Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 33

All in the family: The associate's degree that Illias earned while still in high school inspired his mom to go back to college.
kids can do all these things that they never had any idea they
could do. "
R
emarkably, in 2021, about a third of students who earned
an associate's degree that year in Dallas had failed their
eighth-grade exam. " They shouldn't have even been in
high school, " said Hinojosa, who completed his last year with
the district in June 2022. According to a recent study of the program,
such turnaround stories are typical for P-TECH students.
An April 2022 evaluation by MDRC-a nonprofit, nonpartisan
education and social policy research organization-found that
P-TECH schools in New York City were " particularly successful
at helping students at risk of underperforming in high school
achieve important academic milestones. "
The evaluation found that, " in particular, [P-TECH] increased
dual enrollment for this group of students, which may
be significant since prior research has found that students who
take college courses while in high school are more likely to both
enroll in college and complete postsecondary education degrees. "
MDRC plans to release a final report on P-TECH in New
York, including a cost study, in 2023.
Statistics show that Illias Gomez has plenty of company
among his fellow high schoolers who benefited from P-TECH.
Of all the Dallas high school students who got two-year degrees
or earned 60 dual credit hours in 2020-21, 71 percent were
P-TECH students.
" This past year in the pandemic, 910 kids-actually 910
is 10 percent of our senior class-graduated from high school
with an associate's degree for free, " Hinojosa told me. " No debt. "
Today, much like Gomez, not only are Dallas high school
students earning college degrees along with their high school
diplomas, but they're also making good money while still in
high school. In summer 2021, more than 400 Dallas public high
school students got internships in which they earned an average
of $17.50 per hour. Collectively, they earned more than $1.6
million, Dallas school data shows.
" The cool thing about this is our students are saying, 'I'm
earning more than my mom. I don't know what to do with
this money,' " says Sibu McNeal, director of workplace learning
at Dallas ISD P-TECH and Early College Programs. " These are
good problems that we're having now. "
Other school districts are looking at these results and
following suit. In May 2022, on a visit to Conrad High, I met
a group of education leaders from Chicago who had come to
learn more about how they could implement P-TECH back in
the Windy City. The group included Pedro Martinez, the chief
executive officer of Chicago Public Schools. Martinez told me
he sees P-TECH in Dallas as a " very, very strong model " and
he hopes to soon pilot the program at 10 to 20 schools in Chicago.
The city already has one P-TECH school, Sarah E. Goode
STEM Academy, but Chicago's educational leaders are thinking
of greatly expanding the program. Martinez said, " I think this is
the future of education. "
D
espite the interest from Chicago, P-TECH is still a relatively
rare model on the American educational landscape.
Of the nation's 15.3 million high school students,
only about 1.5 million are in dual enrollment programs, according
to researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Less than 10 percent of those students are in P-TECH. Of
those 1.5 million dual enrollment students, the vast majority-
particularly Black, Hispanic, and low-income students-do
not earn anywhere near enough credits to graduate from high
school with an associate's degree the way Gomez did.
Washington Monthly 33
Ben Torres

Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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