The Do-over School
For high school dropouts, a chance for a second chance
Kyle Dotson is used to waking up with the sun. Back when he lived at home, he was regularly up at dawn to "conduct business," selling drugs at the school bus stop in his Chicago neighborhood. He got kicked out of high school, but that didn't bother him. Dotson was 17, and the streets, he was sure, would keep him in cash. A stiff shot of reality soon changed that tune, though. "I didn't want my mom to see me end up in jail," he says, "or dead."
That's why Dotson is now Cadet Dotson, a bright-eyed young man with a quick sense of humor who can't help but keep his back and shoulders ramrod straight. The National Guard Youth Challenge Academy, in rural Rantoul, Ill., 120 miles south of Chicago, is the type of place where backs and lives get straightened out, usually real fast. After only a few weeks at the academy, Dotson talks about attending barber school and "doing my life the legit way."
Shaping up. Kids drop out of high schools all over America today. More than 2,500 students leave high school every day, researchers say, many never to return. About a million students drop out each year, costing the nation more than $260 billion in lost wages, taxes, and productivity over the students' lifetimes. More ominously, police arrest more than 4,400 youths each day; 68 percent of the inmates in state prisons lack a high school diploma. The picture for dropouts, in other words, is both grim and clear.
Which pretty much explains how the Youth Challenge academies like the one Dotson went to got started. In 1993, a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies showed that dropouts could benefit from military-style educational programs. The idea seemed simple enough. So the National Guard and a handful of governors around the country decided to jump into the act. Congress provided the funding, and the idea was an instant hit. Communities saw their dropouts return to class and their unused military facilities returned to service. Two years later, there were 15 Youth Challenge academies, with 23 more states on the waiting list. Three years after that, in 1998, Congress permanently authorized the program, agreeing to fund 60 percent of the cost if states picked up the rest of the tab.
Today, the voluntary, quasi-military program has chapters in 26 states and Puerto Rico and has plans to expand to several more states and the District of Columbia. Not only is the program good politics for its backers in Congress; it's remarkably successful in getting more than 7,000 at-risk youths to earn high school diplomas each year.
The program is simple. It starts off with a 22-week residential phase, in which cadets attend class for three hours per day, exercise, drill, and perform community service. After that, graduates are matched up with a mentor, with whom they work for an additional 12 months.
The students are considered high risk for lots of reasons. Some test as low as the first-grade level on placement exams, many come from broken homes, and nearly a quarter take psychotropic medication. In the first week of the program, in addition to practicing close-order drill, cadets learn basic personal hygiene, like properly clipping their toenails so they won't develop hangnails. "It's not a matter of intelligence; it's a matter of changing their patterns of behavior and creating an environment where they have nothing else to do but learn," says Peter Thomas, a retired Army sergeant major who's so hands-on about running the Rantoul program that he's up at 4 a.m. in black sweats and a reflective jogging vest to lead the cadets in calisthenics.
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."
This story appears in the April 24, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.