Career tech ed must be in the mix of options for all students
College is not a career; college is just one of many pathways to a successful life.
California’s post World War II 50-year prosperity boom was built with the hands of skilled workers. Think aerospace and defense, the auto industry, Silicon Valley. The innovations in those industries came from workers with all levels of education, and the products were made by hundreds of thousands of workers who received technical training in our state’s K-12 public school system. As recently as the late 1980s, more than seven out of every 10 California high school students were enrolled in a Career Technical Education (CTE) course. Today, fewer than three out of every ten students receive that opportunity.
A recently released report of a 2-year study conducted by Harvard University’s School of Education on the outcomes of our education system, including colleges, shows there are many pathways to success. “Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans For the 21st Century” is a candid and insightful look at our public education and provides clear policy implications that college-for-all is leaving far too many students unprepared for entry into the 21st Century workforce.
Leaving our students and workers unprepared in a challenging workforce market is unacceptable. Demand for workers is down, but demand for skilled workers is increasing every day. California’s own return to prosperity requires equal opportunity for all our students to choose their own career pathway, whether it’s receiving real-world technical skills in high school, obtaining an associate’s degree from a community college, or getting a four-year degree at a university.
Government budgets are significantly contracting throughout California’s K-20 institutions. This is why policymakers must re-evaluate the fundamental purposes of taxpayer-funded compulsory education.
With accountability assessments, course mandates, college admissions criteria, and funding mechanisms all fixated on a narrow bandwidth of English language arts and mathematics, broader curricular offerings, such as career technical education, art, music, and even the core disciplines of science and social studies, have been significantly scaled back in the instructional day of most K-12 students.
For kids who struggle in either ELA or math, their entire instructional day can be devoured by those two disciplines at the expense of all other curricula. Due to mandatory remediation programs, this narrowing of the curriculum phenomenon is particularly pronounced in schools at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, where high school dropout rates have reached epidemic proportions. Studies show the California dropout rate as high as 38 percent, with some high schools experiencing dropout rates well in excess of 50 percent.
It ‘s time to get away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to education. This narrow approach – particularly in our middle and secondary schools – has disengaged and discouraged many students.
Industry-relevant, hands-on, career-oriented career technical education courses connect a student’s aspirations with his/her education. When such a student is thus engaged, education becomes much more meaningful and valuable. Many students who never considered pursuing a college degree are tuned in and turned on by their CTE experiences.
I am reminded of my favorite response from a precision welder who makes things for the aerospace industry. When asked why he worked in such an industry, he replied, “I have only a high school diploma, I make $75,000 a year and I make things that have been on the Moon.”
That is a pathway to success that California can’t forgo.
It is also no surprise that some recent studies indicate that young people who take a series of at least three secondary CTE courses graduate from high school, go on to college, and finish their degrees at much higher rates than those who never had an opportunity to participate in vocational education.
It’s time to place a new priority on hands-on, applied learning and provide all students clear and attainable career pathways that are aligned to each student’s aspirations and aptitudes. And when a four-year college degree is part of a given pathway, then college preparatory coursework must be accessible to every student pursuing that pathway. But insisting that all high school students enroll and complete all required college admissions criteria is both unnecessary and counterproductive, as the Harvard researchers concluded.
Policymakers and administrators have spent too much taxpayer money attempting to squeeze all students through the same narrow education keyhole. California employers need all types of workers with all levels of educational achievement. The state’s university system can accommodate only 16 percent of our high school students. We all know that the other 84 percent are potential success stories, too, if they can obtain the real-world skills they need to compete.
Jack Stewart is President of the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, a position he has held since 1998. He is also co-chair of Get REAL (Relevance in Education And Learning), a coalition of employers, labor groups, educators, and others concerned about California’s commitment to Career Technical Education. He formerly served as Chief Deputy Director of the California Department of Commerce, where he managed the state’s economic development programs.
This is so right. People like Jack Stewart MUST have some clout — how can we get our leaders to hear what he’s saying?
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Bravo, Jack!
And, Caroline, Mr. Stewart is working tirelessly for these ideas in our State Capitol … but the status quo defenders (I refer to them as “the adults living off the dysfuncational system”) are strong and entrenched in the education policy arena in Sacramento.
That is why Jack helped found Get REAL (http://www.getrealca.org), in an effort to raise the policy discussions beyond the narrow interests, who have been controlling education policy in Sacramento for decades, and get employers, labor groups, law enforcement and others who have not historically been involved in education reform into the debate. These other folks have a stake in the outcomes of our public education system. Our state’s abandonment of CTE, in particular, has been a focus of their ire.
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While we do need to press the agenda in the State Capitol, we also need to press it with the State Board of Education and at the federal level. Federal law mandates that all states have a single set of state academic content standards and a single statewide assessment system and attaches absurdly high stakes to it. If we want to allow for a more diverse set of instructional opportunities for students, including “career tech,” this federal requirement must be either eliminated or substantially amended. It would also help if the State Board backs-off from any commitments to implement federal “common core” standards.
It would also be helpful to revise and redirect California’s career-prep funding streams. Instead of allocating the funds to local consortia that often allocate and spend the funds ineffectively, require them to issue requests for proposals that would allow broad range of agencies, including employers, to competitively bid to provide the instruction.
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Excellent article. I always shudder when I hear Bill and Melinda Gates or other ed reformers talk about getting “all students into college”. Students who are pushed into the college track when that is not what they want, or need, are much more at risk of dropping out of high school or college. Some of our colleges have completion rates that are less than 60%. What a waste of human and financial resources. Students need more opportunities in high school to sample careers and fields that interest them. The world needs electricians, carpenters, and welders — fields where many people have found rewarding careers. Perhaps if students who struggle with the college prep curriculum had more chances to try their skills — and experience some success – in other areas, they would be more likely to stay in school and more likely to complete post-secondary training in a field that actually appeals to them. Unfortunately, our “one-size-for-all” high schools are often so obsessed with the number of AP courses they offer, or the percentage of students they send to college, that students with other kinds of talents and aptitudes get lost in the shuffle.
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Fred Jones, I don’t think it’s the people you are thinking of (”the adults living off the dysfunctional system” ) who are the guilty parties in this idiocy. I’m assuming that you are referring to educators, but educators who actually WORK with young people understand the need for vocational/career education. They recognize that it’s fantasyland to believe that all young people can be shaped into college material. Nobody who spends any time with a cross section of teen-agers would buy into that.
Jim Mills blames Bill and Melinda Gates and other ed reformers. Since I vigorously disapprove of what they are doing to education, I’m eager to blame them too.
However — maybe we should avoid linking this issue with the current deep and angry divisions over education reform (by its current definition).
Mr. Stewart addresses the craziness from the viewpoint of the business community. Whether or not he has contact with real, live teens, he understands the need for a workforce with an array of vocational skills.
And when we talk about competing in the global marketplace — other nations are graduating students from secondary school with career and technical skills. We simply are not — if a young person wants to be a precision welder in the aerospace industry, we’re all “hey, get your A-G requirements in school and then go find and fund your own training — you’re on your own – no support from here.” That’s crazy.
How can we change this?
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I don’t “blame” the Gates for this situation. As far as I can tell, beyond the interviews they do, they don’t seem to have had much impact one way or the other. I merely cited them as an example of a point of view that seems quite widespread among educators — administrators far more than among teachers who deal with students on a daily basis. When I look for answers, I don’t see much hope in our local school district monopolies. Many have steadily reduced options and instructional quality even in the curriculum for the college-bound. And the districts that are keeping up in college prep are likely to have a parent demographic that is skewed away from demanding other kinds of career preparation.
I would love to see some public charter schools working to come up with a wider variety of career prep choices for parents and students. Unfortunately, charters, perhaps even more than the big districts, are often attacked for not providing students with college preparation that is rigorous enough. (Everyone seems to get hit with that yardstick.) Given how the student populations of charter schools tend to be skewed heavily toward minority and less-advantaged students, I can only imagine the cries that might emerge if they were accused of “steering” those students into “vocational” work. In the end, though, I do believe that it will be the charters that innovate in this area. Most traditional districts, with their emphasis (and operational tendencies) toward “one-size-fits-all” schools, are probably quite unprepared to tackle such a different model. My own district here in the Bay Area is so challenged by the simple executional demands of the day-to-day delivery of its mediocre educational programs, I just can’t imagine their plunging into something like this with any success.
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