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One school district is now working to include more vocational education in high schools. Parents aren’t terribly pleased with this development, however.
According to an article by Sarah Butrymowicz at the Hechinger Report:
Career and technical education has come a long way since the days when students could be steered from academics into hairstyling, auto repairs or carpentry. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to sell the concept of having all students take courses in CTE, as it is known.
Take what happened this March in La Jolla, Calif. Parents rose in protest after the San Diego Unified School District proposed new high school graduation requirements mandating two years of career and technical education courses—or two to four courses. The district would have been the first in the nation to have such a mandate, experts believe. Parents circulated an online protest petition and school officials spent hours in a meeting to assure hundreds of parents that courses like computerized accounting, child development and website design could be in the best interest of all students.
Apparently every parent at the March meeting voted against mandating CTE courses.
A common talking point of education reformers is that “college ready” and “career ready” are the same thing. According to Achieve, Inc., an education policy group:
Is ready for college and ready for career the same thing? With respect to the knowledge and skills in English and mathematics expected by employers and postsecondary faculty, the answer is yes. In the last decade, research…shows a convergence in the expectations of employers and colleges in terms of the knowledge and skills high school grads need to be successful after high school.
If people take the right classes and learn enough in high school they should be prepared to succeed in college or a vocational job.
In 2010 the school began to require all students to take the courses required to be admitted to the state university system. The community supported that move. This latest development is much less popular, particularly with rich families.
As one parent wrote in an online petition opposing the requirement, “if you force the children of … highly intelligent and very academic parents to take less-rigorous VoTech coursework, you will hurt their chances of admission to undergrad and grad school.”
It’s hard to know if that’s true, but taking more VoTech coursework certainly won’t help students get admitted to selective colleges.
If career and college expectations are really the same, why offer separate vocational courses? Why not just offer the same courses and then let the kids use this to go wherever they want after high school? Part of the problem might be that it’s not really true. Perhaps in some theoretical sense the skills needed are the same, but the specific course requirements might be very different.
While secondary schools in Europe often provide sophisticated, selective vocational programs to students that really do provide them with entry into high-earning careers like banking or even law, this doesn’t seem to be what’s going on in San Diego. Perhaps what San Diego residents fear, somewhat understandably, is crappy vocational education.
If the public schools already mandate a curriculum that will get students into college, what’s the need for computerized accounting, child development, and website design? Such courses aren’t necessary for college admissions, and it doesn’t even seem that they’ll help much helping someone get a good entry level job.
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Jim Schultz on July 20, 2012 2:05 PM:
Thanks for shining the light on career ready vs. college ready, and the image of career and technical education. It's an important topic, and one which I wish was more front of mind in this country.
This reality will continue to hit more parents over the next 10 to 20 years, as they invest 120k+ in college degrees, which no longer guarantee employment.
Whenever I explain what my company does (technology-based) and describe our mission to help teachers in career-focused courses, I sometimes get “They use computers in Vo-tech classes? Ugh!"
It is unfortunate Career and Technical Education (not Vo-Tech) has created the wrong impression with so many parents. After spending 30 years in and out of all types of Career and Technical (CTE) courses and programs, nothing is more dynamic than the application and learning occurring in career-ready environments. Teachers in CTE have been implementing blended learning systems for years and creating paths for individualization of their students. Can we say the same for the majority of academic teachers in middle and high schools?
For all the passion parents and our nation focuses on college, the future job creation will have to rely on a strong and vibrant career ready curriculum working in context with the academic subjects.
gelfling545 on July 25, 2012 12:02 PM:
In the US, college education is not a closed system. Students can pursue non-college careers and still, at a later date, go to college to pursue other goals and many do better by returning as an adult student than they might have as 18 year old college freshmen. I am acquainted with several people who used the vocational education available in their school districts to fund their college educations so that they would not have a backlog of debt. Three teaching colleagues started out with cosmetology certification which provided them with very felxible employment to support them through their college years. One woman became a dental hygenist and used the job to support her undergrad studies so that, when she went to medical school, she did not have an already existing backlog of student loan debt. On the other hand, a number of people have completed vocational certification courses, gone on to college and then found that they could not support themselves on the proceede of their particular field. They then used their previous vocational training to actually earn a living while having the enjoyment of the knowledge acquired in their univertisy studies.