The call for career-ready and college-ready standards is raising questions, writes Catherine Gewertz on Curriculum Matters. What does the career part really mean?
Some experts aren’t convinced that the common standards have what it takes to prepare kids for 21st-century employment. Others are skeptical of the whole argument that any one set of skills can cover the diversity of skills needed in the economy’s wide range of jobs.
Apprenticeships and “workforce-oriented high school training” aren’t as common in the U.S. as in Europe, notes USA Today.
One reason is that such programs sound dangerously similar to tracking — sorting students by ability level, a practice repeatedly rejected in U.S. culture, in which the dominant philosophy is that all students should have opportunity to meet their full potential.
My definition of “career ready” is the set of skills needed to qualify for a union apprenticeship or to have a good shot at earning a vocational certificate at a community college. These probably are not the same skills needed to earn a four-year college degree. We’re not serving young people well if we don’t give them a choice: Take courses that will prepare you to earn a four-year degree — not just enroll, take remedial classes and quit — or take classes that will prepare you to learn a skilled job.
About Joanne
sorting students by ability level, a practice repeatedly rejected in U.S. culture, in which the dominant philosophy is that all students should have opportunity to meet their full potential.
This is profoundly wrong.
Despite sustained efforts to convince parents that tracking is evil, tracking is still the norm in suburban high schools throughout the country. Schools with very low URM counts have rigid tracking; those with a substantial minority of URMs have to be more cautious. But the idea that tracking is somehow anti-American or unpopular? Idiotic. Ed schools hate it. Whites and Asians do their best to insist upon it.
Jeannie Oaks, the woman who largely foisted the anti-tracking movement upon America, has written more than one column advising heterogeneous classroom proponents on how to deal with opposition from angry white parents “insisting on maintaining their position of privilege”. There’s a continuing debate between those who believe that low-skilled students can only benefit if they are put with high skill students, and those who point out that all research shows that mixed-ability classrooms consistently depress the achievement of the high ability students.
But yeah. America has just resolutely refused tracking throughout its history.
Why bother with reality, when delusions are so much fun?
One of the challenges with determining what “career-ready” knowledge and skills would be is that careers–at least the ones that promise a reasonable standard of living–are changing decade by decade. It’s difficult to define a vocational set of skills and knowledge that will prepare students for what comes next. It’s a truism by now, but one important “career-ready” skill is the ability to learn and adapt to new professional demands. A broad liberal arts education may be one way to do this.
As for tracking…. While it may be that different students need to learn at different paces–and pursue different goals–shouldn’t we be worried when family income is the major sorting mechanism?
Claus, family income is not the major sorting mechanism. That’s not to say that individual teachers and guidance counselors don’t end up being swayed by that type of factor (as they once and sometimes still are by race, gender, etc). The major sorting mechanism is performance in previous grades/subjects, which happens to sometimes (often) be correlated with family income, but that’s a different story. I’m not in favor of tracking, but instead of flexible (and temporary) readiness grouping, by the way.
shouldn’t we be worried when family income is the major sorting mechanism?
Um, what planet are you on? Are you seriously accusing the schools of putting only rich kids in AP classes?
Or could it be that you confuse the results with the intent? Or don’t care what the intent was, you’ll lie about it anyway?
Kids from “families” (otherwise identified as very young, under-educated, never-married moms and absent/uninvolved fathers who were raised in the same pattern over several generations) who are incapable of/unwilling to prepare kids for school success start out behind and fall further behind every year. Ditto for the kids of recently-arrived, non-English-speaking (non-Asian, because Asians tend to come from intact families who are ferociously devoted to educational success) families. Add in the poisonous and all-too-prevalent (even in good suburban schools) ideology that doing well in school is a betrayal of one’s racial/ethnic group and the result is a cohort which stays at the bottom of the academic/employment pyramid. The bottom line is that the culture which creates this phenomenon needs to change, drastically, before academic results will change.
The high school math standards seem to me to leave a “hole” lot to be desired – well below current expectations for college preparedness.
If you have the time, compare these standards to the Major Topics of School Algebra of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s Report, then take a look at current ACT math content.
I agree with Wurman and Stotsky that “New Standards will set schools back”
http://www.dailynewstribune.com/opinion/x90197788/Wurman-and-Stotsky-New-standards-will-set-back-schools
[They must be talking about me here!]
“High school math teachers will look in vain for course standards in Algebra II, pre-calculus, or trigonometry. The drafters deem algebra, which the prestigious National Math Advisory Panel identified as the key to higher math study, as an outdated organizing principle.”
Math and science teachers – please read these “standards” and comment publicly.
While it may be that different students need to learn at different paces–and pursue different goals–shouldn’t we be worried when family income is the major sorting mechanism?
Yes, the worse that schools do at teaching students, the more important family resources are in children’s educational outcomes. (To illustrate, let’s imagine an extreme school system where all the adults employed spend all day filling out paperwork and no one has any time to teach anything at all, in that situation those kids who don’t have parents who can step in and teach them would be very unlikely to learn anything academic.)
However, the importance of family income implies a fundamental problem with teaching at schools regardless of whether tracking is used or not.
My definition of “career ready” is the set of skills needed to qualify for a union apprenticeship
That’s called nepotism.
Family income serves as a proxy variable for a constellation of factors that affect school performance. Higher incomes correlate with married parents who value education and have acquired the knowledge, skills, habits and behaviors that lead them to the values and practices which enhance their own kids’ learning, both prior to and after school entrance.
Why should it be a surprise that the kids with a father who owns a successful auto repair business and is married to a surgical techician have advantages over kids of a never-married, HS dropout mom who started having kids at the age of 15? This gap continues to widen as parental education and income rise.
Until such time (if ever) that cultural changes discourage unwed parenthood, the kids at the bottom are utterly dependent on schools for all of the knowledge, skills, habits and behaviors that will enable them to be successful in school, the workplace and in their own eventual families. Explicit instruction needs to start in kindergarten and be delivered in the most efficient way possible.