Word: dropouts
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...practiced experimentally elsewhere in that it fixes curricula firmly beginning with the fourth grade and allows little choice of courses. Kids are permitted to jump up a track or so, if capable. Keeping classwork commensurate with abilities seems to decrease the incentive to quit school: Washington's dropout rate has declined to 36%, from 52% when Hansen took over seven years...
...Twilight Schools let tough boys who disturb regular classes as they near the dropout age of 16 go instead to small all-male classes from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m., getting on such personal terms with teachers that sometimes they play basketball with them after class. Explains Coordinator Robert Belt: "The boys don't have audiences to show off how disruptive they might be-there are no girls." Three-fifths of the 180 boys enrolled in two such pilot schools are to return to normal classes in the fall and remain in school past...
...School to Aid Youth (so named to form the acronym STAY) teaches students who leave school to work but want to earn a diploma in night classes. Of 205 students who volunteered, a surprising 70% are from the top two tracks of the school system. "A dropout student is not necessarily a dumb student," says Project Director William Carpenter. "He is usually bored, maladjusted, has problems with his family, or needs money...
...Avenue." Many a Cal dropout "goes on the Avenue," which means he prowls the coffee shops, self-service laundries, bookstores and record shops in nearby Telegraph Avenue's grimy red brick buildings. One frequent stopping place is a shoestore called Sandals Unlimited; another is a self-service laundry where the machines, arranged in pairs, bear student-humor names: Tristan and Isolde, Godliness and Cleanliness, Toulouse and Lautrec, Dun and Bradstreet, Anthony and Cleopatra...
Victor Scott Keppel, 23, a dropout who spent two years on the Avenue before returning seriously to his studies, recalls his hiatus as a fast-moving kaleidoscope of LSD, drinking, faceless girls, and empty days. "The nonstudent life tastes like peanut butter, stale bread and leftover booze," he says. As for sex, "there were a few beatnik chicks that were wailing, but the volume didn't match the myth." At talk sessions, "everybody was very bored and very boring. There was something there, but I couldn't tell what it was. I took a closer look-and found...