Education Exchange
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Partnerships for Progress in Inner City Schools Over the past few years, a number of businesses in Cleveland, Ohio, have formed educational partnerships with high schools in the inner city. The objective of these Partnerships for Progress is to help secondary school students complete their education and be better prepared for future employment. The degree of involvement by businesses in this program ranges from tutoring and promoting better attendance to becoming closely involved in the school's activities. In its own Partnership for Progress, the NASA Lewis Research Center is teamed with East Technical High School, a public high school located in a high-poverty area of central Cleveland. Students come both from the surrounding area, and by school bus from other parts of the city. At East Tech, Lewis is involved in a wide range of programs that emphasize science and engineering and include tutoring, mentoring, "shadowing," summer jobs for students and faculty, funds for specialized equipment, and science fairs. In addition, being a large, diverse organization, we can involve students and faculty in a wide range of functions outside of science and engineering. In the interest of promoting school-wide cooperation, students and teachers have been included in educational activities in the areas of food service, publishing, editing and art work, library operations, and administration and purchasing. This article will concentrate on a "thematic" program we are developing in engineering and the physical sciences. Since East Tech is a comprehensive high school, as opposed to a magnet school where the entire curriculum is devoted to a single educational role, a thematic program is a special function within the school's general curriculum. Participation in the thematic program requires higher academic achievement or other indicators of ability. The objective of the Engineering/ Science Program, as designed by faculty and NASA advisers, is twofold. First, it is to provide a superior technical education appropriate for college Advanced Placement (AP) credit; it also aims to include special enrichment activities that go beyond standard AP programs, activities that an organization such as NASA can provide. Second, the program attempts to provide some employment-oriented skills to students who, although bright, may be limited in opportunities because they come from underprivileged backgrounds. As such, the program was designed with
both an academic-track engineering/science component and a technician-track for students whose ultimate educational objective may be an associate degree from a junior college. The program starts in the ninth grade, but is designed to enable switching in either direction through the end of the tenth grade. In addition, the technician track has been designed so that participating students will have the necessary requirements for a four-year college program, should they later decide to further their education. The engineering /science component has the standard AP course content, but also contains some s
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