As we close another school year and high school graduates up and down the state go into the world armed with the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired, it’s important for us to reflect and look to the future. Education has always played multiple roles in the social development of our country. At the same time that schools are charged with maintaining and passing on our history and traditions, they are entrusted with giving tools to younger generations so that they can forge their paths into the future. Historically, while at times schools have been pillars that upheld the unequal and unjust social structures of segregation and ethnic biases, they’ve also been the laboratories where racial integration first took hold and has created generations of young adults for whom that era seems anachronistic and just plain odd. And as we embark on the 21st Century we must again ask ourselves what will California schools look like over the next 50 years?
For over two decades our state and our nation’s economy has moved away from industrial manufacturing towards a more service and information based economic model. We have moved from the creation and maintaining of widgets to the creation and managing of billions of gigabytes of information that travel around the world at amazing speeds. Furthermore, we continue to move from a nation based economy that competes with other nations in a zero-sum game to a globalized economy. Today’s graduates are some of the first graduates that will compete for jobs with a global workforce. And it’s not simply blue collar jobs factory jobs that are being outsourced, but jobs formerly considered “safe,” such as engineering and design are also up for grabs in this new “flat” world we live in. Given this, we must ask, are our schools doing all they can to prepare students for this new environment?
California schools operates under a model geared towards preparing every single child in high school for college. Every student follows a rigid academic program that adheres to the A-G curriculum required to enter California State Colleges. This is a laudable goal, to give every child the opportunity to go to college if he or she so desires. Especially because this came on the heels of tracking students, often with no other criteria than ethnicity, into either the “college track” or the “vocational/career path.” However, according to Edsource.com “in California, about half of public high school graduates go on to a publicly supported two- or four-year college. Others will attend private institutions in state, or private and public ones out of state.” Even if California does slightly better than the national average, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, roughly 30% of high school graduates in 2007 did not enroll in college. How are these students being served?
Perhaps a much better model is the Multiple Pathways proposal. The Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, out of UCLA, has been studying Multiple Pathways and have put out a series of papers. The paper by Jeannie Oakes and Marisa Saunders caught my eye. It’s entitled “Reforming California’s High Schools: College Prep for All? Reinvigorated Career and Technical Education? Or Multiple Pathways to both?” In this paper the authors tear down the dichotomy between preparing for college or vocational education and propose that “California can and should prepare all student for both college and careers by creating Multiple Pathways through high school.” They propose that California schools must adopt programs which include the following three elements:
1. A college preparatory academic core (satisfying the A-G requirements for entry into CA public universities;
2. A professional/technical core well grounded in academic and real-world standards; and
3. Increasingly more demanding opportunities for field-based learning that deepen students' understanding of academic and technical knowledge through application in authentic situations.
For over a decade we’ve been seeing the poverty gap widen in this country. In our state the median income isn’t enough to purchase the average home, even after the crash and credit crunch. I truly believe schools must be vigilant to maintain the role of education as the great equalizer, the Silver Bullet that gives all students a fighting chance in an a very competitive job market. College for all? Of course! This must continue to be out goal. However we can ill afford to create a social underclass by not giving the non-college bound high school graduate the important skills needed to navigate the new global economy. Moreover, these are real world skills that would benefit all high school graduates.
While the devil is in the details. It’s clear that schools in the future must look vastly different than what they look like today. Currently schools find themselves preparing students to enter a job market that does not yet exist and we can barely fathom. Today’s jobs in the biomedical field, web engineering and e-commerce development were non-existent when today’s graduating Seniors were born. Schools cannot keep up with the changes that our economy faces, however this is an argument for strengthening our public schools by creating programs and alliances with private industry in which truly no child is left behind because they are prepared with the necessary tools to take on the jobs of the future and not an irrelevant multiple choice exam.
