Dive Summary:
- In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, President Obama praised the Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Brooklyn, saying, "We need to give every American student opportunities like this.”
- P-TECH is an experimental collaboration involving New York public schools, the City University of New York, and IBM, and its model, which provides IBM mentors to students, requires no academic screens or tests to get in and demands no tuition, is being imitated at five other Chicago and New York schools.
- Graduates of P-TECH are put on track from ninth grade on to graduate in six years with high school diplomas and associates degrees in computers or engineering, as well as potential job opportunities through IBM.
From the article:
"... What’s unusual about P-TECH is educators’ willingness to work with private-sector partners to design an academic program that’s heavy on workplace skills. (Ten years ago, this would have been greeted with greater skepticism.) The students all have IBM mentors, who help them navigate. Because there are no academic screens or special tests to get in, no charter-school freedoms, no tuition, and no ability to dispense with core standards, the model has been widely embraced by educators as one that can be replicated. ..."