[originaltext]Moderator: This month, many high school seniors have either j

Moderator:
    This month, many high school seniors have either just learned, or are anxiously waiting to hear, what colleges they might have gotten into. Keith Frome, author of How’s My Kid Doing? has worked with students across the country. He believes the key to getting more kids to apply to college is peer pressure. Let’s listen to his ideas. Keith Frome, welcome to our program.
Keith Frome:
    Thanks. One summer weekend, I taught a small group of students from a low-income community how to write their personal statements for their college applications. Each student would be the first in their family to apply to college, and their ability to tell their stories was going to be critical to their success. During the three-day retreat, we used a variety of writing techniques to produce memorable, compelling and utterly authentic essays that I knew would stick in the minds of college admission officers.
    One of the students, though, who wrote about his attempts to extricate himself from a neighborhood gang, didn’t share my sense of completion. Though he had completed his college applications, his work was just beginning. He was on a mission. When he returned to school, he asked his principal to gather the entire senior class in the auditorium. He proceeded to read his personal statement to them and said that, if he could write this well, everyone else could do the same. He then led every senior, step by step, through the composition of their personal statements using the techniques he had learned in our weekend together. They started with a free-write. They read these aloud. They listened to each other, noting moments of beauty and probing for more details and explanations.
    The principal called me later that week, astonished at what he had witnessed. My colleagues and I began to hear similar stories from other schools around the country. We began to understand that the most influential person to a 17-year-old is another 17-year-old. And it struck us that this might be a key to solving a big problem. Every year, there are 1.1 million low-income eighth graders in America’s schools; 95 percent say they want to go to college, but only 9 percent of them will graduate by the time they are 24. In 1970, that figure was 6 percent. We have clearly not made much progress.
    Many think that the solution is to bring complex and expensive interventions into schools. I say the students themselves, with some training and coaching, can be organized into teams to work on behalf of the rest of their classmates. There are hundreds of urban or rural high schools around the country where I am privileged to watch students leading their classmates to college. In high schools, where peer leader teams are deployed, we have seen students get more than 70 percent of their classmates to apply to college, resulting in increases of 20 percent or more in actual college enrollment rates. We are entering an era in education reform that is calling for more collaboration among schools, unions and businesses, so that all students succeed. That sounds good, but we will only witness more lackluster results unless we understand that students are partners, too, who can help their peers achieve.
16. What makes more kids apply to college according to Keith Frome?
17. What did Keith Frome do one summer weekend?
18. How many low-income eighth graders are there in America’s schools each year?
19. What is the solution of improving the college enrollment rates?