New UC role: Grow career tech
New institute would broaden applied learning
Instead of just weeding out career technical courses, Sen. Darrell Steinberg wants University of California educators to plant some career tech seeds and cultivate them.
That’s not something that the UC system, with a lingering bias against applied learning, had been comfortable with. But within four or five years – if Steinberg’s goal is reached – UC will have helped create dozens, perhaps hundreds, of courses with career applications, elevating the substance and status of career tech as well as injecting real-world content into classes that most California students take.
Steinberg, the Senate president pro tem, is the author of SB 611, which would write into law the mission of a new UC institute charged with overseeing the design of career tech courses satisfying the entrance requirements to UC and the California State University system. It’s in a package of three Steinberg bills that would significantly reshape K-12 education. SB 612 reauthorizing collaborative projects between UC educators and K-12 teachers, is partly a companion to SB 611 and would provide teacher training for the new courses that the Institute would establish. SB 547, which TOP-Ed contributor Fred Jones wrote about this week, would add new performance measures to the Academic Performance Index (API), while sharply deemphasizing standardized test scores in a handful of subjects.
All three bills were heard Wednesday before the Senate Education Committee, and Steinberg gave a speech about them later that day to the Sacramento Press Club.
“The package begins to change what gets taught by partnering with the UC to make applied career-focused curriculum the norm, not the exception,” Steinberg said in his speech.
A committee of the UC Academic Senate known as BOARS screens high school courses to decide if they can qualify for one of the 15 course requirements for UC and CSU known as A-G. According to Don Daves-Rougeaux, Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions, Articulation and Eligibility of the University of California, the committee has approved nearly 10,000 CTE courses – over 40 percent of all CTE courses offered – based on a review of the syllabi.
But nearly all of these have been approved only to count toward the arts, lab science, and electives requirements of A-G. Only eight were sanctioned as satisfying the math, history, or English language arts requirements. It was this imbalance that Steinberg wanted to address when he pressed UC President Mark Yudof to create the University of California Curriculum Integration Institute.
The Institute identified career pathways, like bioengineering, and invites CTE and pure academic teachers to come together in four-day conferences to design a course that combines hands-on learning and core academic material.
So far, Institute panels have created only four courses qualifying for A-G, but, significantly, three meet the math requirement – Business Math, Business Statistics, and Da Vinci Algebra I, combining arts and math – and the fourth, Applied Medical English, satisfies the English requirement. The next conferences will develop math and lab science courses for three career pathway programs: engineering design, finance and business, and hospitality and tourism, Daves-Rougeaux said.
The CSU might have been a more natural fit for the Institute, since it trains most teachers in California and is not a research-focused system. Steinberg approached Yudof because UC is the gatekeeper of A-G. But some CTE advocates are skeptical whether UC professors can understand the value of applied education. It’s like asking an English professor to design a course in Farsi, a different language entirely.
Sen. Alan Lowenthal, a retired community psychology professor at CSU-Long Beach, got to the heart of that issue in questioning Steinberg and Daves-Rougeaux. He surmised that the reaction of many at UC would be that incorporating applied learning would lower academic standards of UC admissions. “Is everyone embracing this?” he asked.
Daves-Rougeaux said that UC has already made the shift in approving thousands of career tech courses and that leaders of BOARS have participated in developing courses at the institute.
Steinberg acknowledged the Institute reflects “a big shift in culture” for UC, “no doubt about it.” CTE must not be a “niche” program; instead, hands-on, practical learning must become standard in schools, so that students see the relevance of what they are learning.
Representatives of business and a number of education groups testified in favor of all three of Steinberg’s bills. No one testified against them. SB 611 passed the Education Committee 7-3 with three Republicans voting against.
Just to clarify: there are roughly 27,000 CTE courses statewide (at least there was last year, but no doubt this number has continued to slide), so the proportion of A-G approved courses are much less than half.
And while the number of CTE courses approved by BOARS is appreciated (even though Photography and art classes represent the vast majority of so-called CTE courses), when is anyone going to ask: Why should the UC be the arbiter of high school curriculum? And why does CSU cede their course admissions criteria to UC, when they have differing missions (UC does not have a workforce development mission like CSU, nor does it have CSU’s polytechnic roots, to say nothing about our Community Colleges)?
I believe UC has found most of the “low hanging fruit” to approve (i.e., those CTE courses with a sufficient focus on academic principles). They will never be able (nor should they necessarily be compelled) to accept technology-centered, hands-on, career-focused pathway courses that emphasize practical skills over theoritical/esoteric understandings.
While the physics, chemistry and math behind many mechanical parts in an automobile are extremely complex, only the mechanical/chemical engineers who designed those parts need to master those intricacies. The auto tech needs to have a general understanding of the principles behind, say, friction and wear in a brake-pad, but the chemical components and technical physics integrated into those parts go beyond their essential role in maintaining the equipment on vehicles they repair. It would not be appropriate — and actually quite counter-productive — to require every mechanic to take/pass a series of three, largely decontextualized math classes (including Trig) in high school to pursue an auto tech career pathway, even though that coursework would certainly be appropriate for future engineers.
So this is but one of hundreds of real-world examples why a one-size-fits-all approach to high school education — led by UC faculty — is simply ludicrous. We are playing “PC” politics with the lives of adolescent students.
Having said that, the intent behind Senator Steinberg’s package of CTE-related bills is noteworthy and quite laudable. It is high-time Ivory Tower elites and our dominant culture begin to understand how the real-world works, and how practical skills and understandings are as important as theoritical, decontextualized academics. “Rigor” is in the eye of the beholder, but nobody can doubt the value of our pluralistic economy, with its many various industry sectors, all requiring workers and entreprenuers with differing skills sets, aptitudes and training/education. Our high schools need to reflect that diversity.
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It is slightly ominous that ” DaVinci Algebra 1 ” uses one of the most wisely deployed( and thus one of the highest failing) textbooks,McDLittel Alg 1, a text that is written for and purchased with the blessing of HS Math teachers, who, college graduates all, have little instinct or respect for those for whom Math does not come easily. On the other hand, if they actually do weave in Da Vinci’s approached to math, the class might elicit a surprisingly broad spectrum of young adults for whom work in math is both fun and essential. Good Luck to all.
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Amen to the above; very much spot on.
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I find it strange that in Silicon Valley, a place where high tech development and electronics based manufacturing is king, that one cannot find electronics programs, theoretical or hands on, in the K-12 school system. The “SHOP” classes are gone from the valley at almost every high school and middle school. Silicon Valley imports talent from around the world because the local people do not have access to the kind of “hands on” education and training for the high tech manufacturing current to industry needs.
The move in California education to send everyone to college only helps to make a good case for industry to send manufacturing off shore or import well trained, non college degreed workers from outside the country.
And the UC system, which does not see SHOP classes as needed in K-12 education, and does not understand the physical aspects of manufacturing, should have no business designing the future CTE and SHOP in California schools.
John Chocholak
Small Manufacturers’ Institute (SMI)
California Industrial and Technology Education Association (CITEA)
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