But not James Dark, 17, of Essex, Md. By the end of the year, Dark, a senior at Eastern Technical High School, will complete an independent study project on digital music. He’ll create a CD out of school band performances, write a paper on the process, design a brochure for others who want to make CDs and put together a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation that he says will be “simplified enough so that anyone with just a remote idea of what a computer is can understand it.”
Senior year is also packed for Samina Shaikh, a 17-year-old at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora. She’s taking seven classes (compared to the standard five), including human anatomy and physiology, microbiology and calculus-based physics. And that’s on top of extracurricular research in a Chicago medical lab, where she’s helping to develop a test for ovarian cancer. Samina’s baffled by seniors who spend the year goofing off. “When you just go outside and have fun,” she says, “after a while, it should get tiring.”
Students like James and Samina are role models for a radical transformation of senior year that is beginning to happen in high schools all over the country. Today’s students become bored and restless because “senior year does not add value,” says Gene Bottoms, senior vice president of the Southern Regional Education Board. The way to keep them engaged, reformers say, is to help them make a clear connection between success at school and success in college and work. Says Sizer: “We need to be treating high-school seniors like adults who are nearly ready to become competent and fulfilled workers at real–not teenage–jobs, rather than as children who are out at recess for a whole year.”
This rethinking comes at a critical time. Senioritis is particularly destructive when so many teenagers are graduating from high school without the skills they need to move on. Experts estimate that nearly a quarter of college freshman drop out, while about 30 percent take remedial courses in reading, writing or math. Students who go straight into the work force are equally unprepared because they’ve been taking watered-down versions of these subjects for years and as seniors don’t get any extra help. Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Education set up a special panel, the Commission on the High School Senior Year, to improve the curriculum. Cheryl Kane, the executive director, says that the seniors most in need of help are poor and minority kids who feel it’s enough of an achievement just to stay in school. “They’re the ones,” she says, “who are really being lost.”
The link between school and careers is central to the curriculum at Eastern Tech, a vocational magnet school in an economically depressed area east of Baltimore. Just 10 years ago the school was offering seniors courses in sheet metal and key punching. Now, under principal Robert Kemmery, freshmen are accepted into one of 10 career majors, including health, computer-aided drafting and design, engineering and information technology. There are computers in virtually every classroom. Seniors take the equivalent of three classes a day in their major, participate in internships and learn to work independently on special projects like Dark’s CD. Those projects, says Kemmery, are intended to show students how to use the skills they’ve learned in the first three years. “It gets them thinking about their continuing education and career,” he says.
The shortage of technologically literate workers has forced some businesses to build their own work forces from senior classes. The Center for Advanced Research and Technology in Fresno, Calif., is a joint venture between two school districts and a consortium of technology companies. The project-based curriculum trains juniors and seniors either for college or for work at one of the sponsoring companies. Students spend half their day at their regular schools and half at the center where, instead of just hanging out with their buddies, they spend several hours tackling a single subject ranging from telecommunications to biomedicine. The latter was Jonathan Miller’s choice. The 17-year-old from Clovis, Calif., is working on a research project in emergency medicine and has been assigned a mentor at a local hospital, who arranged for him to observe a 10-hour night shift in the emergency room. “This definitely makes better use of my time,” he says. “we don’t just read books and answer study questions. We push ourselves.”
Several states have set up special programs to provide similar challenges for the most academically talented students, like Samina Shaikh’s school in Illinois, a four-year public boarding school. Texas pushes that model one step further, bringing juniors and seniors to the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas. The students live together and attend classes at the university. There are also lots of opportunities to work with scientists. Senior Chris Ezell, 18, has worked on a robotics project at NASA. “This has opened up many more doors for me,” he says. Next stop (he hopes): Georgia Tech.
Despite the success of these programs, some educators say senior year won’t really get better until there’s a complete overhaul of high school. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, has been among the most outspoken critics of the current system, in part because Bard runs Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Mass., which enrolls students after 10th or 11th grade. Botstein believes adolescents today are academically and physically more mature than their peers a century ago, when the modern high school was created. High schools need to reflect that change, he says, by giving adolescents many more opportunities for community service, working with adult mentors and learning in classrooms with older students. “I think this is going to happen whether we like it or not,” he says. If he’s right, there might be a cure for senioritis after all.
