Here is a revealing article from the Asheville Citizen-Times:
Buncombe County Early College, on the campus of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, will graduate its first class of students this spring.
The class started with 60 students in 2005. Fewer than half ? only 27 ? are expected to graduate in 2010. Thirteen students have dropped out of high school, and the rest moved to other schools. Of those graduating, a little more than half will leave the school with two years of college credit.
SNIP
Buncombe County?s school isn?t alone in its challenges. It was one of 13 early colleges that opened across the state in 2005 in an effort by Gov. Mike Easley to give nontraditional students access to college. By January, there will be 70 early colleges across the state.
There were 623 students enrolled in those first early colleges. One semester before those students are set to graduate, the schools have lost about 80 of them. Schools that opened in 2006 have lost 239 students.
And don’t buy the half-baked explanation offered by Tony Habit, president of the N.C. New Schools Project. Habit said, “I think it?s important to remember what these schools are attempting to do is very ambitious and unprecedented. There is no such thing as a perfect school in the first year.” The New Schools Project, along with the Easley administration, hyped these schools for the last four years, while the state has poured millions of taxpayer dollars into them.
Of course, if the Buncombe County Early College was a charter school, the State Board of Education would have closed it by now.
