Dropouts Get Jump Start on New Life

In the midst of the national debate over how to revamp American educational performance and stem the large number of dropouts, students like Jim Thompson, Matt Zuniga, Bernadette Carter and Jason Koehler have a few small successes they’d like to share.

They, along with eight of their peers, have come back from the scholastic dead, moving from the dropout column to near-completion of a high school equivalency diploma under an unusual pilot program at Mira Mesa High School in cooperation with the San Diego Community College District.

In essence, the effort brings to the high-school campus an existing community college program to give older dropouts a second chance, as a way to recapture disaffected students at an earlier age and give them a psychological jump start through counseling in self-esteem and self-discipline.

The key is completion of the General Educational Development (GED) test, a series of exams long used for adults without diplomas to show they possess skills and concepts considered necessary for high school graduates.

“With all the effort we’re trying with dropouts, I think this can be a real benefit for a lot of students,” said Ricki Martinez, adult education coordinator for San Diego city schools, who helped design the program to Mira Mesa.

The dozen students in the pilot had long given up on attending classes regularly at Mira Mesa, all for their own reasons--some academic, some family, some personal.

“I had all F/Us in the 11th grade,” Thompson said. “Personally, I was bored,” a fact exemplified by the 31 formal referrals slips that teachers gave him to the principal’s office for violating normal codes of conduct.

Despite their antipathy toward school, the students--together with about 100 others who had stopped attending or were about to drop out--were corralled by counselors to enroll in the school district’s night high school diploma program. That alternative program at 10 campuses offers students a chance to make up credits by taking two or three courses at a time, in an environment that bends some of the rules, such as drinking or eating in class, that made regular school so onerous for some.

But Mira Mesa Principal Jim Vlassis discovered that the night diploma program by itself was proving no panacea. Most students were so deficient in credits needed for a regular high school diploma--most having half or less of the 44 required--that completion could take years.

With the majority of them near or already 18 years old, chances of success were slim and none, even though many had academic potential, because after turning 20, students must leave the night program and continue their quest for a diploma at the community college level.

Statistics compiled by Martinez showed that few, if any of the students referred directly to the community college GED program were completing it. In large part, the no-nonsense, impersonal world of adult continuing education proved too daunting to these students lacking in self-discipline and responsibility.

“So a number of us kicked around the idea of perhaps improving the (outlook) for these students” who had the potential to complete the GED for an equivalency degree, Martinez said. “For this certain group, we thought about creating a bridge” by having the students study for the GED in a high-school setting.

Under the program, the students receive a high school equivalency diploma through the accredited community college foundation if they pass the GED and complete three social studies courses in economics, U.S. government and U.S. history--two of them in the night program and the third at a community college.

For the pilot, Mira Mesa High counselor Gaylord Albright set about identifying a dozen or so students who, although slogging along in the night program, appeared to have the ability to tackle a community-college GED course. He recruited his son Aaron, a basic skills instructor at Madison High, to adapt the course to the different environment.

“I guess I wanted to prove something,” said student Thompson, who readily agreed to Gaylord Albright’s proposition when approached earlier this year. He had tired of sleeping late every day, arising largely to eat a meal and then go to work waxing floors for a building maintenance company.

“This can be a gold mine” in recapturing dropouts, Albright said. “A lot of dropouts are not ‘dumb’ as people sometimes think” but rather dislike school for reasons of immaturity, or family problems, among many others, he said.

The prep course runs 2 1/2 hours a day, 4 days a week, for 6 weeks, covering all areas that the GED will test: writing skills, a writing essay, social studies, science, literature and the arts, and mathematics. Students then take the five-part GED, with passing grades based on the level at which two-thirds of all regular high school graduates in the United States would score.

“In the class, they help you one-on-one, that’s different,” said Carter, who admitted that the attractions of San Diego beaches had proven stronger than those of the classroom during most of her high-school career.

Added Thompson: “In a regular class, if you ask a teacher something, you get maybe a minute or two, what with 40 kids in there and a couple of loudmouths always (trying to disrupt) things.”

Barbara Barnes, a 17-year veteran of adult education with the community colleges, guided Aaron Albright in organizing the course.

“You need constant motivation and (for these kids) more of a classroom structure rather than (an alternative) method of giving them independent study,” she said. “You want the students to see some immediate gratification.”

All the educators involved with the program stress that the GED is not an easy test.

“It definitely presupposes that you can read” at or near the 10th-grade level, Barnes said. Much of the review centers on improving writing and math skills.

Gaylord Albright said that some students who were pre-tested for the pilot course needed additional course work beyond the rapid-paced review of the GED-prep class. They have been encouraged to continue in night school at Mira Mesa but, under another experiment, will be provided special tutors from the nearby Miramar Naval Air Station under a cooperative community participation plan with the military.

The GED is written by committees of secondary teachers selected from specialty subject associations, such as the National Council of English Teachers and the American Academy of Science, who decide what is appropriate material that a high-school graduate should know, Douglas Whitney, Washington-based director of the American Council on Education-GED Testing Service, said.

“It’s not a minimum competence test; the minimum score in California is such that 34% of seniors graduating with diplomas would fail it,” Whitney said. “A person with a GED diploma has outperformed a third of the high school graduating seniors in the country.”

Whitney added, “We administer it each year to seniors who are graduating and we set (passing) standards based on their performance. The test was changed substantially in 1988 and a writing essay requirement added in response to the national educational reform.

“We don’t promote it as a substitute for a high-school diploma--we require people to be at or near (age) 18 before they can take it--but rather it is for adults who did not complete high school on their first go-around,” Whitney said.

“And we are careful to counsel that students need to read at least about the ninth-grade level to take a prep course . . . but on the other hand, a majority of kids who drop out do not do so because of bad grades so you can’t always equate dropping out with lack of skill.”

Since the GED by itself cannot measure motivation, the community college district requires the three social studies courses the completion of which means a student has shown at least sufficient discipline to attend class regularly.

“That says the students have the capacity to stick with something,” said Heiko Fredericks, a community college counselor who will work with the expanded GED-prep program at Garfield and Hoover high schools as well as Mira Mesa to get students to think beyond the diploma itself.

“Most of these students are still very uncomfortable with the system,” Fredericks said. “I have to work hard to penetrate their defenses, to get them to start thinking beyond diploma requirements into career thinking, some basic goals.

“We don’t profess to say that the (equivalency) diploma is as desirable as one (that comes) from graduating from a San Diego high school, but four years of high school is simply not realistic for everyone. . . . I don’t think what we are doing is a disservice at all to students.”

Fredericks cited the case of Matt Zuniga, a self-admitted discipline problem who nevertheless has done well in the pilot and needs now only to complete his final government class, having passed the GED.

“He is beginning to have one small success followed by another small success,” Fredericks said. “I see a slight increase in stimulation and interest” beyond completion of equivalency requirements.

Zuniga has expressed interest in photography or architecture, and Carter now hopes to study nursing.