"a challenge to the conventional educational wisdom"

[Universe Prince]

http://www.reason.com/news/show/127387.html

At the 19 schools in the network (three new ones are opening this fall in Brooklyn, Detroit, and the west side of Chicago), four-student teams share entry-level clerical jobs at area employers. In exchange, these companies pay the schools $20,000 to $30,000 for each team. The subsidy of $5,000 to $7,500 per student keeps tuition low enough (usually around $2,500) that a prep school education becomes feasible for poor families. This business model was born of necessity. But as the Cristo Rey Network has discovered in the 12 years since the first school opened in Chicago, the benefits go beyond financial sustainability. Introducing inner-city children to corporate America shows them the jobs they can have if they study hard and go to college. And that's what the vast majority of Cristo Rey's predominantly Hispanic and African-American graduates do. The schools are also raising interesting questions about the financing of education. Sociologists have long pointed to systems of free, compulsory public schools as the international gold standard. There are many arguments for subsidizing education, and it's certainly tragic when parents in poor countries pull their kids out of school because they can't afford the fees. But with only half of public high school students in America's 50 largest cities graduating on time, perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. The successes of Cristo Rey schools suggest that one answer to America's educational woes is not asking more of taxpayers but asking more of the students themselves. [...] Even given the model's limitations, though, the Cristo Rey schools present a challenge to the conventional educational wisdom. Not only do they show that it is possible to achieve good results with poor, minority young people; they show that it is possible to fund those results not with public money but by relying on businesses' self-interest. They show that teenagers are capable of more than most people think. "When you let young people work side by side with adults, give them meaningful adult responsibilities, and separate them from their peers because if they're trapped with their peers all the time, they're not going to advance--any program that does this finds the same thing: These young people rise to the challenge," says the psychologist Robert Epstein, author of The Case Against Adolescence. [...] Likewise, students at the Cristo Rey schools know they are working real jobs and earning real money that, rather than going to buy clothes or cell phones, is going to pay for their education. Hence education is a good that has value. That's a lesson that's lost in a system of free public high schools.

[Amianthus]

The successes of Cristo Rey schools suggest that one answer to America's educational woes is not asking more of taxpayers but asking more of the students themselves.

<sarcasm>

Can't have that. Why, even asking them to read at the same level as other kids their age is too much for 'em...

</sarcasm>