Credit: Education Next
High school students should take more career classes, even if that means spending less time on science, math and history, a California teacher tells Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews.
Chris Peters, who spent years teaching in a college-prep program, now teaches psychology classes to prepare students to become mental health or social work professionals, writes Mathews. Peters ” believes all students need to take more CTE to develop individual interests, talents and hard skills.”
Cajon High’s CTE offerings have rapidly multiplied from the old wood shop and auto shop to 10 career pathways, as they are now called, including Peters’s program. The other nine pathways at Cajon are theater arts, film theory/production, emergency medical services, medical assisting/patient care, sports medicine, cybersecurity, business logistics (sponsored by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post) and the two traditional subjects, now known as automotive technologies and building trades/construction.
Peters complains that students are overloaded with academics at his very large, very diverse high school.
. . . students are required to take three years of history and three years of lab science to graduate, but are encouraged to take four years in each of those subjects when they only need two to get into college. They are encouraged to take four years of math when colleges only require three, and three years of foreign language when colleges only require two.
. . . Schools emphasize attendance rates, graduation rates and completion rates for courses required for state college admission. “If we defined success of schools instead based on industry certifications, college course and internship completion, then we’d have something,” he said.
Reopening schools will require a lot of creativity and flexibility, writes Mathews. “Why not try cutting back history and lab science for those interested in making movies or responding to ambulance calls?”
Future EMTs will need those science classes, won’t they?
It will ease the anti-vocational stigma, if academically talented students do career tech too, Mathews and Peters believe. I think career tech for all makes as little sense as college for all.
