You are here: Home / Archives for vocational

Axing French, Italian, classics, theater …

October 19, 2010 by

Do Colleges Need French Departments? On the New York Times’ Room for Debate, professors discuss the State University of New York at Albany’s decision to eliminate degree programs in French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater. The university president blamed budget cuts and said the programs attracted few students.

Should these humanities programs be saved at public universities that are hard pressed to meet the needs of all sorts of students? Are they luxuries that are “nice to have” but not what taxpayers need to support? What’s lost, if anything, if they are eliminated?

Not everyone needs French, writes linguist John McWhorter, a former French major. As long as some colleges and universities offer humanities degrees, others can focus on career training. Some students should be able to choose vocational tracks, he writes.

The very notion in America of four years of a post-high school liberal arts education as a default experience for people between 18 and 21 is a post-World War II novelty. It is unclear that it has created a populace significantly better informed or intellectually curious.

Most of the respondents argue that the humanities produce culturally aware, clear-thinking, flexible learners and thoughtful citizens who can adapt to a changing world.

On Community College Spotlight:  The shampooer with a bachelor’s degree.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , ,

Career ed bill vetoed

October 1, 2010 by

California students will not be able to to take career classes instead of art or foreign language to earn a diploma. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill. An advocate of vocational education, Schwarzenegger said he was worried the bill would impose new costs on school districts and could require funding of more career academies.

He also vetoed a bill creating “green tech” career academies in high schools using a small surcharge on electricity. The funding source would set a bad precedent, the governor said.

The governor signed a bill requiring kindergartners to turn five by Sept. 1 and creating “transitional” classes for children affected by the switch. The cut-off date has been Dec. 2.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

‘Food for Singles’ or French?

September 24, 2010 by

California students must take an arts class or a foreign language to graduate from high school, but a bill on the governor’s desk would let students choose a career course instead. The sponsor, Assemblyman Warren Furutani, D-Gardena, hopes the option will engage students who might otherwise drop out.

Common Core, which strongly opposes the idea, looks at Granada High School, where vocational options include:

* Hospitality to “learn grooming and proper work ethic.”

* Fashion Apparel to “learn sewing machine basics.”

* Landscape Design to “grow flowers, ornamental plants and vegetables.”

* Food for Singles to learn culinary “short cuts, new techniques, budgeting their food dollars, and multiple uses of appliances.”

“Education is about more than workforce preparation,” Common Core argues. “It’s about building creativity, wonder, cultural literacy and citizenship, for starters.”

California’s college-prep curriculum includes arts and a foreign language. However, the students who’d prefer “Hospitality” are not planning to apply to a state university.

The problem I see is that the bill includes no funding to develop high-quality  classes that would prepare students for real careers, most of which will require some additional training at a community college or in an apprenticeship program. Potential drop-outs might be motivated by Cooking for Chefs. It’s hard to believe anyone sees Food for Singles as a reason to stay in school.

Filed Under: Careers, College, Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Three tracks to success in Santa Fe

July 18, 2010 by

Tracking is out of fashion these days, but Santa Fe high schools’ three tracks give students a choice, reports KRQE News 13. Some take the most rigorous academic classes to apply for highly selective colleges, others aim for a less-selective college or university and some plan to pursue a technical career, go to community college or enter the military.

The third track engages students who’d otherwise be at risk for dropping out.

Welding teacher Al Trujillo said offering hands-on training is an important tool in keeping Hispanic students in school.

“Here, they learn a skill and their education becomes more valuable to them,” he said. “Without something like this, they may end up having a low-paying, low-skilled job.”

Moises Venegas, founder of the Quinto Sol research group, worries about lower expectations for Hispanic students.

Students who are pursuing a career in the military or a tech college are told to take a “workplace readiness” course, but they are not encouraged to take any AP classes and they take fewer language and science classes.

New Mexico raised graduation requirements this year, requiring all high school students to take four years of math and enroll in at least one AP or honors course or college-credit class. State policy — all students will be ready for college or a career — means that career-oriented graduates “need the same abilities as a college freshman,” says Melissa Lomax, head of the state’s career technical and work force education bureau.

Melecio Sanchez, 17, who just finished his junior year at Santa Fe High, has already received one welding certificate that allows him to work with heavy metals. He has a job with a welding company in Bernalillo and said he may attend college after he works and saves some money. He has several uncles who are welders.

“I like it because you get to work with fire, and you learn how to build things,” he said. “You will also make good money doing this.”

New Mexico students lag in reading and math skills compared to the national average; graduation rates are low. I prefer Santa Fe’s honesty to the pretense that all students will take the same classes and graduate with college-level skills.

Filed Under: Careers, College, Education Tagged With: ,

College prep for all? The Chicago story

May 1, 2010 by

In 1997, Chicago ended remedial classes and required all students to take college-prep English, math, science and social studies classes. College prep for all didn’t work the way it was supposed to, write Christopher Mazzeo and Elaine Allensworth of the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research and Valerie Lee, a University of Michigan education professor, in Education Week.

More students took college-prep classes, significantly reducing “previous inequities in coursetaking by prior achievement, race and ethnicity, and special education status.” However, test scores didn’t rise, and there was no increase in the likelihood of students going on to  advanced math or science classes.

Some things got worse.

Grades declined, failures increased, and absenteeism rose among average and higher-skilled students. There also were no improvements in college outcomes, and those students who attended college were no more likely to stay there than students were before the policy change. High-achieving students were actually slightly less likely to attend college after the 1997 curriculum reforms were implemented.

The researchers call for more focus on improving instruction and helping teachers engage students with a wide range of performance levels.  They also point to students’ academic behavior — attendance and homework completion — as more critical than low skills.

Improving instruction is always a good idea, but what if the K-8 schools continue to send unprepared and unmotivated students to high school? Before the policy change in 1997, most remedial students failed and dropped out. They still do. Only now they make it much harder for teachers to teach at the college-prep level and apparently demotivate the average and above-average students. If this isn’t a failed policy, I don’t know what is.

I think Chicago needs better instruction, more focus on academic behavior and a new policy: Try hard to get students caught up before high school and offer a vocational path to those who lack the skills and behaviors needed for college prep.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Singapore does voc ed too

July 25, 2009 by

Known for high scores in math and science, Singapore also offers high-quality career training in 11th and 12th grade to students who aren’t academically inclined, reports Education Week.

“Streaming” works in Singapore partly because all students receive a strong grounding in core academic subjects, such as math, early in school, said Alan Ginsburg, the director of policy and program studies at the Education Department. As a result, students enter career-oriented classes with skills that help them in class and on the job, said Mr. Ginsburg, who has studied math curriculum in Singapore.

. . . Too many American students with a strong career focus, by contrast, do not receive sufficient academic content, and thus “never get the skills they need to be employable,” he said.

Singapore’s vocational schools work closely with employers so students graduate with marketable skills.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: , ,

From cop to teacher

June 6, 2009 by

The Teacher of the Year for 2009, Anthony Mullen, spent 21 years as a New York City police officer before starting a second career as a special education teacher working with the kind of would-be tough kids he once arrested. He hopes to focus on lowering the dropout rate by encouraging options. Teacher Magazine has a great interview with Mullen, who’s focusing on dropout prevention.


It’s important that every student gets an academic background, but we’ve lost vocational education. Most of our high schools are geared towards getting students into college. And yet we have this population of students—millions of students, literally—who want to do what our ancestors have done for thousands of years: They want to work with their hands. They don’t want to sit in a desk all day. They want to build, they want to create, they want to design. And we’re losing that because we’re so concerned that they take the extra science, the extra math, the extra history and all these things to go to college when all these vocational opportunities are passing them by.

Speaking of cops in the classroom, Los Angeles is seeing high graduation rates at its police-affiliated magnet schools, reports City Journal. Most students come from low-income Hispanic families.


Discipline is strict, a communal priority. Reseda organizes cadets into squads of five to eight, each supervised by a student leader. The leaders make sure that their cadets get their work done, keep their grades up, behave in class, and dress neatly.

So far, few graduates have gone on to become police officers, perhaps because there’s a three- to four-year gap between high school and eligibility to join the force.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Vocational ed that works

January 15, 2009 by

Vocational high schools in Massachusetts are posting above-average test scores and lower drop-out rates than comprehensive high schools, concludes a Pioneer Institute report. In Worcester, the vocational school is the highest scorer in the district, writes Julia Steiny in the Providence Journal.

. . .  at Diman Regional Vocational High School in Fall River, 60 percent of the kids typically go on to college. One year the college-bound rate was 80 percent.

But this success is new. Before the 1993 Education Reform Act, maybe 5 percent of Diman’s kids went to college, 10 in a really good year.

What happened? The state made vocational students pass the same tests as everyone else. Teachers integrated reading, math and science into trade courses. Now there are waiting lists to get into vo-tech schools.

Via Education Gadfly.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
Newer Posts»