The death of voc ed — and the middle class

The death of vocational education is hastening the demise of the middle class, argues Marc Tucker in Ed Week.

Years ago, almost all the larger cities had selective vocational high schools whose graduates were virtually assured good jobs, Tucker writes. Employers made sure these schools had “competent instructors and up-to-date equipment,” so graduates would meet job requirements.

That ended when vocational education became just another class, often crowded out by academic requirements, Tucker writes.

I will never forget an interview I did a few years ago with a wonderful man who had been teaching vocational education for decades in his middle class community.  With tears in his eyes, he described how, when he began, he had, with great pride prepared young men (that’s how it was) for well-paying careers in the skilled trades.  Now, he told me, “That’s all over.  Now I get the kids who the teachers of academic courses don’t want to deal with.  I am expected to use my shop to motivate those kids to learn what they can of basic skills.”  He was, in high school, trying to interest these young people, who were full of the despair and anger that comes of knowing that everyone else had given up on them, to learn enough arithmetic to measure the length of a board.  He knew that was an important thing to do, but he also knew that it was a far cry from serious vocational education of the sort he had done very well years earlier.

Career academies were developed to motivate students, not to prepare them for real jobs, Tucker writes. Voc ed, now renamed “career technical education,” is no longer a “serious enterprise” in high schools.

By contrast, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands, Denmark and other leading industrial countries “doubled down to improve both their academic and their vocational programs.”

They built vocational education programs that require high academic skills.  And they designed programs that could deliver those skills.  They did not sever the connections between employers and their high schools; they strengthened them.  They made sure their high school vocational students had first-rate instructors and equipment.  Their reward is a work force that is balanced between managers and workers, scientists and technicians.  No one tells an individual student what he or she will do with their life.  But those students have a range of attractive choices.

Tucker links to descriptions of vocational education in the Netherlands, Australia and Singapore.

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama called for states to require school attendance till age 18 or graduation. If schools offer no options except the college track, that seems cruel.

Minnesota schools can’t meet career-tech demand

Minnesota high schools can’t meet the rising demand for career-tech classes, reports the Star-Tribune. Just in the last three years, career-tech classes have been cut by more than half because of flat state and federal funding and a focus on core reading and math classes to meet No Child Left Behind standards.

“It gets rugged while running an auto-mechanic class with 60 kids,” said Daniel Smith, who oversees Minnesota’s high school career and technical education as the supervisor of Minnesota’s Center for Postsecondary Success.

In the 1970s, there were more than 70 career and technical centers for high school students in Minnesota. The well-equipped centers offered dozens of nationally certified programs, Smith said.

In the 1980s, high schools began to be seen as a place to prepare students for a liberal arts four-year degree, emphasizing reading, writing and arithmetic rather than skills for a job.

Twenty-six community colleges and surrounding school districts have created consortia to collaborate on career-tech classes.

College for all — with easier math

Math teachers at my daughter’s old high school oppose a plan to require all students to pass college-prep classes required for admission to California universities, known as A-G courses. They say some Palo Alto High students — disproportionately black, Hispanic and disabled — can’t pass the school’s demanding Algebra II class, which requires more than the UC/CSU standard.  Water it down to the minimal level and students will end up in remedial math in college, the teachers warn.

The department chair, Radu Toma, wrote the letter (posted on wecandobetterpaloalto.org), which is signed by his colleagues. He taught my daughter Geometry in ninth grade and AP Calculus in 12th grade. Her Algebra II and pre-calc teachers signed too.

The math teachers are snobs who only want to teach advanced classes, argues LaToya Baldwin Clark in the Palo Alto Weekly. Require A-G for graduation, she writes, and create an easier Algebra II class for average students who don’t have parents who can tutor them — or pay for tutoring.

By the department’s own admission, even the regular lane Algebra II class greatly exceeds the UC/CSU. In the view of Toma and his colleagues, “diluting the standards in our regular lane to basic benchmarks which might allow every student to pass Algebra II would end up hurting the district’s reputation.” The department refuses to teach an Algebra II that satisfies UC/CSU requirements that students can actually pass. And where does the Paly math department think those students who fail to complete Algebra II should go, rather than to college? They can “go on to community colleges or jobs for which district prepares them better than most districts.”

The reputation of a high school is enhanced when all students go to four-year colleges.

Last year, 85 percent of all high school graduates in the district met the UC/CSU requirements. But only 5 percent of special-ed students, 15 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanic graduates were eligible for state universities.

Many of the black and Hispanic students have transferred from neighboring East Palo Alto, a low-income and working-class town, under a desegregation agreement. Many of the Palo Alto students are the children of very well-educated parents who work in high-tech or at Stanford. There’s no question that Palo Alto’s two high schools are designed to prepare students for very competitive colleges and universities.

The local community college, Foothill, is one of the best in the state. But graduation rates are low for community college students. Starting at a four-year university — San Jose State is the likely choice — would raise the odds of earning a bachelor’s degree.

But we’re still talking about long odds. Most remedial math students never earn a degree.

If a basic Algebra II is created, it should be aligned with college placement tests, so students know if they’re on track to take college-level or remedial classes. If the high school maintains high standards in its regular-lane Algebra II, then teachers need a strategy to help math-challenged students pass.

There’s another option: Work with Foothill to create a career-prep track. Community colleges offer programs that qualify students for a “middle-skill” job in two years or less. Some require advanced algebra, but others do not. But this would be seen as setting low expectations for other people’s kids. It wouldn’t fly.

Is ‘college for all’ the real enemy?

After reading Complete College America‘s Time is the Enemy report, which details  very low graduation rates for low-income and part-time students, Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli wonders if the college-for-all push is setting students up for failure.

. . . less than half of Pell-eligible students pursuing a four-year degree graduate within six years. For part-time Pell students, it’s more like 17 percent. The numbers are similar for African-American and Hispanic students.

It’s worth trying to strengthen K-12 to cut the need for remediation, Petrilli writes. It should be easier for students to transfer credits and move quickly to a degree.

But I can’t help but wonder: with so many kids dropping out of college–and especially so many poor kids–should we reconsider our assumption that higher education is the ticket to the middle class? Isn’t it possible that lots of these kids would be better off pursuing the trades or (dare I say) the military? If you could figure out a way to do a rigorous study, I’d bet a lot of money that the military has a much better retention rate than higher education for similar young adults–and a much better track record at propelling its “graduates” into middle-class jobs.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be so sure” that education is “the ticket to a better life,” Petrilli writes.

If students actually got an education, it probably would be a ticket to somewhere, even in a job-poor economy. Going to college to flunk remedial math is not the path to success.

Subway of (false) hope

Subway cars are a rolling index of aspirations, writes Peter Wood in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Monroe College declares, “Your career will now be making express stops only”—a play on the dreaded announcement that the train is about to skip your local stop. “Start here. Go Anywhere,” promises BMCC, Borough of Manhattan Community College. “Choose your next career at Apex,” advises Apex Technical School, with pictures of a welder, an automotive technician, and some other cheerful tradesmen plying their skills. “Think master’s in education. Think MCNY,” whispers Metropolitan College New York. Most succinct of all is City College of New York: “Breaking boundaries.”

Upscale colleges — New School, New York University, Hofstra, St. John’s, and Columbia — don’t advertise on subway cars, Wood notes.

He sees “unparalleled educational opportunity” and hucksterism: “Start here, go anywhere, but more likely nowhere.”

While some students will learn skills and move ahead in their careers — those Apex welders have a good shot at success — others are just being fleeced, Wood writes.  They didn’t learn much in high school and know they need more education, but lack “the aptitude or the steadiness to make much of this kind of postsecondary training.” Colleges feed false hopes, but eventually “reality kicks in.”

While riding the subway, Wood is reading In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by Professor X, an adjunct English instructor who teaches at a liberal-arts college and a community college.

He has described his students as “poignantly desperate for success,” though not likely to find it in the programs they have enrolled in. They have “done poorly in high school; college is not a goal for which they prepared single-mindedly for 18 years. College is a place they landed in.”

. . . Community colleges, he realizes, are “American egalitarianism at its best. We are happy believing that we can and should send everyone under the sun to college.” But he no longer believes. He sees the plain evidence that his students are for the most part incapable of writing a simple English sentence; that they don’t read; and that even those who dearly want to learn are generally so underprepared academically and so overburdened personally that they seldom move beyond the most rudimentary steps.

Professor X is also aware that President Obama, major foundations such as Gates, the business community, Government (his capitalization), the media, and the entire higher-education establishment is “all for it”—“it” being the feel-good notion that everyone can and should go to college.

The belief that college can transform all comers is fading, Wood believes. Young people will “discover better ways both to learn useful things and to get certified for knowing them,” he hopes.

People who’ve had trouble learning in school aren’t likely to be good at learning on their own or online, in my experience. Most need more help from teachers, not less.

However, many jobseekers would save time and money by taking certification tests to prove they’ve mastered a set of skills and knowledge. Combined with online learning, certification tests respected by employers would transform postsecondary education.

Build non-degree paths to the middle class

Can the Middle Class Be Saved? asks Don Peck in an interesting (and depressing) Atlantic story.

College graduates with a four-year degree are doing better than non-graduates, whose prospects are “flat or failing,” he writes. But the only people earning more are those with postgraduate degrees.

The less-educated middle class — people who made a decent living without a bachelor’s degree — is suffering financially and socially, Peck writes.

In a national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,” which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”

. . . Between 2006 and 2008, among moderately educated women, 44 percent of all births occurred outside marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among college-educated women, that proportion was just 6 percent.

National policy is to turn everyone into a college graduate.

Grants, loans, and tax credits to undergraduate and graduate students total roughly $160 billion each year; by contrast, in 2004, federal, state, and local spending on employment and training programs (which commonly assist people without a college education) totaled $7 billion—an inflation-adjusted decline of about 75 percent since 1978.

Peck likes the idea of “career academies” within larger high schools and apprenticeships linked to community colleges as ways to help students find “paths into the middle class that do not depend on a four-year college degree.”

College shouldn’t be the only K-12 goal

Higher education shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of K-12 education, writes “edu-traitor” Cathy Davidson, an English professor, in an Inside Higher Ed commentary.

Higher education is incredibly valuable, even precious, for many. But it is bad for individuals and society to be retrofitting learning all the way back to preschool, as if the only skills valuable, vital, necessary in the world are the ones that earn you a B.S., BA, or a graduate and professional degree.

Many jobs require specialized knowledge, intelligence and skills, but not a college education, Davidson notes. Yet our educational system “defines learning so narrowly that whole swaths of human intelligence, skill, talent, creativity, imagination, and accomplishment do not count.”

Schools are cutting art, music, P.E. and shop to focus on college prep, Davidson complains. (I’d say schools are cutting electives — especially shop — to focus on basic reading and math skills.)

. . . many brilliant, talented young people are dropping out of high school because they see high school as implicitly “college prep” and they cannot imagine anything more dreary than spending four more years bored in a classroom when they could be out actually experiencing and perfecting their skills in the trades and the careers that inspire them.

We need value “the full range of intellectual possibility and potential for everyone,” Davidson writes.

The brilliant, talented kid who drops out to pursue a passion for art, carpentry or cosmetology is a rare bird, I think. But Davidson is right about the college-or-bust mentality in K-12 education. Many students who are bored by academics could be motivated — maybe even inspired — by a chance to develop marketable skills.

Some 80 percent of new community college students say they want to earn a bachelor’s degree. They sign up for remedial or general education courses. Few succeed. Students who pursue vocational goals — a welding certificate, an associate degree in medical technology — are far more likely to graduate.

Bachelor’s isn’t the only way to success

Young people need education and skills: Most will need some form of postsecondary training. However, a bachelor’s degree isn’t the only worthwhile path, write Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson in a Chronicle of Higher Education column.

In an important recent article by James Rosenbaum and his colleagues, “Beyond One-Size Fits All College Dreams” (pdf), the authors argue that the over-simplification of the “college for all” movement threatens the futures of many young people with high—but too frequently unrealistic—aspirations.

Pushed to try for a bachelor’s degree, poorly prepared students usually fail to earn any credential. If C and D students were urged to aim for a vocational certificate at a community college, their odds of success would go way up, along with their incomes, researchers say.  And those who want to go on to a higher-level degree can do so.

We must “combine realism, pragmatism and idealism,” Baum and McPherson write.

We can’t accept the limited opportunities facing people as a result of accidents of birth or unavoidable life circumstances. But we do have to recognize that there is wide variety in capabilities, interests, attitudes and preparation. There is a vital need for people with many different types of training in our economy. We should be sure that everyone has all of the information available about both the potential benefits and the potential risks involved in whatever choices they make.

I’ve met high school students just barely passing the easiest possible classes who say they plan to go to college — and sometimes graduate school. They don’t know the difference between going to a community college to take remedial classes and qualifying for the University of California.  It’s all “college.” They have no idea what academic skills or work habits are necessary to pass college classes — or to qualify for an entry-level job.  If they knew they were on the remedial/dropout/unemployable path, some might work harder to get on the certificate-in-a-year path. Students on the some-college path might work to get on the associate degree path or even the bachelor’s path.

Degrees or certificates?

President Obama wants the U.S. to lead the world in college graduates by 2020. But last week, he endorsed a plan to qualify 500,000 community college students for skilled manufacturing jobs over the next five years.  With a year of training or less, they’d earn a certificate developed by the National Association of Manufacturers in conjunction with community colleges.

With college costs soaring and more graduates working in jobs that don’t require a degree, should educators encourage more students to pursue vocational training rather than seeking a broad-based college education? On National Journal, the debate is on.

Seventy percent of Swiss and German students are tracked into vocational and apprenticeship programs, writes Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

The majority of their students spend half of their days in school and the other half working for a company, getting practical experience in their chosen field and getting paid. The youth unemployment rate is about five percent in those countries as opposed to the double digit rate here in America.

The U.S. once dumped minority students into vocational tracks that ruled out a college degree, he writes. “But the overreaction has not been truly beneficial to minority students because today only fifty percent of them are graduating and college attendance and graduation rates for that population are dismal.”

In my response, I argue that students need to know early in high school whether they’re on track to earn a bachelor’s degree — or to take remedial classes, go into debt and then drop out without a credential of any kind. Many students who think they’re doing OK — mostly B’s and a few C’s in classes with college-prep labels — are not prepared for college-level classes.

High school counselors should understand the success ratios for their students: What percentage of B students complete a four-year degree? What percentage of C students complete any degree? What’s the starting pay of electricians, welders, radiology techs and paralegals in the area? They should be able to offer students a career-prep track leading to non-remedial community college classes by ninth or tenth grade instead of a pseudo-college-prep track.

While many believe that career-prep students need the same math and English classes as college-prep students, I don’t think that’s true. Our best students should learn to write college research papers and read college texts; they need a strong math and science foundation to keep the door open to STEM careers. (Quite a few make it to college now with inadequate writing and math skills.) Our average students should focus on developing solid reading, writing, math and science skills — not on preparing for high-level academic work they’ll never need to do or want to do.

Many students don’t particularly enjoy academics or want to spend more years in a classroom than is absolutely necessary. They do want to qualify for a decent job. I think they’ll work much harder with that goal clearly in front of them. You want to earn $50,000 as a manufacturing technician at Local Industries? Here are the English, math and science classes you’ll need to pass with a B or better to get into the certificate program at Nearby Community College. That’s a motivator.

‘College for all’ gets second look

The “college for all” idea is getting a second look, reports Ed Week.

“That whole space, between a high school diploma and a four-year college degree, has been overlooked,” says Anthony P. Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, whose labor-market research was cited in the “Pathways to Prosperity” report. “The reform trajectory we’ve been on since ‘A Nation at Risk’ was a noble goal, but along the way, we’ve set aside every pathway but one, and we’ve left a lot of people behind.”

Most young Americans do not complete a four-year degree. Only 56 percent of four-year college students will earn a bachelor’s degree by their mid-20s, points out Pathways to Prosperity.

Two thirds of the jobs created in the United States by 2018 will require some postsecondary education, but of those, nearly half will go to people with occupational certificates or associate degrees, according to data cited in the report. Many of those jobs carry decent wages, as well: One-quarter of those who hold such credentials earn more than the average bachelor’s-degree holder, the report says.

However, many educators and education reformers fear lowering expectations for disadvantaged and minority students. Steering students toward vocational certificates or associate degrees will form an “educational caste system,” according to Kati Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, which advocates for educational opportunities for low-income and minority students.

Only a third of young people complete a bachelor’s degree. Not surprisingly, the A students are the most likely to reach that goal. Making a four-year degree the universal goal means setting up most young people for failure.