VOA慢速英语-Education Report - Interest Grows in International H

　 
This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

Some American high schools are for students with special interests, like science or the arts. New York City even has a program for those interested in the food service industry, called Food and Finance¹ High School.

New York also has what are called international high schools, or internationals, for immigrant students. They must be new learners of English who have been in the United States less than four years.

The first school opened in nineteen eighty-five. The city will begin the new term next month with ten.

New York works with a nonprofit organization, the Internationals Network for Public Schools. Support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped the network expand.

Oakland, California, opened an international high school last year. San Francisco and Los Angeles plan to follow in two thousand nine. Other cities are also showing interest.

The network says the graduation rate was seventy percent last year in the four New York schools open long enough to have graduating classes. That, compared with twenty-three and a half percent for English language learners in all of the city schools.

Over all, New York officials recently reported that the city's four-year graduation rate, excluding August graduates, reached fifty-two percent last year.

At the same time, they reported that the city's dropout² rate fell below fifteen percent. The Internationals Network says its schools have an average dropout rate of just five percent.

Claire Sylvan³ is the executive⁴ director of the group. She says students drop out mainly because their families need them to work or because parents arrange marriages for girls.

The network helps find teachers and trains them in the teaching method of the internationals. Claire Sylvan says the teaching approach is to have students use their different strengths to help each other. They work in small groups, but she says they are not grouped by ability.

She says the students discuss issues, then produce a product like a paper, a play, a poster or a report. They learn English as they work.

Some came from traditional schools where, they said, other students made fun of them. Students in the international high schools immigrated⁵ from more than ninety countries. The Internationals Network says more than ninety percent of the graduates continue on to college.

And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach. You can hear archives of our programs at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.

1 finance   

n.财务管理，财政，金融，财源，资金

参考例句：

• She is an expert in finance.她是一名财政专家。
• A finance house made a bid to buy up the entire company.一家信贷公司出价买下了整个公司。

2 dropout   

n.退学的学生；退学；退出者

参考例句：

• There is a high dropout rate from some college courses.有些大学课程的退出率很高。
• In the long haul,she'll regret having been a school dropout.她终归会后悔不该中途辍学。

3 sylvan   

adj.森林的

参考例句：

• Venerable oaks forms a sylvan archway.古老的栎树形成一条林荫拱道。
• They lived in a sylvan retreat.他们住在一个林中休养地。

4 executive   

adj.执行的，行政的；n.执行者，行政官，经理

参考例句：

• A good executive usually gets on well with people.一个好的高级管理人员通常与人们相处得很好。
• He is a man of great executive ability.他是个具有极高管理能力的人。

5 immigrated   

v.移入( immigrate的过去式和过去分词 )；移民

参考例句：

• He immigrated from Ulster in 1848. 他1848年从阿尔斯特移民到这里。 来自辞典例句
• Many Pakistanis have immigrated to Britain. 许多巴基斯坦人移居到了英国。 来自辞典例句