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High schools try to make better use of something often wasted: Senior year (quotes Denise Pope)

May 11, 2016
The Hechinger Report
Instead of warehousing 12th-graders, some schools try to give them study and life skills. Senior lecturer Denise Pope comments.
By 
Matt Krupnick

High school senior Brody Ford is looking forward to the final weeks of the school year, but not for the reasons you might think.

At San Diego’s High Tech High School, Ford and his fellow 12th-graders take end-of-the-year courses in personal finance, cooking on a budget, even sewing. The charter school, which has five San Diego-area campuses, uses the classes not only to battle senioritis, but to make the last year of high school into something more than just a slack-off waiting period.

Ford, who goes to High Tech High’s Media Arts campus, is looking forward to learning how to be independent, something he’ll need to know when he goes to college in Chicago in the fall.

“It’s mostly life skills, the kinds of things most people learn about by messing up,” said Ford, 17, who added he’s particularly interested in personal finance. “I’m pretty stoked to learn that. It’s weird that in the school system they don’t teach something that everyone should know.”

Now, policymakers are urging schools to put the 12th grade to better use, teaching students skills that many haven’t learned, as a way of improving college enrollment and college graduation.

Senior year in most schools is “a laissez faire period that offers little challenge, motivation, or direction,” according to the nonprofit group Jobs for the Future. In a new report, the group argues that many seniors spend their last few months of high school doing little more than waiting to pick up a diploma.

Meanwhile, students enter college unprepared for the more rigorous academic environment and life on their own. “There’s a huge learning curve when you enter college, and a lot of kids aren’t ready,” said Denise Clark Pope, a senior lecturer in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who studies how to improve students’ engagement and reduce their stress.

Read the whole story on The Hechinger Report.

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