HIGH SCHOOLS
The latest enterprise of Union Carbide is located in a former liquor store on a street of squalid tenements and shops in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district. Similarly, the famed IBM trademark now hangs proudly over what was once a fruit market in Harlem. Neither company is looking for new customers in those quarters. Instead, both are serving as sponsors of "street academies," a new kind of informal learning program designed to lure high school dropouts to education and, hope fully, on to college.
Organized two years ago by New York City's Urban League, the program operates on the premise that the...