A new six-year Brooklyn high school has been called the future of vocational education in America. TIME Magazine recently profiled the school’s concept on its cover with the headline, “The Diploma That Works,” and when President Barack Obama visited the campus here in October he called it “outstanding.”
Not bad for a school that has yet to graduate a single student.
The hype over Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH, has continued to grow since 2011 after a public-private partnership was unveiled between IBM, the New York City Department of Education and City University of New York, establishing the school in a run-down section of central Brooklyn. At the heart of the model’s design is giving low-income students the chance to earn an Associate’s degree, essentially acquiring two years of free college tuition.
