Arnie, our Governator, is requesting increased funding for "career and technical education" in our Community Colleges........ and HIGH SCHOOLS!!!!
Schwartzenegger had sales vocational training in Austria before he started messing with weights.
I will probably vote for him because of this. If he signs the fair electioneering pledge, I might even work for him. (I didn't vote for him tha last time due to him not signing the pledge.)
I don't see how they can fit it back in to high school. Kids have a full time job with the homework that goes with a regular curriculum, provided they actually do the homework, and if you're aiming for a selective college, you need a "5-point" average (all honors and advanced placement courses). They're getting the very hell of a math background, but it's virtually impossible for a "career-track" student (nice irony--you're not allowed to learn anything employable) to take metals or auto tech training along with sciences. And the science courses, though a nice head start for college chem or physics, certainly could not get you hired as a lab technician. Memorizing the entire human genome doesn't qualify you to run DNA tests. Plus, they keep adding dinosaurs. They think it throws the creationists off.
Many states no longer have time/funds for driver training (although there's always enough for sex ed--or as we call it here, the other thing you could have learned on a back road), and most are planning new "rigorous" core curricula. Add one sport and one club, as per admissions guidelines, and you've got as much as most grownups could handle on a day-to-day basis. Summer is nine weeks long (losing one week per decade), and had better include some structured, creditable activities if you don't want to run afoul of the counseling and psychologist professionals the school boards have on staff.
It's been two generations since high school was expected to get you a job. We seem to have accepted that two-year colleges took that over. To get what is now required for high school, plus learn a trade, you'd have to go to school 12 months, 8 hours a day--and that's just for the ones who pay attention. To walk out of high school actually prepared to live your life, and find a real job, is an idea that's appealed to me since I was in high school. But there's got to be a limit to what the kids can take. Keeping up with the Japanese isn't my idea of a national education policy.
Good luck, though. Wonder what the NEA sees in this.
I expect that the 9th grader would have a choice between a traditional high school with the vocational training coming in the Community College or a old-fashioned trade school with the training designed to get him working upon graduation.
At my high school (Newton, Mass) in the fifties, the trade school folks were in shop one week and classroom the other week, with the school day
40 minutes longer thn for non trade-school stiudents. As I was friends with students in all five tracks, this 40 minutes was bothersome at times - like when I wanted a ride home in the snow!
This is the 50th anniversary and I have no plans to attend.
The best week of my life involved Studebaker (& Packard) and was in Netherlands / Belgium ten years ago and involved car-nuts from a dozen different nations. Things that happen for the first time can never be as good the second time around. I nnded it. Karl
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