Cities across the US are shaking the thugs out of government by getting rid of Wall Street city development corporations, Ivy League universities, and their pols using cities to suck trillions of dollars in fraud from our Federal, state, and local coffers and keeping cities stagnant and people impoverished while doing it. SPRING CLEANING OF ALL THUGS IN 2016!!!!!
GETTING WALL STREET'S BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT, JOHNS HOPKINS, AND THEIR BALTIMORE CITY HALL AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY POLS OUT OF GOVERNMENT AND PRIVATE NON-PROFITS!
Below you see what Wall Street has in mind as it installs corporate privatized education with Clinton neo-liberals leading the way hitting city schools first because poor communities have no voice. But as you see, these national education corporations are going global----tying children around the world to these online schools---individualized programs meaning these children will be tested and tracked into what vocation the global corporate tribunal government decides and then these children will become a migrant worker pool sent around the world as needed. Some schools will have children working as apprenticeship labor in elementary school-----some schools with children working in middle school----but the idea of vocational high schools with children still receiving a broad-based education does not exist in these global corporate education models.
AMERICAN STUDENTS GET THE SAME EDUCATION AS CAMBODIAN, UZBEKISTAN, OR SUDAN CHILDREN AS THE US IS MOVED TO COLONIAL THIRD WORLD STATUS.
This is what O'Malley in Maryland as Governor-----the Maryland Assembly pols, and Mayor Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore City Hall have worked to install as hard as they can---the infrastructure for these global K-college education corporations taking all Federal, state, and local funding for public schools to private corporate profit. Baltimore school children are already being placed in front of online lessons in ever increasing numbers and after this coming bond market crash and the government debt used as an excuse to end funding for public schools----national charter chains will move in with the power to move children to any vocation----to place children in early labor apprenticeships----which will be the most likely as this maximizes profit of free labor.
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Next Section: K12 high school program: How else is it different from our K–8 program?
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Baby boomers remember when high schools had strong vocational tracks in high school open to any students wanting exposure to basics in trades. At the same time those students were required to stay in the broad course work of humanities and arts. When students graduated from high school and found they wanted a career in trades----then they joined a union apprenticeship or took classes at a community college.
THIS IS WHAT ALLOWED AMERICAN CHILDREN TO BE THE BEST EDUCATED AND WORKPLACE-READY IN THE WORLD.
Corporations did not want unions so if you are killing unions you are killing trade apprenticeships---ergo, the need for community colleges as job training and trade apprenticeships. Corporations sold the idea to the working class that all that humanities and arts in school was a waste of time. Why do we need to know history and dates-----why know English and composition----why know sociology and statistics because those things are only used BY CITIZENS AND LEADERS.
Republicans have been the best in selling this idea to their voters as they install this corporate education telling voters you only need to learn enough to do a job. Clinton neo-liberals are Republicans controlling a Democratic Party that believes in broad-based humanities and arts education so they have to lie, cheat, and steal elections in order to move these corporate education policies forward.
Reagan/Clinton defunded and dismantled public K-12 and its strongly resourced schools killing especially this vocational tracking in high schools as neo-liberalism sent all US industry overseas. For a few decades the American students not only saw crumbling schools---but all vocational programs dried up. So, Wall Street wasn't interested then in vocational tracking---it is only now that they intend to bring back global manufacturing corporations that they are rebuilding public education in their own likeness----MINUS WE THE PEOPLE DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION BECAUSE---GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNALS DO NOT SEE CITIZENS WHEN THE US IS SIMPLY A COLONIAL ECONOMIC ZONE
Below you see data that states more vocational students are doing the dual academic/vocational track and that is because people are not being employed from academic tracks. Vocational programs in high schools may have been largely low-income students but the union apprenticeship pathway to employment gave those trades a strong middle-class wage as with academic track. This is not happening today.
The troubled history of vocational education A student at a vocational high school in Massachusetts learns to weld.
(Photo: Emily Hanford) This essay is a product of the larger radio documentary Ready to Work: Reviving Vocational Ed, which you can listen to in its entirety on this website or on our podcast feed (iTunes).
Ernest Houle grew up in Leominster, a working-class city in central Massachusetts. His two older brothers had gone to the local vocational high school, so he did too. He thought he would do better there than at the traditional academic high school.
“I’m not one to be stationary,” says. “I like to be up and moving.”
Houle studied welding, just like his brothers. He got a job as a welder during his junior year of high school and, after graduating in 1988, stayed on with the same company. For the next eight years, Houle worked on “nuclear submarine engine casings, stuff for satellites, x-ray machines.” He says he made a good living.
Ernest Houle learned to be a welder at a vocational high school in Massachusetts in the 1980s. When he eventually went to college to become a teacher, he realized he hadn’t gotten a very good academic education in high school. (Photo: Bill Heisler)
But welding is tough work. It’s “not kind to your knees and your back,” says Houle. He started to think about the fact that his body would give out someday. Then what would he do?
He’d always been interested in teaching welding, partly because of the close relationship he had with his welding teacher from high school. But to do that, Houle needed a teaching license. That meant going to college. And that’s when he realized that, when it came to academics, he hadn’t learned nearly enough in high school.
“The highest-level math I ever had in high school was Algebra 1,” he says. “And that only happened my sophomore year because it fit in the schedule.”
Academics weren’t a priority at his vocational high school. The goal was to “get people to work,” says Houle.
College was a struggle, says Houle.
The origins of vocational ed Boys in a vocational printing class learning math, Fall River, Massachusetts, 1916. Even before the Smith-Hughes Act authorized federal funding for vocational education, many schools offered vocational classes. (Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)
Vocational education wasn’t designed to prepare students for college. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the law that first authorized federal funding for vocational education in American schools, explicitly described vocational ed as preparation for careers not requiring a bachelor’s degree.
“The early vocational education was driven by a philosophy of fitting people to their probable destinies,” says Jim Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education. “Kids from poor families were tracked off into becoming the worker bees. Others were tracked off to go to universities and be the intelligentsia. We would today call that tracking.”
The interest in vocational education in the early 20th century was prompted in part by big economic and social changes. Factory owners were facing a shortage of skilled labor in a rapidly industrializing society. And public schools were seeing an influx of immigrants and farm kids.
Many of those kids would have learned farming or skilled trades from their parents in an earlier era. But with the rise of factories, it was no longer safe for kids to learn to work alongside their parents. So they went to high school instead.
Young men learn woodworking, circa 1918. Photograph is part of the series “Vocational studies, public schools.” (Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)
“And secondary schools didn’t know what to do with them,” says Jeannie Oakes, author of Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality.
High schools “were used to dealing with this very small group of mostly quite privileged children of educated families and they gave them this nice liberal arts education in preparation for the university,” she says. “Well that didn’t seem to be fitting at all for these kids who’d come in from the farms, or these new immigrants. So the idea was, let’s put vocational training into public education and we can solve all of these problems.”
Vocational education had its critics from the start, chief among them John Dewey, the educational philosopher and social progressive.
“Dewey opposed [vocational ed] because he thought it was building a class distinction right into the design” of public education, says David Stern, whose research focuses on the relationship between education and work. “And I think history proved him right.”
Tracking From the beginning, vocational education was designed to teach kids the specific skills for one job or career. To be a welder or a cosmetologist, for example, “with the idea that, once you become a welder, you’ll always be a welder. Or once you become a cosmetologist, you’ll always be a cosmetologist,” says Stone. The idea was, get kids really skilled at one thing, “and life will be good,” he says.
The idea that people could be trained in one area and rely on an industry to employ them for life was a reasonable one for much of the 20th century. There were lots of jobs — good union jobs — for people with just a high school education. Back in the early 1970s, only 26 percent of middle-class workers had any kind of education beyond high school.
Still, civil rights activists and advocates for low-income kids were disturbed by who was being steered into vocational education. Studies in the 1960s and 70s showed that students in vocational programs were much more likely to be from lower-income families with lower levels of education. In her book Keeping Track, Jeannie Oakes writes, “[M]any educational scholars agree that an underlying function of vocational education has been to segregate poor and minority students into occupational training programs in order to preserve the academic curriculum for middle- and upper-class students.”
It’s not clear that vocational ed was preparing students well for work either. Two studies from the 1960s showed that graduates of some vocational programs were no more likely to be employed than high school dropouts. Other research found that few graduates of high school vocational programs had an advantage over graduates of academic programs in terms of income or employment.
And, by the 1970s, the good jobs that required just a high school education were beginning to disappear. Technology and globalization were increasing the skill levels required for most occupations, and making the labor market more volatile. Entire sectors of the economy were being wiped out, and new kinds of jobs were being created.
To be successful in this kind of economy, experts say workers have to be multi-skilled and able to retrain for new jobs throughout their careers. Everyone needs a good academic foundation in order to do that, experts say, and most kids in vocational programs were not getting that foundation.
Improving vocational ed By the late 1990s, vocational education had a major image problem. Vocational programs had become a kind of dumping ground for kids who weren’t succeeding in the traditional academic environment. That included a lot of students with behavior problems, and a lot of students with learning disabilities. In many school districts, vocational education wasn’t much more than a “second-tier special ed program,” says Jim Stone.
At the same time, the standards and accountability movement was taking hold in public education. States had begun to write academic standards, or goals, for what students should learn. In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act. That law required states, in exchange for federal education funding, to test their students every year and to insure that all students would eventually be proficient in math and reading.
All students meant the kids in vocational programs too. And once states starting testing their students, it became clear that many students in vocational programs were at the bottom in terms of math and reading skills. Under No Child Left Behind, those programs could eventually be shut down for poor performance. If they were going to survive, vocational schools had to up their game in terms of academics.
Students eating lunch at Minuteman, a regional vocational high school in Massachusetts. Students at regional vocational high schools in Massachusetts are more likely to graduate than students at traditional, comprehensive high schools. (Photo: Emily Hanford)
“The early 2000s was a time of significant change in voc ed,” says Dave Ferreira, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators.
“What we wanted to do was create a student who was able to go out” and get a job, he says, but also able to “get accepted into a four-year college or university.” The idea was to make sure all students were both “career and college ready.”
Massachusetts stands out as a state that devoted significant time and resources to overhauling its vocational education programs, according to experts.
“It was a slow process,” says Ferreira.
The key was to convince vocational teachers to put aside “the old philosophy of saying, ‘It’s all about the trades. I don’t teach academics,'” says Ferreira, and to help them learn how they could integrate academic instruction into career training. For example, show teachers how to teach writing skills when students were writing up materials lists and job estimates.
And it wasn’t all about integrating academics into career classes, says Ferreira. It was also about adding academic classes to the vocational curriculum.
Massachusetts has largely succeeded in bringing the academic quality at its vocational high schools up to par with its traditional high schools. In 2013, students at regional vocational high schools in Massachusetts did as well on the state English tests (92 percent proficient) as students at traditional high schools (93 percent proficient). On the math tests, they did nearly as well: 78 percent of students at regional vocational high schools were proficient in math compared to 82 percent at traditional high schools.
And when it comes to graduation rates, vocational high schools in Massachusetts do better than traditional schools. In 2013, the graduation rate at regional vocational high schools was 95 percent. At traditional high schools, the graduation rate was 86 percent.
Career and college readiness Minuteman students in the biotechnology program dissect dogfish. Their teacher worked in the bio-tech industry for years and says, “It’s really cool to be able to teach students what I did for a living.” (Photo: Emily Hanford)
Ernest Houle, the former welder, is now the principal of Minuteman Regional High School, a vocational school in Lexington, Massachusetts. Houle started as a teacher’s aide in the metal fabrication and welding shop. It was 1996, and he says things were already different from when he went to vocational school a decade earlier.
“The students [at Minuteman] had advanced math classes, they had the opportunity to enroll in [foreign] language classes,” he says.
“Students get the same kind of college prep here that they’d get at any high school.”
-Ernest Houle And they could study more than just the traditional industrial trades. There was a bio-technology program and an engineering program.
“It was kind of like a Cadillac” version of vocational ed, says Houle, compared to what he’d had in high school. (Read more about Minuteman High School.)
Houle worked his way up to school principal, earning a Bachelor of Science in occupational and vocational education and a Master of Science in educational leadership along the way. To get his college degree, Houle had to pass a college calculus class, a tall order having had only Algebra 1 in high school.
“It was a lot of hard work and staying after class, working with the professor,” says Houle. But he did it.
“I am probably the poster child for the importance of career and college readiness,” he says with a chuckle. Kids who graduate from vocational schools shouldn’t have to go through what he did in college, he says. They should be ready for whatever comes after high school.
“We don’t push students to go the college route,” he says. But the goal is to make sure that anyone who wants to go to college is prepared to succeed there. The most recent data show that 60 percent of Minuteman’s 2013 graduates went on to college after high school, either for a two-year or four-year degree. That’s slightly lower than the national average of 66 percent for all high school graduates in 2013.
“Students get the same kind of college prep here that they’d get at any high school,” says Houle. “And they get career skills too.” That’s a bonus they don’t get at most traditional schools.
Tracking today Federal data show that a lot has changed across the country in terms of who takes vocational classes in high school and what kind of academic preparation they get.
In 1990, only 10 percent of students who took four or more occupational course credits in high school also completed the courses they needed to be prepared for a four-year college. The most recent data show 37 percent of those students also took a four-year college prep curriculum; 60 percent completed courses that would prepare them for a community college. And when it comes to race and ethnicity, data show black and Hispanic students are no more likely than white students to concentrate in occupational coursework while in high school.
A student in the environmental science and technology program at Minuteman High School. (Photo: Emily Hanford)
But nationwide, students who go to vocational high schools are more likely to come from poor families than students who go to traditional high schools. Some advocates for low-income students say this is a problem. They worry that vocational education is still being used to segregate low-income kids and put them on a track that’s less likely to result in a college education.
Getting a bachelor’s degree does, on average, result in higher earnings over a lifetime than anything less, such as an associate’s degree or a license or certificate. However, some associate’s degrees and certificates result in higher earnings than the average earnings of a college graduate.
Ed Bouquillon, superintendent of the Massachusetts school district where Minuteman High School is located, says Minuteman does tend to attract kids from poor and working class families. But he doesn’t see that as a problem.
“I’ve seen what [vocational education] can do for kids and families,” he says. “It can take them out of poverty, it can move them to a place where they never envisioned themselves being.”
He says too many kids are graduating from traditional high schools only prepared for college. But kids who graduate from Minuteman have both job skills and college preparation.
“Kids who go to vocational schools have more options,” says Bouquillon.
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As this article written just a few years ago states----there is no movement to resource public schools with tools and machines necessary for shop classes. The public school teachers specializing in teaching shop are not being replaced. This is because children are to be sent into the workforce as free labor instead of spending that time in the surroundings of a community school. To top it off, that corporation taking children from these vocational tracks receives taxpayer funding for the tools and machines operating their businesses because they are using school children as free labor.
These are the same conditions that existed centuries ago when 90% of people were impoverished and families had to send their children to apprenticeships because they could not feed them. These children often remained in apprenticeship status MOST OF THEIR LIVES. THIS IS WHERE THESE WALL STREET EDUCATION REFORMS BROUGHT TO YOU BY CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND REPUBLICANS ARE GOING.
Our public schools don't receive the funding to resource schools with shop classes-----corporations do.
'As shop teachers around California retire, high schools aren’t replacing them and shop classes are closing. There is no training for teachers going through university to learn how to teach shop. This trend isn’t limited to California, according to John Chocholak who has testified in front of California State Assembly and Congress on the subject of shop class, he is seeing shop class killed in Florida, Wisconsin, Texas and many other states. Shop class is dead and so are the potential trades people that would be born out of that early exposure to a tool or machine.
What is America going to do without skilled workers who can build and fix things?'
ForbesWoman 5/30/2012 @ 6:28AM 32,569 views
The Death Of Shop Class And America's Skilled Workforce
During my freshman year of high school I was required to take home economics and shop class where I learned basics skills in sewing, cooking, woodwork and metal work. Regrettably the cooking never made an impression, but I fondly remember learning along with a class full of boys and girls how to sew a pair of shorts, punch holes into metal to create a hook to hang my bathrobe, cut and bend metal to make a box that still holds my pens to this day and use a rotary saw to make a hot plate that was used on the kitchen table at home.
Twenty years later I can still recall that sense of pride when I finished the blue metal box with only minimal guidance from my shop teacher. I remember him fondly, he wore a dark blue lab coat, coke bottle glasses and was missing the tip of one finger. It astonished me how the noisy, formidable equipment permitted me to have a taste of what it must feel like to be an artist, as opposed to an envious seemingly untalented observer hanging outside art class watching the creative students’ imaginations explode onto the canvas with every brush stroke. I have continued to use those skills throughout my life both professionally and when needed around the house.
Shop classes are being eliminated from California schools due to the University of California/California State ‘a-g’ requirements. ‘The intent of the ‘a-g’ subject requirements is to ensure that students can participate fully in the first-year program at the University in a wide variety of fields of study.’ (a) History/Social Science (b) English © Mathematics (d) Laboratory Science (e) Language other than English (f) Visual and Performing Arts (g) College Preparatory Elective Courses. High school administrators are graded on their effectiveness to administer those classes through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation. Shop class is not included in the requirements, thereby not valued and schools consider the class a burden to support. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) with 660,000 students in K-12 has already eliminated 90% of shop classes and it looks like the rest will be gone by the end of the 2013.
The UC/CA State system focuses on theory and not applied skills; a belief that learning how to swing a hammer or understand the difference between a good joint from a bad joint is part of a by-gone era, and as a society these skills are not something to strive for – something people resort to when they are out of options. Looking at shop class in this light is short-sighted and detrimental to America’s future.
[Shop] acquaints students with its ties to mathematics and the sciences. It could point toward possibilities in the arts, which arise in one degree or another from craftsmanship. Through discussions of its materials – wood, metal, rubber, plastic – it could point toward history classes, and through the materials those classes could draw the student into study of the Industrial Revolution, colonialism, conquest of native peoples, systems of government, and on and on. The shop class could even give practical lessons in English; imagine, for example, an exercise in which a student is handed an incomplete specification for some required task and to complete it is made to write an RFI. On finishing the shop class a student should have some idea of how to answer the question, ‘What use is x in my life?’ – and we could substitute for x any of the litany of usually detested classes.
75% of the students in California are not going to attend university yet they are taking classes that will help them get into UC and CA State schools. Just like there are people who are not inclined to become welders or machinists, not everyone can be a rocket scientist or a football star.
Students take physical education class in elementary school and with that opportunity they discover their abilities and their like or dislike for various sports. The schools breed our pro football and basketball stars. What would it be like if as adults we didn’t have exposure to sports in school? Would the NFL and NBA be as popular? What about the Olympics? With all the money that is poured into high school sports teams you would think that every kid was going to turn into a professional player. Without early exposure to shop class many kids are going to lose out on the opportunity to discover whether or not they like making things, and the inclination to pursue a career as a drafter, carpenter, welder or auto mechanic. Statistically speaking there is a greater chance that a kid will become employed as a tradesperson than ever becoming a professional sports player. Skilled laborers are essential and are not limited to stereotypical jobs as plumbers (although that is critical profession). Companies such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman are struggling to find skilled laborers and that trend is going to continue.
…the skilled trades are undervalued in America. They are undervalued in the American educational system that has systematically eliminated shop class. They are undervalued in the collective consciousness that views them as lowly, “blue collar”, dirty, unprofessional. But, the funny thing is that there is one place where they are actually not undervalued at all, and that is in the marketplace, which has seen a greater and greater demand for the skilled craftsman, be he a carpenter, electrician, machinist, mechanic, and so on. On account of his being in demand, the skilled tradesman has his choice of jobs, needs answer to no one, and earns a living wage, perks that are not to be scoffed at in this economic environment.
As shop teachers around California retire, high schools aren’t replacing them and shop classes are closing. There is no training for teachers going through university to learn how to teach shop. This trend isn’t limited to California, according to John Chocholak who has testified in front of California State Assembly and Congress on the subject of shop class, he is seeing shop class killed in Florida, Wisconsin, Texas and many other states. Shop class is dead and so are the potential trades people that would be born out of that early exposure to a tool or machine.
What is America going to do without skilled workers who can build and fix things?
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What Obama and Clinton neo-liberals in Congress did these several years was dismantle what getting a college degree means in the US------they subprimed our higher education system by making what is basically cheap certificate programs the equivalent of college degrees and now are attaching any Federal education funding American citizens receive to these cheap job training degrees. Then they brag that college degree attainment in the US is growing.
Students are being hooked in middle and high school to these private vocational corporations that in turn are simply outsourced arms of corporations that brings students to work for free as part of a 'degree' program. As this article states this entire process is of such poor quality that student who graduate from these programs are lucky to get a job----or if they do they could not use that degree again for any other job. It is simply a corporate education business trying to suck up Federal public education money. Know what? These newer vocational for-proftis are as fraudulent as the Clinton-era for-profits that looted $1 trillion from Federal student loans. So, these reforms are simply meant to break down all of the centralized structures of public education, all oversight and accountability, and make sure the dumbing down of the American people continues from the Reagan/Clinton era of education reforms. Meanwhile, strong 4 year universities are becoming fewer and fewer===and filling with the world's rich====and not the American people.
This is what your Clinton neo-liberal at Federal, state, and local level installed with Obama these two terms and if Bush was elected to a third term---that is exactly what he would have done because-----CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS ARE BOTH WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL POLS.
All Federal laws protecting students ====all regulations in workplace----are ignored and not taught because there are no Federal education laws being enforced and complete deregulation of education is the goal.
BALTIMORE IS GROUND ZERO FOR ADVERTISEMENT AND CONNECTIONS TO THESE FOR-PROFIT AND CORPORATE PARTNERED VOCATIONAL PROGRAMMING AND AFTER THE COMING BOND MARKET CRASH----ALL BALTIMORE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL BE PRIVATIZED TO THESE GLOBAL VOCATIONAL TRACKS
Vocational High School Programs an Option for Teens But parents should be aware that the quality of programs varies, one expert says.
Students can study allied health professions, electrical, graphic communications, carpentry and more in career and technical high school education programs.
By Alexandra Pannoni Oct. 20, 2014 | 8:00 a.m. EDT + More
For teens who desire a unique learning experience, a vocational high school program may be a good fit.
In vocational high school programs – which are also known as career and technical education programs – students study a skill or trade, such as engineering or plumbing, in addition to completing academic core requirements.
Career and technical education programs can prepare a teen for a job directly out of high school, but these programs are seeing declining enrollment and the quality of programs varies.
Once considered by some as a dumping ground for underachieving students, vocational programs at some public high schools offer many more opportunities than those of yesteryear.
"Nowadays it is completely different," says Kim Curry, dean of admissions at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. "The kids are fighting tooth and nail to come here."
The interest in career-tech in Massachusetts is not unique to Monty Tech, as it is known. At least 3,500 students have been placed on waiting lists for entrance into public vocational schools in Massachusetts in the past two years, according to a survey conducted by the Northeastern University School of Law, The Boston Globe reported.
Curry says that students are attracted to her school, and vocational schools in general, because they can leave school with a career.
Although it is a public school, students in Curry's district must apply to attend Monty Tech. Applicants are considered based on a combination of factors, including their grades, attendance records and even an interview.
Once at the school, they can choose from more than a dozen vocational programs, including automotive technology, cosmetology, dental assisting, engineering technology, graphic communications and masonry.
Last year more than 700 students applied for about 350 spots, Curry says.
But parents should be aware that the quality of programs varies greatly across the nation.
"Depending on the reputation of the local career-tech school, they may be begging for students," says James Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education.
Special admissions policies into a career-tech school – if the school has one – vary greatly as well, he says. Some schools may have an in-depth application, some may have a lottery and others may accept all students who sign up.
Not all career-tech programs are offered at stand-alone vocational high schools either, he says. Some traditional high schools offer an extensive array of career and technical education programs. And in some districts, students from traditional high schools attend a career-tech center or community college for a portion of the day to receive career-tech education.
But nationwide, enrollments in career-tech programs are declining, Stone says, at a time when demand is increasing.
A lack of qualified teachers, restricted school budgets, high operational costs and an increase in the number of academic core requirements students are required to complete for graduation have influenced career-tech education’s enrollment decline.
"There’s less room for electives and career and technical education is an elective," he says.
In New Castle County in Delaware, enrollment decline in vocational-focused high schools is not an issue.
"Employers hire our kids. Our students get into two- and four-year colleges. They are successful," says Kathy Demarest, spokeswoman for the New Castle County Vocational Technical School District.
About one-third of the eighth grade students in public schools in the county apply to attend one of four vocational high schools in the district, says Demarest, who also oversees the admissions process in the district. About 80 percent receive a spot.
Demarest says that parents should consider a career and tech pathway for their child because if the child has a particular interest in a career field, it will give them an advantage upon graduation.
"They not only get the work-based experience, they get the soft skills training for employability," she says.
Stone, of the NRCCTE, says that not all kids can excel in a traditional school environment, and that career-tech high school programs can provide them with a new way to succeed.
"You can't predict the future in terms of the labor market," he says. "But you can know your child and what really motivates them."
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If you read national financial journals they state Wall Street has maximized profit in the US in record amounts-----because labor has been not only busted----but every avenue of work starts with free labor. From adult internships to now ever-lower K-12 student apprenticeships----from universities as corporate research facilities with students paying higher tuition to be free labor for corporate research and development, from college grads forced to be VISTAs rather than starting their career----to unemployed being made to work as free public sector workers at a time of deliberate Wall Street stagnant economic distress having nothing to do with the American worker.
It all comes down to ever increasingly low categories of work for the American people and now it is going to our children. As this article states----WE WILL REVIEW CHILD LABOR LAWS ABOUT THESE APPRENTICESHIPS.
WALL STREET IS LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK-----AND THEY ARE COMING FOR EVEN MORE AS THEY TAKE THE US TO THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT STATUS AND CHILD LABOR.
Now, almost every youth in Baltimore could become employed immediately out of high school if Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins did not deliberately kill every avenue employment for citizens in Baltimore. They talk of youth apprenticeships while laying off thousands of public workers year after year eliminating pathways to new hiring. Baltimore has lost 100,000 jobs since the Inner Harbor development started a few decades ago and global corporations being the only new businesses in town that are not restaurants is choking Baltimore's domestic economy. Black minority contractors have been almost totally eliminated and that pathway was closed even more in this Maryland Assembly session BY BALTIMORE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY POLS.
So, now they say the best way to grow employment for youth is apprenticeship.
I think what they are saying is that rather than hire a person and train them on the job AS HAS BEEN DONE FOR CENTURIES IN THE US with or without a union------we are going to allow another route to free labor to further maximize corporate profits.
Apprenticeships needed to target youth unemployment, foundation says
By Joe Burris
The Baltimore Sun Report: one in five Baltimore City Public school graduates matriculate to four-year college. A Baltimore-based foundation analyzing the local workforce says apprenticeships are critical to decreasing youth unemployment, and highlighted General Assembly legislation designed to establish a youth training program.
A report released by the Abell Foundation, formed in 1953 by officials of the former publisher of the Sun, said in Baltimore only one in five public school graduates matriculates to a four-year college and 16 to 19-year-olds have an unemployment rate of more than 40 percent.
The report, released Thursday, recommends youth apprenticeship that would enhance student engagement, improve job skills and provide direct links to careers.
"For too many young people, particularly low-income young people, engagement in high school is low, work-ready skills are scarce and work experience is limited," said Robert Embry, president of the Abell Foundation.
"Youth apprenticeship is a proven model to increase youth employment and develop a highly-skilled workforce," Embry said. "Youth apprenticeship programs operate successfully in Georgia and Wisconsin, as well as in Canada and certain European countries. Research suggests that a youth apprenticeship program in Baltimore could be equally successful."
Last month, the foundation released a report that said while more good-paying jobs are coming to the Baltimore region in health care, information technology, transportation and bioscience, area community colleges are not doing enough to prepare Baltimore residents for the jobs.
The new report noted a bill in the General Assembly that will establish an apprenticeship program called Apprenticeships Maryland beginning the summer of next year. The legislation, which was passed with amendments, would require state education, labor and licensing officials to develop criteria to select school systems for participation.
The study also recommended researching how child labor laws could affect the pilot internship program and developing a financing plan for the pilot.
GETTING WALL STREET'S BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT, JOHNS HOPKINS, AND THEIR BALTIMORE CITY HALL AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY POLS OUT OF GOVERNMENT AND PRIVATE NON-PROFITS!
Below you see what Wall Street has in mind as it installs corporate privatized education with Clinton neo-liberals leading the way hitting city schools first because poor communities have no voice. But as you see, these national education corporations are going global----tying children around the world to these online schools---individualized programs meaning these children will be tested and tracked into what vocation the global corporate tribunal government decides and then these children will become a migrant worker pool sent around the world as needed. Some schools will have children working as apprenticeship labor in elementary school-----some schools with children working in middle school----but the idea of vocational high schools with children still receiving a broad-based education does not exist in these global corporate education models.
AMERICAN STUDENTS GET THE SAME EDUCATION AS CAMBODIAN, UZBEKISTAN, OR SUDAN CHILDREN AS THE US IS MOVED TO COLONIAL THIRD WORLD STATUS.
This is what O'Malley in Maryland as Governor-----the Maryland Assembly pols, and Mayor Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore City Hall have worked to install as hard as they can---the infrastructure for these global K-college education corporations taking all Federal, state, and local funding for public schools to private corporate profit. Baltimore school children are already being placed in front of online lessons in ever increasing numbers and after this coming bond market crash and the government debt used as an excuse to end funding for public schools----national charter chains will move in with the power to move children to any vocation----to place children in early labor apprenticeships----which will be the most likely as this maximizes profit of free labor.
High School Program
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The K12 high school experience is one with exceptional courses, dedicated teachers, a strong support team, and an individualized program. It's a place where you can truly find your path.
A High School Experience Like No Other With more than 150 online high school courses from which to choose, including multiple levels of core subjects (from remediation to AP®), students can enjoy an individualized high school program tailored to their goals and abilities. Whether targeting a top-tier university, a local community college, or an immediate career, K12 will help maximize each student's personal post-high school success.
An Individualized Learning Plan provides the roadmap for counselors and students to chart a course for success during and after high school. Supported by a combination of teachers, advisors, counselors and customer support representatives, students benefit from the support and direction of up to eight professionals dedicated to helping them reach their xPotential™. K12 high school students are also connected to a broader community of like-minded learners through engaging online forums, clubs, and networks—all of which allow them to thrive in the flexible learning environment.
K12's high school program is available in many states through top online public schools, as well as worldwide through the private K12 International Academy. (Students can also take individual, for-credit K12 high school courses with full teacher support on a part-time basis through the K12 International Academy.)
Superb Teaching, Support, and Opportunities
- Enrollment counselors guide you through the enrollment, placement and registration process
- Highly dedicated, state-certified teachers are assigned for each course and are experts in their respective subjects. In high school, teachers are responsible for the class schedule, facilitating online class discussions and for grading students’ assignments and assessments.
- A dedicated Advisor focuses on the overall experience of parents and students and acts as an advocate to trouble-shoot problems
- School counselors help students navigate through the selection of courses, the scheduling of national tests, college (or job) applications, job searches, or whatever is needed—all with the single purpose of helping students get where they want to go after high school
- Customer and technical support representatives are committed to ensuring that your questions get answered
- Supportive parents help students stay on task and ensure the student is following through on his or her assignments —but the student is expected to start managing his or her own time and schedule more directly. Students will typically spend 5-6 hours daily on coursework and homework
- Programs designed to give students an advantage for the future, such as potentially earning college credit while in high school, and applying those credits to both a high school diploma and post-secondary degree
- A range of compelling, profession-focused courses geared towards specific careers help students prepare for college while gaining 21st-century workforce skills, discover their career path, or explore a possible college major
- Our comprehensive orientation gets students off to a successful start with training, Q&A sessions, peer-mentoring, college and career exploration, and more.
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- The Individualized Learning Plan is designed to outline academic objectives, identify post-high school goals, document strengths and challenges, and sequence the student’s course work for maximum success.
- Extensive college and career planning resources such as the state-of-the-art counseling system, Naviance® – Family Connection, offers learning style assessments, thousands of college and career resources, scholarship information, and more.
- Our Advanced Learner Program comes with special enrichment such as clubs and unique learning events, enriched courses as well as enhanced training for teachers.
- There are local community activities such as parent booster clubs, museum trips, and picnics.
- Student can participate in national K12 school events such as the K12 Art Competition and Operation Lemonade.
K12 International Academy: A fully accredited, U.S. diploma-granting, private online school for grades K–12
The Keystone School: A flexible, independent study option for students in grades 6–12.
Next Section: K12 high school program: How else is it different from our K–8 program?
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Baby boomers remember when high schools had strong vocational tracks in high school open to any students wanting exposure to basics in trades. At the same time those students were required to stay in the broad course work of humanities and arts. When students graduated from high school and found they wanted a career in trades----then they joined a union apprenticeship or took classes at a community college.
THIS IS WHAT ALLOWED AMERICAN CHILDREN TO BE THE BEST EDUCATED AND WORKPLACE-READY IN THE WORLD.
Corporations did not want unions so if you are killing unions you are killing trade apprenticeships---ergo, the need for community colleges as job training and trade apprenticeships. Corporations sold the idea to the working class that all that humanities and arts in school was a waste of time. Why do we need to know history and dates-----why know English and composition----why know sociology and statistics because those things are only used BY CITIZENS AND LEADERS.
Republicans have been the best in selling this idea to their voters as they install this corporate education telling voters you only need to learn enough to do a job. Clinton neo-liberals are Republicans controlling a Democratic Party that believes in broad-based humanities and arts education so they have to lie, cheat, and steal elections in order to move these corporate education policies forward.
Reagan/Clinton defunded and dismantled public K-12 and its strongly resourced schools killing especially this vocational tracking in high schools as neo-liberalism sent all US industry overseas. For a few decades the American students not only saw crumbling schools---but all vocational programs dried up. So, Wall Street wasn't interested then in vocational tracking---it is only now that they intend to bring back global manufacturing corporations that they are rebuilding public education in their own likeness----MINUS WE THE PEOPLE DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION BECAUSE---GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNALS DO NOT SEE CITIZENS WHEN THE US IS SIMPLY A COLONIAL ECONOMIC ZONE
Below you see data that states more vocational students are doing the dual academic/vocational track and that is because people are not being employed from academic tracks. Vocational programs in high schools may have been largely low-income students but the union apprenticeship pathway to employment gave those trades a strong middle-class wage as with academic track. This is not happening today.
The troubled history of vocational education A student at a vocational high school in Massachusetts learns to weld.
(Photo: Emily Hanford) This essay is a product of the larger radio documentary Ready to Work: Reviving Vocational Ed, which you can listen to in its entirety on this website or on our podcast feed (iTunes).
Ernest Houle grew up in Leominster, a working-class city in central Massachusetts. His two older brothers had gone to the local vocational high school, so he did too. He thought he would do better there than at the traditional academic high school.
“I’m not one to be stationary,” says. “I like to be up and moving.”
Houle studied welding, just like his brothers. He got a job as a welder during his junior year of high school and, after graduating in 1988, stayed on with the same company. For the next eight years, Houle worked on “nuclear submarine engine casings, stuff for satellites, x-ray machines.” He says he made a good living.
Ernest Houle learned to be a welder at a vocational high school in Massachusetts in the 1980s. When he eventually went to college to become a teacher, he realized he hadn’t gotten a very good academic education in high school. (Photo: Bill Heisler)
But welding is tough work. It’s “not kind to your knees and your back,” says Houle. He started to think about the fact that his body would give out someday. Then what would he do?
He’d always been interested in teaching welding, partly because of the close relationship he had with his welding teacher from high school. But to do that, Houle needed a teaching license. That meant going to college. And that’s when he realized that, when it came to academics, he hadn’t learned nearly enough in high school.
“The highest-level math I ever had in high school was Algebra 1,” he says. “And that only happened my sophomore year because it fit in the schedule.”
Academics weren’t a priority at his vocational high school. The goal was to “get people to work,” says Houle.
College was a struggle, says Houle.
The origins of vocational ed Boys in a vocational printing class learning math, Fall River, Massachusetts, 1916. Even before the Smith-Hughes Act authorized federal funding for vocational education, many schools offered vocational classes. (Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)
Vocational education wasn’t designed to prepare students for college. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the law that first authorized federal funding for vocational education in American schools, explicitly described vocational ed as preparation for careers not requiring a bachelor’s degree.
“The early vocational education was driven by a philosophy of fitting people to their probable destinies,” says Jim Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education. “Kids from poor families were tracked off into becoming the worker bees. Others were tracked off to go to universities and be the intelligentsia. We would today call that tracking.”
The interest in vocational education in the early 20th century was prompted in part by big economic and social changes. Factory owners were facing a shortage of skilled labor in a rapidly industrializing society. And public schools were seeing an influx of immigrants and farm kids.
Many of those kids would have learned farming or skilled trades from their parents in an earlier era. But with the rise of factories, it was no longer safe for kids to learn to work alongside their parents. So they went to high school instead.
Young men learn woodworking, circa 1918. Photograph is part of the series “Vocational studies, public schools.” (Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)
“And secondary schools didn’t know what to do with them,” says Jeannie Oakes, author of Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality.
High schools “were used to dealing with this very small group of mostly quite privileged children of educated families and they gave them this nice liberal arts education in preparation for the university,” she says. “Well that didn’t seem to be fitting at all for these kids who’d come in from the farms, or these new immigrants. So the idea was, let’s put vocational training into public education and we can solve all of these problems.”
Vocational education had its critics from the start, chief among them John Dewey, the educational philosopher and social progressive.
“Dewey opposed [vocational ed] because he thought it was building a class distinction right into the design” of public education, says David Stern, whose research focuses on the relationship between education and work. “And I think history proved him right.”
Tracking From the beginning, vocational education was designed to teach kids the specific skills for one job or career. To be a welder or a cosmetologist, for example, “with the idea that, once you become a welder, you’ll always be a welder. Or once you become a cosmetologist, you’ll always be a cosmetologist,” says Stone. The idea was, get kids really skilled at one thing, “and life will be good,” he says.
The idea that people could be trained in one area and rely on an industry to employ them for life was a reasonable one for much of the 20th century. There were lots of jobs — good union jobs — for people with just a high school education. Back in the early 1970s, only 26 percent of middle-class workers had any kind of education beyond high school.
Still, civil rights activists and advocates for low-income kids were disturbed by who was being steered into vocational education. Studies in the 1960s and 70s showed that students in vocational programs were much more likely to be from lower-income families with lower levels of education. In her book Keeping Track, Jeannie Oakes writes, “[M]any educational scholars agree that an underlying function of vocational education has been to segregate poor and minority students into occupational training programs in order to preserve the academic curriculum for middle- and upper-class students.”
It’s not clear that vocational ed was preparing students well for work either. Two studies from the 1960s showed that graduates of some vocational programs were no more likely to be employed than high school dropouts. Other research found that few graduates of high school vocational programs had an advantage over graduates of academic programs in terms of income or employment.
And, by the 1970s, the good jobs that required just a high school education were beginning to disappear. Technology and globalization were increasing the skill levels required for most occupations, and making the labor market more volatile. Entire sectors of the economy were being wiped out, and new kinds of jobs were being created.
To be successful in this kind of economy, experts say workers have to be multi-skilled and able to retrain for new jobs throughout their careers. Everyone needs a good academic foundation in order to do that, experts say, and most kids in vocational programs were not getting that foundation.
Improving vocational ed By the late 1990s, vocational education had a major image problem. Vocational programs had become a kind of dumping ground for kids who weren’t succeeding in the traditional academic environment. That included a lot of students with behavior problems, and a lot of students with learning disabilities. In many school districts, vocational education wasn’t much more than a “second-tier special ed program,” says Jim Stone.
At the same time, the standards and accountability movement was taking hold in public education. States had begun to write academic standards, or goals, for what students should learn. In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act. That law required states, in exchange for federal education funding, to test their students every year and to insure that all students would eventually be proficient in math and reading.
All students meant the kids in vocational programs too. And once states starting testing their students, it became clear that many students in vocational programs were at the bottom in terms of math and reading skills. Under No Child Left Behind, those programs could eventually be shut down for poor performance. If they were going to survive, vocational schools had to up their game in terms of academics.
Students eating lunch at Minuteman, a regional vocational high school in Massachusetts. Students at regional vocational high schools in Massachusetts are more likely to graduate than students at traditional, comprehensive high schools. (Photo: Emily Hanford)
“The early 2000s was a time of significant change in voc ed,” says Dave Ferreira, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators.
“What we wanted to do was create a student who was able to go out” and get a job, he says, but also able to “get accepted into a four-year college or university.” The idea was to make sure all students were both “career and college ready.”
Massachusetts stands out as a state that devoted significant time and resources to overhauling its vocational education programs, according to experts.
“It was a slow process,” says Ferreira.
The key was to convince vocational teachers to put aside “the old philosophy of saying, ‘It’s all about the trades. I don’t teach academics,'” says Ferreira, and to help them learn how they could integrate academic instruction into career training. For example, show teachers how to teach writing skills when students were writing up materials lists and job estimates.
And it wasn’t all about integrating academics into career classes, says Ferreira. It was also about adding academic classes to the vocational curriculum.
Massachusetts has largely succeeded in bringing the academic quality at its vocational high schools up to par with its traditional high schools. In 2013, students at regional vocational high schools in Massachusetts did as well on the state English tests (92 percent proficient) as students at traditional high schools (93 percent proficient). On the math tests, they did nearly as well: 78 percent of students at regional vocational high schools were proficient in math compared to 82 percent at traditional high schools.
And when it comes to graduation rates, vocational high schools in Massachusetts do better than traditional schools. In 2013, the graduation rate at regional vocational high schools was 95 percent. At traditional high schools, the graduation rate was 86 percent.
Career and college readiness Minuteman students in the biotechnology program dissect dogfish. Their teacher worked in the bio-tech industry for years and says, “It’s really cool to be able to teach students what I did for a living.” (Photo: Emily Hanford)
Ernest Houle, the former welder, is now the principal of Minuteman Regional High School, a vocational school in Lexington, Massachusetts. Houle started as a teacher’s aide in the metal fabrication and welding shop. It was 1996, and he says things were already different from when he went to vocational school a decade earlier.
“The students [at Minuteman] had advanced math classes, they had the opportunity to enroll in [foreign] language classes,” he says.
“Students get the same kind of college prep here that they’d get at any high school.”
-Ernest Houle And they could study more than just the traditional industrial trades. There was a bio-technology program and an engineering program.
“It was kind of like a Cadillac” version of vocational ed, says Houle, compared to what he’d had in high school. (Read more about Minuteman High School.)
Houle worked his way up to school principal, earning a Bachelor of Science in occupational and vocational education and a Master of Science in educational leadership along the way. To get his college degree, Houle had to pass a college calculus class, a tall order having had only Algebra 1 in high school.
“It was a lot of hard work and staying after class, working with the professor,” says Houle. But he did it.
“I am probably the poster child for the importance of career and college readiness,” he says with a chuckle. Kids who graduate from vocational schools shouldn’t have to go through what he did in college, he says. They should be ready for whatever comes after high school.
“We don’t push students to go the college route,” he says. But the goal is to make sure that anyone who wants to go to college is prepared to succeed there. The most recent data show that 60 percent of Minuteman’s 2013 graduates went on to college after high school, either for a two-year or four-year degree. That’s slightly lower than the national average of 66 percent for all high school graduates in 2013.
“Students get the same kind of college prep here that they’d get at any high school,” says Houle. “And they get career skills too.” That’s a bonus they don’t get at most traditional schools.
Tracking today Federal data show that a lot has changed across the country in terms of who takes vocational classes in high school and what kind of academic preparation they get.
In 1990, only 10 percent of students who took four or more occupational course credits in high school also completed the courses they needed to be prepared for a four-year college. The most recent data show 37 percent of those students also took a four-year college prep curriculum; 60 percent completed courses that would prepare them for a community college. And when it comes to race and ethnicity, data show black and Hispanic students are no more likely than white students to concentrate in occupational coursework while in high school.
A student in the environmental science and technology program at Minuteman High School. (Photo: Emily Hanford)
But nationwide, students who go to vocational high schools are more likely to come from poor families than students who go to traditional high schools. Some advocates for low-income students say this is a problem. They worry that vocational education is still being used to segregate low-income kids and put them on a track that’s less likely to result in a college education.
Getting a bachelor’s degree does, on average, result in higher earnings over a lifetime than anything less, such as an associate’s degree or a license or certificate. However, some associate’s degrees and certificates result in higher earnings than the average earnings of a college graduate.
Ed Bouquillon, superintendent of the Massachusetts school district where Minuteman High School is located, says Minuteman does tend to attract kids from poor and working class families. But he doesn’t see that as a problem.
“I’ve seen what [vocational education] can do for kids and families,” he says. “It can take them out of poverty, it can move them to a place where they never envisioned themselves being.”
He says too many kids are graduating from traditional high schools only prepared for college. But kids who graduate from Minuteman have both job skills and college preparation.
“Kids who go to vocational schools have more options,” says Bouquillon.
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As this article written just a few years ago states----there is no movement to resource public schools with tools and machines necessary for shop classes. The public school teachers specializing in teaching shop are not being replaced. This is because children are to be sent into the workforce as free labor instead of spending that time in the surroundings of a community school. To top it off, that corporation taking children from these vocational tracks receives taxpayer funding for the tools and machines operating their businesses because they are using school children as free labor.
These are the same conditions that existed centuries ago when 90% of people were impoverished and families had to send their children to apprenticeships because they could not feed them. These children often remained in apprenticeship status MOST OF THEIR LIVES. THIS IS WHERE THESE WALL STREET EDUCATION REFORMS BROUGHT TO YOU BY CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND REPUBLICANS ARE GOING.
Our public schools don't receive the funding to resource schools with shop classes-----corporations do.
'As shop teachers around California retire, high schools aren’t replacing them and shop classes are closing. There is no training for teachers going through university to learn how to teach shop. This trend isn’t limited to California, according to John Chocholak who has testified in front of California State Assembly and Congress on the subject of shop class, he is seeing shop class killed in Florida, Wisconsin, Texas and many other states. Shop class is dead and so are the potential trades people that would be born out of that early exposure to a tool or machine.
What is America going to do without skilled workers who can build and fix things?'
ForbesWoman 5/30/2012 @ 6:28AM 32,569 views
The Death Of Shop Class And America's Skilled Workforce
During my freshman year of high school I was required to take home economics and shop class where I learned basics skills in sewing, cooking, woodwork and metal work. Regrettably the cooking never made an impression, but I fondly remember learning along with a class full of boys and girls how to sew a pair of shorts, punch holes into metal to create a hook to hang my bathrobe, cut and bend metal to make a box that still holds my pens to this day and use a rotary saw to make a hot plate that was used on the kitchen table at home.
Twenty years later I can still recall that sense of pride when I finished the blue metal box with only minimal guidance from my shop teacher. I remember him fondly, he wore a dark blue lab coat, coke bottle glasses and was missing the tip of one finger. It astonished me how the noisy, formidable equipment permitted me to have a taste of what it must feel like to be an artist, as opposed to an envious seemingly untalented observer hanging outside art class watching the creative students’ imaginations explode onto the canvas with every brush stroke. I have continued to use those skills throughout my life both professionally and when needed around the house.
Shop classes are being eliminated from California schools due to the University of California/California State ‘a-g’ requirements. ‘The intent of the ‘a-g’ subject requirements is to ensure that students can participate fully in the first-year program at the University in a wide variety of fields of study.’ (a) History/Social Science (b) English © Mathematics (d) Laboratory Science (e) Language other than English (f) Visual and Performing Arts (g) College Preparatory Elective Courses. High school administrators are graded on their effectiveness to administer those classes through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation. Shop class is not included in the requirements, thereby not valued and schools consider the class a burden to support. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) with 660,000 students in K-12 has already eliminated 90% of shop classes and it looks like the rest will be gone by the end of the 2013.
The UC/CA State system focuses on theory and not applied skills; a belief that learning how to swing a hammer or understand the difference between a good joint from a bad joint is part of a by-gone era, and as a society these skills are not something to strive for – something people resort to when they are out of options. Looking at shop class in this light is short-sighted and detrimental to America’s future.
[Shop] acquaints students with its ties to mathematics and the sciences. It could point toward possibilities in the arts, which arise in one degree or another from craftsmanship. Through discussions of its materials – wood, metal, rubber, plastic – it could point toward history classes, and through the materials those classes could draw the student into study of the Industrial Revolution, colonialism, conquest of native peoples, systems of government, and on and on. The shop class could even give practical lessons in English; imagine, for example, an exercise in which a student is handed an incomplete specification for some required task and to complete it is made to write an RFI. On finishing the shop class a student should have some idea of how to answer the question, ‘What use is x in my life?’ – and we could substitute for x any of the litany of usually detested classes.
75% of the students in California are not going to attend university yet they are taking classes that will help them get into UC and CA State schools. Just like there are people who are not inclined to become welders or machinists, not everyone can be a rocket scientist or a football star.
Students take physical education class in elementary school and with that opportunity they discover their abilities and their like or dislike for various sports. The schools breed our pro football and basketball stars. What would it be like if as adults we didn’t have exposure to sports in school? Would the NFL and NBA be as popular? What about the Olympics? With all the money that is poured into high school sports teams you would think that every kid was going to turn into a professional player. Without early exposure to shop class many kids are going to lose out on the opportunity to discover whether or not they like making things, and the inclination to pursue a career as a drafter, carpenter, welder or auto mechanic. Statistically speaking there is a greater chance that a kid will become employed as a tradesperson than ever becoming a professional sports player. Skilled laborers are essential and are not limited to stereotypical jobs as plumbers (although that is critical profession). Companies such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman are struggling to find skilled laborers and that trend is going to continue.
…the skilled trades are undervalued in America. They are undervalued in the American educational system that has systematically eliminated shop class. They are undervalued in the collective consciousness that views them as lowly, “blue collar”, dirty, unprofessional. But, the funny thing is that there is one place where they are actually not undervalued at all, and that is in the marketplace, which has seen a greater and greater demand for the skilled craftsman, be he a carpenter, electrician, machinist, mechanic, and so on. On account of his being in demand, the skilled tradesman has his choice of jobs, needs answer to no one, and earns a living wage, perks that are not to be scoffed at in this economic environment.
As shop teachers around California retire, high schools aren’t replacing them and shop classes are closing. There is no training for teachers going through university to learn how to teach shop. This trend isn’t limited to California, according to John Chocholak who has testified in front of California State Assembly and Congress on the subject of shop class, he is seeing shop class killed in Florida, Wisconsin, Texas and many other states. Shop class is dead and so are the potential trades people that would be born out of that early exposure to a tool or machine.
What is America going to do without skilled workers who can build and fix things?
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What Obama and Clinton neo-liberals in Congress did these several years was dismantle what getting a college degree means in the US------they subprimed our higher education system by making what is basically cheap certificate programs the equivalent of college degrees and now are attaching any Federal education funding American citizens receive to these cheap job training degrees. Then they brag that college degree attainment in the US is growing.
Students are being hooked in middle and high school to these private vocational corporations that in turn are simply outsourced arms of corporations that brings students to work for free as part of a 'degree' program. As this article states this entire process is of such poor quality that student who graduate from these programs are lucky to get a job----or if they do they could not use that degree again for any other job. It is simply a corporate education business trying to suck up Federal public education money. Know what? These newer vocational for-proftis are as fraudulent as the Clinton-era for-profits that looted $1 trillion from Federal student loans. So, these reforms are simply meant to break down all of the centralized structures of public education, all oversight and accountability, and make sure the dumbing down of the American people continues from the Reagan/Clinton era of education reforms. Meanwhile, strong 4 year universities are becoming fewer and fewer===and filling with the world's rich====and not the American people.
This is what your Clinton neo-liberal at Federal, state, and local level installed with Obama these two terms and if Bush was elected to a third term---that is exactly what he would have done because-----CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS ARE BOTH WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL POLS.
All Federal laws protecting students ====all regulations in workplace----are ignored and not taught because there are no Federal education laws being enforced and complete deregulation of education is the goal.
BALTIMORE IS GROUND ZERO FOR ADVERTISEMENT AND CONNECTIONS TO THESE FOR-PROFIT AND CORPORATE PARTNERED VOCATIONAL PROGRAMMING AND AFTER THE COMING BOND MARKET CRASH----ALL BALTIMORE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL BE PRIVATIZED TO THESE GLOBAL VOCATIONAL TRACKS
Vocational High School Programs an Option for Teens But parents should be aware that the quality of programs varies, one expert says.
Students can study allied health professions, electrical, graphic communications, carpentry and more in career and technical high school education programs.
By Alexandra Pannoni Oct. 20, 2014 | 8:00 a.m. EDT + More
For teens who desire a unique learning experience, a vocational high school program may be a good fit.
In vocational high school programs – which are also known as career and technical education programs – students study a skill or trade, such as engineering or plumbing, in addition to completing academic core requirements.
Career and technical education programs can prepare a teen for a job directly out of high school, but these programs are seeing declining enrollment and the quality of programs varies.
Once considered by some as a dumping ground for underachieving students, vocational programs at some public high schools offer many more opportunities than those of yesteryear.
"Nowadays it is completely different," says Kim Curry, dean of admissions at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. "The kids are fighting tooth and nail to come here."
The interest in career-tech in Massachusetts is not unique to Monty Tech, as it is known. At least 3,500 students have been placed on waiting lists for entrance into public vocational schools in Massachusetts in the past two years, according to a survey conducted by the Northeastern University School of Law, The Boston Globe reported.
Curry says that students are attracted to her school, and vocational schools in general, because they can leave school with a career.
Although it is a public school, students in Curry's district must apply to attend Monty Tech. Applicants are considered based on a combination of factors, including their grades, attendance records and even an interview.
Once at the school, they can choose from more than a dozen vocational programs, including automotive technology, cosmetology, dental assisting, engineering technology, graphic communications and masonry.
Last year more than 700 students applied for about 350 spots, Curry says.
But parents should be aware that the quality of programs varies greatly across the nation.
"Depending on the reputation of the local career-tech school, they may be begging for students," says James Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education.
Special admissions policies into a career-tech school – if the school has one – vary greatly as well, he says. Some schools may have an in-depth application, some may have a lottery and others may accept all students who sign up.
Not all career-tech programs are offered at stand-alone vocational high schools either, he says. Some traditional high schools offer an extensive array of career and technical education programs. And in some districts, students from traditional high schools attend a career-tech center or community college for a portion of the day to receive career-tech education.
But nationwide, enrollments in career-tech programs are declining, Stone says, at a time when demand is increasing.
A lack of qualified teachers, restricted school budgets, high operational costs and an increase in the number of academic core requirements students are required to complete for graduation have influenced career-tech education’s enrollment decline.
"There’s less room for electives and career and technical education is an elective," he says.
In New Castle County in Delaware, enrollment decline in vocational-focused high schools is not an issue.
"Employers hire our kids. Our students get into two- and four-year colleges. They are successful," says Kathy Demarest, spokeswoman for the New Castle County Vocational Technical School District.
About one-third of the eighth grade students in public schools in the county apply to attend one of four vocational high schools in the district, says Demarest, who also oversees the admissions process in the district. About 80 percent receive a spot.
Demarest says that parents should consider a career and tech pathway for their child because if the child has a particular interest in a career field, it will give them an advantage upon graduation.
"They not only get the work-based experience, they get the soft skills training for employability," she says.
Stone, of the NRCCTE, says that not all kids can excel in a traditional school environment, and that career-tech high school programs can provide them with a new way to succeed.
"You can't predict the future in terms of the labor market," he says. "But you can know your child and what really motivates them."
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If you read national financial journals they state Wall Street has maximized profit in the US in record amounts-----because labor has been not only busted----but every avenue of work starts with free labor. From adult internships to now ever-lower K-12 student apprenticeships----from universities as corporate research facilities with students paying higher tuition to be free labor for corporate research and development, from college grads forced to be VISTAs rather than starting their career----to unemployed being made to work as free public sector workers at a time of deliberate Wall Street stagnant economic distress having nothing to do with the American worker.
It all comes down to ever increasingly low categories of work for the American people and now it is going to our children. As this article states----WE WILL REVIEW CHILD LABOR LAWS ABOUT THESE APPRENTICESHIPS.
WALL STREET IS LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK-----AND THEY ARE COMING FOR EVEN MORE AS THEY TAKE THE US TO THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT STATUS AND CHILD LABOR.
Now, almost every youth in Baltimore could become employed immediately out of high school if Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins did not deliberately kill every avenue employment for citizens in Baltimore. They talk of youth apprenticeships while laying off thousands of public workers year after year eliminating pathways to new hiring. Baltimore has lost 100,000 jobs since the Inner Harbor development started a few decades ago and global corporations being the only new businesses in town that are not restaurants is choking Baltimore's domestic economy. Black minority contractors have been almost totally eliminated and that pathway was closed even more in this Maryland Assembly session BY BALTIMORE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY POLS.
So, now they say the best way to grow employment for youth is apprenticeship.
I think what they are saying is that rather than hire a person and train them on the job AS HAS BEEN DONE FOR CENTURIES IN THE US with or without a union------we are going to allow another route to free labor to further maximize corporate profits.
Apprenticeships needed to target youth unemployment, foundation says
By Joe Burris
The Baltimore Sun Report: one in five Baltimore City Public school graduates matriculate to four-year college. A Baltimore-based foundation analyzing the local workforce says apprenticeships are critical to decreasing youth unemployment, and highlighted General Assembly legislation designed to establish a youth training program.
A report released by the Abell Foundation, formed in 1953 by officials of the former publisher of the Sun, said in Baltimore only one in five public school graduates matriculates to a four-year college and 16 to 19-year-olds have an unemployment rate of more than 40 percent.
The report, released Thursday, recommends youth apprenticeship that would enhance student engagement, improve job skills and provide direct links to careers.
"For too many young people, particularly low-income young people, engagement in high school is low, work-ready skills are scarce and work experience is limited," said Robert Embry, president of the Abell Foundation.
"Youth apprenticeship is a proven model to increase youth employment and develop a highly-skilled workforce," Embry said. "Youth apprenticeship programs operate successfully in Georgia and Wisconsin, as well as in Canada and certain European countries. Research suggests that a youth apprenticeship program in Baltimore could be equally successful."
Last month, the foundation released a report that said while more good-paying jobs are coming to the Baltimore region in health care, information technology, transportation and bioscience, area community colleges are not doing enough to prepare Baltimore residents for the jobs.
The new report noted a bill in the General Assembly that will establish an apprenticeship program called Apprenticeships Maryland beginning the summer of next year. The legislation, which was passed with amendments, would require state education, labor and licensing officials to develop criteria to select school systems for participation.
The study also recommended researching how child labor laws could affect the pilot internship program and developing a financing plan for the pilot.
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