Giving Compass' Take:

• Beth Hawkins reports that in New Orleans, at KIPP Renaissance High School, juniors are taking classes with professors from Bard College to gain extra college credit and be prepared for higher education before they graduate. 

• How are charter school partnerships exemplifying college-readiness programs? How can education funders help strengthen programs like this one outside of the charter network? 

• Read about college and career readiness under ESSA. 

This year, half the juniors at KIPP Renaissance High School in New Orleans are also freshmen at New York’s Bard College. They’re being taught by Bard faculty, all of whom have Ph.D.s, for free, on a Bard satellite campus set up on the high school’s top floors.

Unlike applicants to Bard’s traditional liberal arts college, interested KIPP sophomores don’t need to show a high grade point average or college entrance exam score. Instead, they participate in a college-style seminar where they can display their intellectual curiosity and motivation.

If everything goes according to plan, the students will graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in humanities.

The move by Bard, a leader in successful early college programs, and KIPP, the nation’s largest nonprofit charter school network, is a natural extension of a seven-year-old partnership between the two institutions. And it’s an example of the kind of ready-for-college program Congress set out to encourage in the Every Student Succeeds Act, the 2015 federal law intended, among other things, to prod states to get more disadvantaged students to and through college.

Under ESSA, states must now track and report how many high school students are enrolled in college-level classes, how many are from historically underserved populations, and what schools and districts are doing to ensure that those students are ready for college.

Bard and KnowledgeWorks are among five organizations that came together two years ago to promote awareness of the opportunities that ESSA has opened up. The coalition, the College in High School Alliance, hopes to help state education leaders figure out how to take advantage of provisions that encourage creative ways of using public dollars to fund high school college programs.

Read the full article about preparing high school students by Beth Hawkins at The 74.