Breaking the Diploma Barrier

Every Wednesday and Thursday night, John L. Smith goes to a janitor's closet in the Kansas City, Mo., Federal Office Building and rolls out a battered metal dolly. It holds a filing cabinet full of academic-achievement tests, a carton of mimeographed math and reading drills, and a pile of pocket-size dictionaries. "This is our school," he says. In the past five years, the cart's contents have brought 2,500 school dropouts all they need to crack the barrier between them and a better job: a high school equivalency diploma.

Smith's unusual night school, conducted in the Federal building in space contributed by the Government, is an outgrowth of his varied daytime career. Once he taught in a reform school. After World War II, he worked in a United Nations program to train former concentration-camp inmates. Now he is the civilian in charge of education programs at Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base, 18 miles south of Kansas City. In helping base personnel and their dependents make up educational deficiencies, he developed a stripped-down tutoring system that seemed too good not to share with outsiders. His technique rests on the assumption that most dropouts leave school with at least some academic skills and that they have usually picked up others on their own.

Crossword Puzzles. Smith avoids the teaching approach of the typical classroom; his system is tailored to the individual's level and potential rather than the group's. He and his volunteer instructors also make certain that the students understand how they have learned what they learned. Working their way up through a series of standard tests, pupils are asked to circle doubtful answers and to adorn with a question mark any answer that they think they know but do not understand why. These, together with wrong answers, provide Smith with a profile of student deficiencies.

There are no textbooks--Smith considers most of them to be "junk"--but students are encouraged to read what interests them. "It's better to read a pornographic book than not to read anything at all," he says. He finds that crossword puzzles help build the vocabulary.

Even the tests are sometimes not identified as such. "You'd hate to take a 'test.' " says Smith. "But it's not so bad to take a 'review.' " The 500 people a year who pass through the program progress at varying paces. A student with an average IQ and a seventh-grade education could be prepared with 20 to 25 hours of instruction. Then Smith has them take the General Educational Development exam, which is widely accepted as the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Smith, 56, gets no pay for his services. He insists that the program is just a hobby: "I get more enjoyment doing this than from bowling." Word-of-mouth recommendations keep the students coming. Smith's charges have included functional illiterates and former convicts, but mostly they are low-paid workers who want to improve themselves. Cleaning men at the Federal Office Building became so fascinated with the classes that some of them signed up and eventually passed their GEDs. Now they have traded in their mops for the badges and higher pay of security guards.

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