Bard College Launches New High School: Apply Now!
by Sarah Elzas

“The high school may be an outdated model,” suggests Dr. Leon Botstein, President of the private Bard College, who has launched an ambitious project with the New York City Board of Education (BOE): a four-year school, grades 9-12, that offers students a chance to graduate not with a high school diploma, but with an Associates degree.

“The structure of high school is essentially infantilizing,” continues Botstein, explaining that high school is “anti-intellectual” and does not give students the subject-matter competence they need in today’s world.

Botstein is not a reformer; he is a revolutionary. “If this program is successful, it will nothing less than change the nature of secondary school education,” said Chancellor Harold O. Levy at the BOE meeting where the partnership was announced. The revolution is in the classroom and the partnership as well. “This is the first public/private partnership of this sort,” said Levy.

“The pattern that I am advocating is earlier completion of college,” says Botstein. The Bard High School Early College will have a principal, Ray Peterson, for the ninth and tenth grades who will teach the standard BOE curriculum. It is in the eleventh and twelfth grades that things will be different. With professors and “no high stakes testing,” classes will have more emphasis on “adult- student participation,” says Botstein. Patricia Sharp, who is currently the Dean of Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts, Bard’s 35-year-old program teaching high school in this way, will become the Dean of Early College component.

The school will open in September 2001 with 250 ninth- and eleventh-grade students and will be located at 424 Leonard Street (in JHS 126) in Brooklyn. Admission is by application, which will include an essay and an interview, a process similar to college admissions. Botstein encourages students and their families to apply to the school. The admission doors are open and the school is actively recruiting qualified applicants.#

For further information call 718-935-3415 or toll-free: 1-866-537-3901.

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