Students Built Hybrid Sports Car

Talk about audacity. Talk about saving gas with style. Not even Porsche can match what a group of Philadelphia high school students created: an environmentally-friendly car that does zero to 60 in less than five seconds and gets 50 miles per gallon. It even looks James Bond-worthy.

The students worked with teacher Simon Hauger while attending West Philadelphia High School's Academy of Applied Automotive and Mechanical Science. They are credited with creating the world's first high-performance hybrid car. Against all odds, these inner-city students from disadvantaged households dared to enter the Tour de Sol, a national green car competition. In storybook fashion, they won top honors.

But this isn’t just a car story. It’s about teaching and learning.

In interviews, Hauger talks with equal enthusiasm about sports cars as he does about programs that meld vocational and academic learning. You can listen to a 14-minute interview with Hauger here.

Research shows that career and technical education programs can improve students' academic performance and help keep at-risk students from dropping out. Career and workforce readiness programs are a key point in NEA’s Dropout Prevention Plan.

Keeping Hauger's students in school has certainly benefitted the auto industry. As Earth Day (4/22) and $4-a-gallon approach, Detroit automakers could profit by following the example set by our young auto innovators from West Philly.

Dropout Prevention 2.0

If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. That's what some large school districts have decided in the struggle with media saturation for students' attention. Last month, New York City distributed cell phones to 2,500 students as the first salvo of a $2 million campaign to engage students more in school. Some planned uses for the phones sound useful (teachers will be able to text students on important upcoming assignments, tests, etc.), others a bit tired (hiring celebrity spokespeople to record downloadable messages encouraging students to do well in class).

But can school really be marketed as a "must-have" product to disinterested teenagers and would-be dropouts, as some advertising gurus would have us believe? Los Angeles Unified School District seems to think so, recently spending millions on Web 2.0 applications to improve its graduation rates. Last fall, the district launched a Web site devoted to re-enrollment and assembled a team of mentor students to communicate with their peers via a MySpace page and You Tube videos telling their stories and encouraging their friends to re-enroll.

Naturally, skepticism abounds from those who believe that utilizing tools such as cell phones, viral marketing schemes, etc. amounts to little more than a "kitchen sink" strategy to attack an enormously complicated problem. We'll soon see how it plays out--although New York's campaign to "rebrand" school is still in its infancy, LAUSD hopes to bring 5 percent of the current 17,000 current dropouts back into school by the end of this school year.

--Tim Walker