UC turns career tech ed-friendly
Approval of Business Algebra II for A-G
A decade ago, 258 career technical education courses counted toward satisfying requirements for admission to the California State University or the University of California. Today, the number has grown to 9,079 courses, closing in on the 2012 goal of 10,000 courses that the Legislature set several years ago.
The numbers reflect a dramatic shift in the mindset toward CTE by the University of California, whose faculty determines which courses meet A-G, the 15 subjects that all students must pass to apply to a four-year state university. They dispel the myth that UC discourages the submission of CTE courses for A-G approval, Nina Costales told attendees at the Santa Clara County Office of Education’s annual career technical education conference on Thursday. Costales oversees the course review process for the UC Office of the President.
In years past, it’s been true that UC professors, as definers of rigor, looked down their noses at applied learning. But that has changed, as UC felt pressure from the top – the Legislature, led by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg – and the bottom – a groundswell from high schools, encouraged by the Irvine Foundation – to expand CTE and inject real-world learning into academic courses.
“We are listening to the schools,” Costales told me.
Of the 9,079 courses, two approved this year reflect the sea change: Accounting, and Business Algebra II. The requirement of passing Algebra II, particularly at CSU, has often been criticized by those who question its relevance for non-science majors. Many had predicted that UC would never approve a course that strayed from a standard, textbook Algebra II.
Business Algebra II was created over a four-day retreat at Lake Arrowhead in May. It was organized by the University of California Curriculum Integration Institute, which brings together CTE and academic high school teachers, UC professors, and education experts to design courses that cross disciplines. One of Steinberg’s bills, SB 611, now sitting on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, would write the Institute into law and expand the course offerings, as state money permits.
Richard Stapenhorst, a teacher at the Finance Academy at Independence High in San Jose, was on the team that designed Business Algebra II. Students who take it will use logarithms and exponential functions in cost-benefit analyses and use linear programming to maximize profits. They will use scatter plots to set varying prices for selling drinks on hot and cold days. For students who see no relevance for Algebra II, the course will show practical applications and perhaps pique their interest to pursue higher education.
Stapenhorst had been a skeptic of UC’s role as gatekeeper of courses. The experience at the Institute turned his views “180 degrees.”
“It became clear that UC is doing the best it can to incorporate CTE and its own requirements for academics without losing sight of its mission,” he said.
A separate obstacle, not of UC’s making, is who will teach cross-discipline courses like Business Algebra. If taught by a math teacher, it will satisfy the math requirement, but if taught by a business teacher, it will satisfy only an elective requirement, the “G” in A-G. Under the No Child Left Behind requirement for highly qualified teachers, core subjects must be taught by teachers credentialed in those areas.
Until this year, UC had never accepted an accounting course. Stapenhorst has submitted what he hopes will be the third to be approved. UC had assumed Accounting was nothing more than bookkeeping. But his course will include economic modeling and topics in finance and require that students write papers, said Stapenhorst, who worked a quarter-century in high-tech marketing and sales before turning to teaching.
Granting an A-G elective to Accounting should help him expand the Finance Academy, a three-year California Partnership Academy that by law must focus on at-risk students. Since East Side Union High School District voted this year to adopt A-G as a default graduation requirement, his students will need elective credits like Accounting. Awarding A-G credits will also entice college-bound students outside of the Finance Academy to get a taste of a business course for a possible major or career path.
Most CTE courses satisfy only “G” as electives. But among the lab science courses that UC has approved (the “D” requirement) are Biotechnology, Applied Physics and Engineering, Engineering Physics and Geometry (satisfying science and math), and Forensic Biology.
“We want to provide more options for students. Courses like Automotive Physics may excite students to design cars and seek higher education,” Costales said.
I am very excited about some of these courses, and I think they could be hugely beneficial in creating incentive and interest for kids in the more traditional academic classes. Tools are far more interesting when you have a problem to solve and the tool can solve it.
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Every report I hear from Institute participants is glowingly positive, but shouldn’t we be asking ourselves: Why do we want the UC to become the arbiter of HIGH SCHOOL CTE coursework?
The UC system does not have a workforce development mission; according to their senior adminstrators, they are only interested in “scholars, researchers and academics.” That is why they serve less than 10% of our population.
The CSU system (with their polytechnic focus) and the Community Colleges (with workforce development being one of their three, statutory missions) should be the levels of higher education that should be a part of this effort. So why is everyone willing to have UC run this effort to develop CTE high school course curriculum?
Answer: The A-G admissions criteria!
CSU ceded their secondary course admissions requirements to UC’s BOARS back in 2000, and ever since, the fixation of every career counselor (the few that are still left at our high school campuses) has been on the UC’s A-G required and recommended list of courses.
Do any of the readers of this site believe UC faculty are best positioned or equipped to appreciate the needs of industry and labor in the workforce beyond the hallowed-halls of academia? As this article reports, the UC has decided that the only CTE courses that will meet a non-G category are those that are taught by non-CTE instructors (e.g., the only automotive course in the entire state that UC has recognized must be taught by a physics instructor, not the very experienced Industrial Tech instructor, who is very connected to the industry that employs his students).
While I applaud UC for turning over a new leaf vis-a-vis the relevance and value of vocational education courses, I seriously question the dominant culture’s assumption that UC should be the ultimate gatekeeper of all secondary-level CTE courses and curricula.
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I think, @Fred, that part of the question is what kind of courses do you want to offer?
). The secondary benefit is in the long term producing mechanical engineers who know how to tear down and rebuild an actual engine.
There is a real difference in appropriate curriculum between a course that teaches physics via the example of an automobile engine versus a course that teaches someone to be an automobile mechanic. And there should be. It’s extremely reasonable for a school to offer both.
One of the reasons people want to offer these as A-G is to preserve options for kids and to make them available to the college bound kids, kids who otherwise do not have time in their schedule for electives. And I think one of the great benefits of these courses is that they open the vista of what all those academic tools are good for, perhaps moving some kids from an automotive mechanic track to the mechanical engineer track (or even the quantum mechanic track
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You make good points here, Fred, yet it seems to me that there is increasingly a blur between UC and CSU, which has always been there potentially, since UC has very strong engineering programs; but the more the missions between UC and CSU are made to overlap, the less relevant the latter becomes. It would be nice to have each of them be world class in their chosen spheres of influence, instead of UC kind of taking over all of the state’s higher education system and increasingly influential in dictating to the secondary schools as well. In addition, as UC moves into fields like accounting and auto mechanics, it can expect its undergraduate reputation to continue to sink, to the detriment of all of us alumni. The California Master Plan for Higher Education was a magnificent document, and the more we have strayed from it over the years, the more our state has suffered. The University of California no longer appears the kind of dream university that helped attract my parents to this state in the 1960s; it appears instead an odd amalgamation of expensive decay. One can only hope it regains its sense of mission to lead according to its original purpose, rather than to follow into all kinds of fields where it can wander astray.
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So accounting and auto mechanics are equivalent, eh Bruce.
Sorry to bust your bubble but the mighty UC system is already teaching numerous accounting courses only they are hidden from sight in the economics department.
As someone who attended a Ph.D. program in a liberal arts discipline on a graduate fellowship and who has both a Master in Tax and a Masters in Accounting I can assure that accounting is not bookkeeping and that it is as rigorous an academic discipline as any the UCs offer.
A large number of UC graduates with liberal arts degrees are coming back to the lowly community colleges to earn the accounting units they need so they can sit for the CPA exam. You know, in order to get a job to pay back their UC college loans.
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Mark, my point wasn’t really about accounting as a course in a graduate business school; it was about UC simultaneously moving into fields more aptly considered applied rather than theoretical (as it does so, it crowds out CSU) and into changing undergraduate admissions standards in a like manner (which again encroaches on CSU, and the community colleges, and the high schools). It’s not obviously losing its research credentials, witness today’s Nobel Prize announcement, but the professors at Berkeley, at least, have long complained about the preparation levels of entering students, and these course approvals are likely to add fuel to that fire. It becomes increasingly hard for the teachers of first-year classes to predict what can taken for granted regarding student knowledge and therefore where to begin their courses, which the standards-based movement was supposed to help solve. And if students enter deficient in knowledge, general education is likely to grow more expensive, and more time-consuming, exactly opposite from the direction we should be heading.
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Bruce, the University of California campuses have long had technical or applied schools alongside their liberal arts schools. Where would the California wine industry be without UC Davis’ Enology? Where would Silicon Valley be without armies of Berkeley & UCLA EECS grads? Forestry, Social Welfare, Business, Government, Journalism, Law, Education, Medicine… these aren’t “pure” academic disciplines, yet UC schools train the best of the best in these disciplines. At least in the last century, the programs were thought to be of great benefit to California & Californians. You can call it overlap with CSU if you like, but the overlap has been there for the past hundred years or more, and it was there in Kerr’s Master Plan.
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