Copyright© 2000 by School Services of California, Inc.
Big Push to Concurrently Enroll
High School Students in Community Colleges
Reformers are touting community colleges as a remedy for an array of high school ills-from overcrowding to a lack of motivation by high school seniors. According to a Los Angeles Times article, programs that allow students to attend community colleges while still in high school have been growing more popular nationwide in recent years.
Current law, Education Code 76001, permits the governing board of a community college district to admit to any community college under its jurisdiction as a special part-time student any student who is eligible to attend a community college pursuant to Education Code 48800. Education Code 48800 governs the K-12 system and permits the governing board of any school district to determine which students would benefit from advanced scholastic or vocational work. The governing board may authorize those students, upon recommendation of the principal of the school the pupil attends and with parental consent, to attend a community college as a special part-time student.
Officials in the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles Community College District are putting final touches on a plan to encourage many more high school students to take community college classes. Their plan is aimed at easing crowding in high schools, making college vocational classes available to younger students, giving ambitious students a way to start college early, and giving less ambitious students early exposure to college-level academics.
California has allowed high school students to enroll in community colleges since the 1960s, and many other states have programs dating back years. In Florida, for example, a statewide concurrent enrollment program has been growing rapidly, and 25,000 students now participate each year.
However, the programs are not universally lauded. In Washington State, high schools lose state funds when students enroll in community colleges, to ensure that taxpayers are not paying twice to educate the same students. For this reason, the program has been controversial. In California, neither system loses money, but the State Board of Education last spring moved to limit the potential for similar controversy by placing a cap on the number of high school students allowed to participate. The limit was set at 5% per grade level, but it has not been enforced.
Broadening access to Advanced Placement courses through the community colleges could help address an issue raised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year in a class action lawsuit. The suit alleged that African-American and Latino students were denied equal access to prestigious universities because their schools do not offer as many Advanced Placement courses as schools with predominantly white students.
The Los Angeles Community College District hopes that its plan will bring some standardization to the practice of concurrent enrollments, because current rules and practices vary so much. It has been reported that some students have earned community college degrees while in high school, but were later told the credits would not count toward their high school diplomas.
Certainly blending the last years of high school with the first years of college is a plan worth pursuing.
--Arnold Bray