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Society is increasingly critical of public education in the United States. Students fail to learn good communication, thinking, numerical, technical, or workplace skills, and leave school unprepared to meet the demands of the marketplace. Many factors are cited as contributing to the poor performance of urban high school students. These factors include societal changes such as the growing proportion of young people who are from minority or immigrant populations, a breakdown of the social institutions that have traditionally supported young people and their families, and the change in the demands of a skilled workforce (Dayton, Raby, Stem, & Weisberg, 1992).The educational system is seen as contributing to the low performance of urban high school students through (a) tracking students by "ability ," thereby reinforcing and exacerbating social and class stereotyping; (b) increasing the size and impersonality of high schools; (c) holding low expectations for students and not accepting them culturally; (d) offering uninspiring curricula that lack academic rigor and fail to provide the skills young people need after high school; (e) offering narrow vocational training for jobs with little future; and (f) failing to offer Requests for reprints should be sent to Abbe Shorr, HHS had 2,665 students enrolled year-round. The student population was 68% Hispanic, 22% White, 4% African American, and the remaining 6% were a mix of Asian, Filipino, American Indian, and Pacific Islander. Of the White students, 79% were from Soviet Armenia. Fifty-eight percent of the student population was classified as LEP. Eighty-five percent of the students qualified for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program. Because the city of Hollywood has long been a magnet for the runaway teenager, an unusually high percentage of homeless youth attend HHS daily. In addition, five gay and lesbian group homes feed directly into HHS.The Hollywood community is considered the Ellis Island of the 1990s. Almost 28% of HHS's students were immigrants who attended schools in the United States for less than 3 complete years. The birth regions represented at HHS are Bangladesh,

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