The Times's Sam Dillon reports today on a plan by eight states that would let students who pass rigorous high school exams--Advanced Placement tests, the International Baccaulaureate, or some others--to enroll in community college--to enroll in community colleges after 10th grade. Now I'm all for any system that will give students more choices. If they are capable of doing college level work and want to get away from over-regimented, under-educating experience of their high schools, terrific.
This plan, however, is based on an insane misconception: that the community college system is in any way a good option for high performing high school students. One expert quoted in Dillon's story says that the central problem this addresses is the enormous rate of failure in open admission colleges. Indeed, community college graduation rates are abysmal, and if the states decide to start tracking accomplished students into this system, they will probably do better than the current crop of community college students. But why in heaven's name would the students who pass five AP exams after 10th grade want to go to these schools? Instead of giving them a path to the selective schools they should attend, the plan would put them in what is essentially a remedial college setting--one that will undoubtedly disappoint them.
There is a good animating idea here. The incentive offered here for working hard in high school is the chance to get the hell out of it, which at least recognizes that part of the problem with many high school programs is that ithey are dull and stupid and coerce students into staying at their desks because it keeps them off the streets. So at the heart of it there is an idea that students will do better if they are offered a better product. Yes, I know, folks like to get up in arms about treating education as a "product," but from where I stand I'd much rather treat high school students as consumers rather than as prisoners.
In execution, however, this is exactly backwards. Instead of creating better programs for the kids who are miserably prepared for rigorous AP style exams and leave in the first place, the "high school board exams to community college concept" would take strong students and place them in the most dysfunctional sector of higher education. If you think that given the incentive to graduate earlier if they finish a rigorous program of study, go ahead and let them do it (though I'm not sure it's a really good idea--my own excellent public high school had an early graduation option, which few kids took). But don't pretend that you can fix high school but taking accomplished students and shoving them into the community college holding pen. That won't give anybody a better education. What it will do is push bright students whose parents haven't taught them to navigate the system away from the real universities they should be aiming at.
