One of Gov. Mike Easley’s initiatives to reform high schools in North Carolina was praised as “revolutionary” in a national network news broadcast Dec. 28. CBS Evening News Correspondent Lee Cowan characterized the Learn and Earn program as high school reform “on steroids” and a “jumpstart that saves time and resources.”
But Terry Stoops, education policy analyst for the John Locke Foundation, said the educational alternative program for teens is nothing new.
“Lee Cowan drools over North Carolina’s ‘revolutionary’ high school reforms, declaring high schools to be a thing of the past,” Stoops said. “But let’s be honest. The high school reform ideas implemented by the state did not spring from the head of Governor Easley, as the report leads one to believe.”
Learn and Earn high schools are located on university or community college campuses. In five years, students can earn their high school diploma and an associate’s degree or two years of college credit.
According to the governor’s office, CBS News spent almost a week in North Carolina looking at the state’s high schools, visiting Learn and Earn programs, and talking with administrators, teachers, and students.
Stoops said the idea “made the rounds” at a National Governors Association meeting a few years ago, and in 2003, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner discussed a high school reform proposal almost identical to the Learn and Earn program.
“Without financial support from the [Bill and Melinda] Gates Foundation, I am not sure that North Carolina would have much of a Learn and Earn program at all,” Stoops said.
The CBS report is not the first to praise the Learn and Earn initiative. In its June 12, 2006 edition, Newsweek looked at efforts to prepare people for globalization and changing economic times in the 21st century. The article described North Carolina’s high school reform work and its effort to overhaul “its education system to create a 21st century work force.”
“Easley deserves credit for convincing legislators that this program is a critical component to a successful public school system, even though he has no empirical evidence that it has been successful in North Carolina,” Stoops said. “Research on similar schools nationwide found mixed results, and I suspect that the same will be true in North Carolina.”
The New Schools Project, supported by the Gates Foundation, administers funding to 33 Learn and Earn schools in North Carolina. Twenty new Learn and Earn school sites are planned to open in 2007, according to a press release from the governor’s office.