It's interesting for me to hear you describe this as I understand Texas is trying something similar with a program called Avid. My best friend is tutoring, er, facilitating for a smaller district. She tells me it's hard. You have the normal issues of kids not listening (either some classes just go "bad" or sophomore year causes kids to be especially...) but also have to deal with the kids expecting a more normal student-teacher relationship becoming frustrated that they aren't being given answers or being stubborn about how their teacher did it differently. IIRC, the program is for kids who neither parent has a degree so I wonder how much that plays into the difficulties of the program.
The one thing missing from my description is the idea of a role model—kids need those, and schools shouldn't be where they get them. It used to be that kids would first use their parents as role models, and then enter vocational training, where they would have a master as a role model.
Right now, teachers act like role models for kids, but they're an intrinsically bad fit: kids want to see their role models doing the things they want to do, but teachers simply teach. Ideally, role models would be "visiting fellows", perhaps alumni, of a completionist school, psyching kids up about doing some thing or other such that they see school as a step toward doing that thing. Without that, school is meaningless, and it's no wonder kids aren't interested in it.
