Word: michigans
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...take effect with next fall's freshman class. "They are among the most rigorous requirements in the country," says Michael Cohen, president of the nonprofit education think tank Achieve Inc. Some forward-thinking schools have already begun to incorporate the new approach. Here's a look at how three Michigan schools are preparing their students for the challenges of the 21st century...
Throughout most of the 20th century, the stream of cars rolling off Michigan assembly lines created jobs with high wages and schools with low expectations. When even a kid who dropped out of school early could look forward to a cozy middle-class living, mastering chemistry, geometry or geography didn't seem so important. But now, at the start of the 21st century, both the state's leading industry and its school system are at a crossroads...
...fast lane of educational reform. "The collapse of the auto industry, which also exploded the notion embedded in the DNA here that you can make a good living despite being a high school dropout, created a perfect storm for convincing everyone we needed to make changes," says Michael Flanagan, Michigan's superintendent of public instruction. For three months last fall a task force of state education officials, school superintendents, college deans and a Ford Motor Company executive pored over scholarly research on curriculum reform, borrowed ideas from private schools with strong college preparatory curricula and International Baccalaureate programs that infuse...
...goal was to craft rigorous learning standards that would give students the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college and in the 21st century workplace. The group recommended that every Michigan student, whether college-bound or not, be required to complete four years of English and math; three years of science and social studies; two years of foreign language; one year of phys ed; one in a course covering visual, performing or applied arts, as well as an online course-not necessarily for credit-offered by Michigan's web-based Virtual High School or another Internet instruction provider...
...While train tracks still course through the streets of Wyandotte, Michigan, many of the factories that for much of the 20th century made the city a hub from which cargo containers filled with paper, steel, tires and chemicals were dispatched to consumers around the country and across the ocean are now shuttered. "The opportunity to go to college is about all the students here have now, besides low-paying service jobs," says Mason Grahl, assistant principal at Roosevelt High, where traditionally far less than half the seniors go on to college. To change the mind-set, Grahl and his boss...