The Do-over School
For high school dropouts, a chance for a second chance
The teaching at the academies is strictly organized. Cadets take one section of the high school equivalency test at a time, focusing on reading, writing, and math. The testing method, which pairs an adult education model with the military's instructional system, works. Nationwide, 70 percent of the students in the Challenge program earned their general equivalency diplomas. That's nearly double the 41 percent pass rate of other adult education programs. And cadets earn theirs in half the time--improving an average of two grade levels in reading and math in only 5-1/2 months in class, for example. The cost of educating a cadet is 85 percent less than that of educating a high school student--and far less than the cost of juvenile incarceration.
Finding a purpose. In Rantoul, one late blustery winter afternoon, cadets in dark-blue work coveralls hang banners along the main street as part of their community-service requirement.
The combination of service and discipline seems to have a powerful, and lasting, effect on most cadets. More than half the graduates find jobs soon after completing the program, 20 percent go on to higher education, and around 20 percent join the military. Gladys Hernandez says she first took drugs in her Southside Chicago neighborhood at age 13, so young she didn't even know what the drugs were. She quickly fell in with a gang and dropped out of school in ninth grade. When she joined the National Guard program, she thought she was plenty tough, but her quick temper got her crosswise with the instructors almost immediately. Now, sitting in the hallway outside her GED class, a few months shy of graduation, Hernandez says the program has changed her life. "I plan to go to cosmetology school," she says, "once I get my degree, of course."
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