left), Elizabeth Muse (center), Pat Sessions (back left), Ingrid Thomas (back center), Stephania Muterspaugh (back right)Kids like the immediate feedback, Katherine Fox, the academic coordinator at Hampton, told me: “It’s difficult for them to wait for success. Kids want to move on.” A mop- haired boy named Michael told me that he used to obsess over test questions at his conventional school and couldn’t force himself to move ahead.
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The Nova. NET practice tests and make- up tests relieved him of that anxiety, he said, as he pulled certificates from his backpack to show that he had completed two business classes, oceanography, and biology. Most Hampton PLC computers can access only Nova. NET; the few that can access SAS can’t go any further than research sites to which SAS provides a link. At the career center PLC in Richmond, which is housed on the top floor of a 1. Patricia Sessions showed me more. A “pacing sheet,” a sort of minimum speed limit set by the state education department, suggested that teachers should expect to devote three weeks to a unit on biochemical processes, part of the biology curriculum.
But when Sessions opened the computer file of a student named Trish, it showed that Trish had finished the unit in a week. She’d spent 2. 6 minutes on an online lesson about atoms and molecules, and got a 9. She’d spent an hour on the properties- of- water lesson and another hour on acids and bases, and got 8. Teachers told me that most Nova. NET courses are comparable to textbook- based courses in length and content—a comeback to critics who talk of watered- down curricula at alternative schools—but that many students move through them more quickly, and often finish high school a semester early. But as the year went on, and students progressed at different speeds, classes became more diverse.
In any class period now, she could have youngsters working on either semester of any of four subjects. Wes Hamner is the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC. As students finish courses, they can move to another classroom to work on courses they may find slower going. If they earn enough credits to graduate before the school year is over, the services coordinator steers them to mentorships, trade training, or jobs. Sessions, who was playing Mendelssohn in her otherwise- silent classroom as her students worked, said she started the year with 2.
March. All that movement precludes lectures or class discussions. Teachers told me that anywhere from 6. The walls of Pritchard’s classroom were ringed with poster- board projects on the Zhou Dynasty, the Battle of Fort Fisher, and the roles of the secretary of defense and the U. S. Department of Education, among others. It wasn’t AP material, perhaps, but it showed persistence and attention to detail that are not always common in city schools.
Last year, the whole school read the same book, Facing the Lion, and used it as a springboard for cross- disciplinary studies. The students I talked with said they didn’t miss discussions or were self- aware enough to know that lectures didn’t fit their learning style.