Preparing Students to Enter the Workforce

Mark Sass

It is always refreshing to engage with my fellow educators on matters important to public education and our profession. In my initial post, I emphasized that the vocational track of the past should be kept in the past. Today's high school graduates need the skills that give them the flexibility to navigate between immediately entering the work place, going to a vocational school, or heading off for a degree at college.

Noah Zeichner, in his follow-up post, aptly described the Finnish system that aligns the curriculum between vocational and academic programs in secondary schools. This alignment, along with career guidance, allows students to make conscious decisions as to the path they desire. This is very different from the United States, where we are rightly concerned that vocational paths have traditionally reflected social and economic strata embedded in class and race.

A look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook shows that most of today's and tomorrow's jobs are in the medical and software industries. As I noted in my original post, these jobs require a diverse skill set that also is needed for entry into college. Regardless of the path these students take, we need to take heed of Renee Moore's admonition to ensure that students are not merely eligible to take these paths, they are ready.

My dad taught a work-to-school class in high school for over 30 years. He worked with students who, for whatever reason, struggled with academics or with their behavior in high school. The purpose of this vocational class was to ensure a transition to a post-high school life that led away from delinquency and trouble with the law. That's the traditional vocational world that needs to give way to today's reality.

Mark Sass has been teaching high school social sciences for 16 years, for the past 12 years at Legacy High School in Broomfield, Colo.

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Renee Moore

A heartfelt thanks to all who shared corrections, clarifications, questions, and deep thinking with me on the first round of our discussion.

From that exchange, I want to focus on two especially interesting threads.

First, Mark raises some important issues about readiness and remediation of our current college-bound students. I've blogged extensively on this topic over at TeachMoore (The Other Side of College Readiness: Readiness of Colleges and More Counseling Support Needed for Students). I urge those of you who are interested to join the conversation over on those pieces, since I don't have space to repeat those important points here.

The second line of thinking that emerged from our dialogue deals with eliminating the false dichotomy between college preparation and career preparation in our curricula, which would also reduce the treacherous practice of tracking.

In my reply to Eric Pollock, I noted: "We treat our so-called college-bound students as if college is all they will ever do. Conversely, we treat the rest as if they will never in their lives pursue post-secondary options. The scary part is those decisions are often made for children, based on social status, or faulty data, often while they are still very young. It is a huge waste of human potential."

Bill Ivey observed: "You also want them [students] to keep their options open as long as possible, whether because they are still making up their minds or simply because they might yet change their mind one day."

Jennifer Martin added: "Teaching hands-on, job-specific skills should not happen at the expense of teaching abstract reasoning, aesthetic appreciation, and critical thinking. Students need an education that gives them flexibility in their careers, but they also need one that does more than prepare them to [be] part of the economy. They need to be participants in moving civilization forward in every dimension of life."

The kind of education Jennifer describes should be our goal for every student in the United States. Restricting students to predetermined sets of courses and educational options presupposes that knowledge is a limited and controlled resource. We live in a world where access to knowledge of all kinds in constantly increasing. What is slower but essential to change is our concept of the purpose of school.

Renee Moore, a National Board-certified teacher, has taught English and journalism for 20 years in the Mississippi Delta region at both the high school and community college levels.

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Noah Zeichner

Both Renee Moore and Mark Sass wrote last week about the need to move away from locking students into rigid vocational or academic tracks. I couldn't agree more. What then, might a more flexible system look like?

People often look to Europe for highly developed vocational programs. But European education systems traditionally sort students into different pathways. In Finland, whose system is touted as being one of the most equitable in the world, more than 40 percent of high school students choose vocational programs, and students attend separate schools. But as Pasi Sahlberg explains in his 2012 book Finnish Lessons, there is opportunity for mobility between vocational and academic tracks.

According to Sahlberg, because Finland has aligned the curriculum of vocational and academic programs, students graduating from vocational schools are eligible to take the university matriculation exam and enter four-year colleges. At the same time, upper secondary students are able to take vocational classes as part of their academic programs. In reality, few Finnish students appear to take advantage of this flexibility, but the structure is in place, which is a start.

More importantly, Finland invests in career guidance and counseling from a young age. Whereas elementary school students in the United States might experience a career day in their classrooms once a year, Finnish children have the opportunity to explore different options on a regular basis. By the Finnish equivalent of middle school, students have weekly interaction with career counselors. Imagine if all students in the United States received individualized career guidance in grades 1 through 9.

Writing this column has pushed my thinking about vocational education. Perhaps what is most important is not the quantity of vocational classes available. Instead, we should focus on the type of work that we are asking students to do in both academic and vocational courses. In the 21st century, students increasingly need opportunities to explore, create, and work together to solve problems. While most schools in our country are pushed to focus on raising reading and math test scores, vocational programs are teaching these critical skills every day.

How can we integrate the knowledge and skills of vocational education into our academic curricula? And what will it take to change our society's view of vocational education as a lesser alternative to a core component of our nation's education system?

Noah Zeichner is a National Board-certified teacher at Chief Sealth International School in Seattle, Wash. He also spends part of his day supporting the Center for Teaching Quality's global teacher-leadership initiatives.

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Jennifer Martin

The alumni magazine of my local community college recently published an article focusing on students who had gained the education needed for "middle skills" jobs, what we used to call "blue collar" work. The cover photo of the woman in a hard hat caught my attention. The featured alumna was a former teacher, Lily Landau, who had returned to community college to retrain for a new career as an electrician. My guess is that she studied alongside many of my former students, and that they, like her, were looking for the training that would give them "the shortest route to a paycheck."

Now that high schools here have largely dismantled such vocational training, it seems that our community colleges are picking up the slack. Courses for work in traditional trades and medical technology are increasingly popular, and folks with these skills are in high demand. It seems to me there is real opportunity for the education community to address the long-standing social prejudices and institutional barriers that have kept women and minorities out of the better-paying, often unionized, trades. (Landau was often the only woman in her electrical classes.) By encouraging interested young women and students of color to undertake studies in these fields, we would be offering them a path that allows for a prosperous and secure future. Trades jobs often have the double advantage of paying well and being difficult to send off-shore.

At my high school, many of the college-bound kids are taking classes at community college in senior year to enrich their high school experience. Others want to get freshman year requirements out of the way, so they can focus on their key interests more fully when they go off to college. Perhaps we should be broadening this opportunity so that high school students who want a future in a trade can take community college classes, too.

And, maybe I'll go back myself! In the article, Landau says she finds being an electrician gives her "a better work-life balance" than teaching did.

Jennifer Martin, an English teacher at Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., has taught nearly every grade of middle and high school at every skill level, from special education inclusion to advanced placement.

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Sandy Merz

Nia and Luis are 8th graders in Introduction to Engineering. Contrasting their strengths shines light on the often unrecognized cognitive demands of the manual arts and bolsters the argument in favor of vocational training.

Nia extracts the potential of words—their potential to give life to abstract ideas through well-crafted thinking and precise language. She works inside her own head and wrestles with notions. Her creativity begins when she hears an assertion not of her liking and proceeds systematically to a satisfactory rebuttal.

Nia's arguments often appear digressive, but she's not wasting time; she's learning about ideas and she's learning about herself.

She's bound by the classic trivium of logic, rhetoric, and grammar; all human concepts. The failures or successes of Nia's abstractions are open to debate.

Luis extracts the potential of cardboard, rubber bands, straws, tape, and string—the potential to become a robotic hand. His product features three fingers that flex and extend at his bidding. His unique innovation is to have one of the fingers flex backwards. That means his device can simultaneously hold things in its palm and against the back of its hand. Think about the implications of that.

Luis is bound by the nature of materials, a more demanding authority than human concepts. Yet his creativity begins by not taking things for granted. What kind of mind thinks of things like backwards fingers?

Working with raw materials requires Luis to get outside of his own mind and conform his means to objective material limitations—all while remaining faithful to his intention. In his encounters with things as opposed to thoughts, he has to systematically approach questions like, "What materials have attributes most like my finger?"

As Luis thinks about things—real, tangible things—he, too, is learning about himself.

As in all vocational work, Luis's failures are manifest, but his final success undeniable: Fingers bend or they don't. Enough said.

I try to extract the potential in both Nia and Luis—and that means avoiding the bias that Nia's life of the mind is cognitively superior to Luis's life of the hand. And it would be unethical for me to discourage either from pursuing college or vocational training.

My obligation is to provide a spectrum of activities so they can learn what they like to do and what they're good at. When I get it right, they each learn which cognitive tasks enrich and which tax their minds. With that knowledge, they can decide responsibly, and for themselves, which options to pursue after high school.

My thinking on this subject was largely inspired by Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Mathew Crawford.

August (Sandy) Merz III, a National Board-certified teacher, teaches engineering and algebra and sponsors MESA at Safford K-8 International Baccalaureate Candidate School in Tucson, Ariz.

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Mark Sass

The teaching profession is my third attempt at a life-long career. And I think I've found my work for the rest of my life. My first profession as a truck mechanic lasted five years, and my second profession, as a professional advertising photographer, lasted 10. For my generation, I was the exception to the rule—the rule that said that while you might have numerous jobs, they would all be in the same profession. Today, for our graduating high school students, having numerous careers in different professions is the expectation. This is why we need to ensure that regardless of where students go after high school, they have skills that can lead them to college or directly into the work world. The skills necessary for both options are the same. This is why we should be very wary of tracking students while they are in high school.

A quick look at the Common Core State Standards or the new Next Generation Science Standards shows that the skills necessary for high school graduates will allow students to navigate between making the decision to go to college or directly into the work world without having to have made that decision while in high school. New expectations for our high school graduates demand that students be able to connect concepts between disciplines and to react to and think critically about new situations.

Look at a job description that a company owner passed along to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a piece he wrote about the paucity of trained American workers. The company owner was looking for a welder and was complaining about the quality of some who had applied:

"They could make beautiful welds," she said, "but they did not understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques" and how different metals and gases, pressures and temperatures had to be combined. Moreover, in small manufacturing businesses like hers, explained [Traci] Tapani, "unlike a Chinese firm that does high-volume, low-tech jobs, we do a lot of low-volume, high-tech jobs, and each one has its own design drawings. So a welder has to be able to read and understand five different design drawings in a single day ... I can't think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it's bent to a certain angle.

Does that description sound like the industrial worker of yesterday? It reads more like what we'd expect from a chemistry major. In fact, we already have a majority of high school students taking chemistry classes. In 1990, only 49 percent of high school graduates had taken a chemistry class, with another 21 percent having had physics. In 2009, 70 percent of high school students had taken chemistry and 36 percent physics. Because we have high standards for all high school graduates, they will be ready for college or to go directly into the workplace.

To track students while in high school into vocational or college tracks would be a step back in time. Back when I graduated high school in 1976, the job of educators was to rank and sort students into those going to college and those heading right into the work world. Each track held students to different expectations. I was a C student tracking into college who decided to take a more circuitous route. Along the way I needed to pick up skills I missed while in high school. It wasn't easy, but I made it. Today's high school graduates should be able to make the leap into either direction without having to worry if they have the skills to be successful, since the skills needed are the same. Tracking students into vocational tracks is a relic of the past and it should stay there.

Mark Sass has been teaching high school social sciences for 16 years, for the past 12 years at Legacy High School in Broomfield, Colo.

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Noah Zeichner

Two weeks ago, one of my students ventured into my classroom during my planning period. He had missed several days of class in recent weeks and was quickly falling behind. He walked up to my desk and handed me a withdrawal form to sign. "Daniel" had decided to drop out of school. He had already started a 40-hour-a-week construction job, which explained his recent absences. He was just about to turn 17.

As he stood in front of me, my mind raced as I tried to come up with a menu of alternative options for him. But I drew a blank. I stalled by explaining that average income rises with each level of education that you attain. Daniel said that he would eventually obtain a GED, to which I cited James Heckman's research that shows a GED is not really equivalent to a high school diploma in terms of social and economic benefits. But I wasn't getting anywhere. Daniel had made up his mind. He wanted to start working now so that he could provide for his future family.

We have few options left in my school for students who plan to enter the workforce after graduation. There is a single section of ACE (Architecture, Construction, and Engineering) along with three wood shop classes. A handful of students take an automotive class off campus. There are some outstanding apprenticeship programs at our local community colleges, but students usually need to be 18 to take them and most require at least a GED.

We have sadly dismantled our nation's vocational opportunities in the name of college readiness. In general, I steer my students toward college after high school. But some students who are passionate about a trade yearn for alternative paths. I have a feeling that Daniel would have thrived in a vocational program if one had been available when he needed it.

Our society is not alone in looking down on students who pursue career and technical education. But other countries have taken steps to counter this negative perception. Singapore made the decision to transform its vocational education program in the early 1990s. They created the Institute for Technical Education and carried out a national marketing campaign to help counter prejudice against the decision not to attend a four-year college. Today, while the bottom 25 percent of students in the United States drop out of high school, 90 percent of the bottom 25 percent in Singapore graduate from the ITE.

What will it take for us to see a system-wide revitalization of vocational opportunities for our students?

Noah Zeichner is a National Board-certified teacher at Chief Sealth International School in Seattle, Wash. He also spends part of his day supporting the Center for Teaching Quality's global teacher-leadership initiatives.

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Sandy Merz

High-definition computer screens punctuate the darkness. Jumbo monitors display urgent "situations." Workers in headsets carry on intense conversations. No, it's not the NSA tackling an international crisis. It's a call-center and the workers are offering special deals on a mobile phone service.

Most are between high school and something else. They earned their jobs by completing training in which they had to demonstrate the bedrock job skill: showing up every day and on time. Their pay is low and they won't stay long. But they'll leave armed with the confidence, skills, and experience they'll need for their next pursuit.

The Tucson sun blazes down on the journeyman electricians. From behind black sunglasses, they tell their stories. They got their foot in the door by proving in interviews they could solve abstract problems, work under pressure in a physically demanding environment, work on a team, and communicate effectively with both specialists and lay people. Then they completed a long apprenticeship. They didn't have to go to college.

Now they earn a base salary over $100,000, which they often match in overtime work. If you haven't worked at the electric company for 15 years, you're still a newcomer.

Moving beyond presumption

Assuming college is for everyone closes doors.

The best pathway a school can offer empowers students to discover and develop their strengths and passions while providing useful post-secondary options. One option is college. In southern Arizona, the Joint Technical Education District (JTED) provides many more.

Through JTED, students attend their regular high school for academic courses while receiving job training in 13 career clusters at 37 satellite locations. Clusters include air transportation, graphic communications, cosmetology, public safety, and culinary arts.

Students from all socio-economic and ethnic groups as well as urban and rural settings benefit from JTED career programs. And JTED provides scholarship and college information as well—dispelling the myth that vocational programs create a two-tiered system.

The lessons I've learned

The best I can do for my students is to learn what options are available during school and what demands they'll face when they graduate. In Arizona that's made easy with Lesson2life, a unique teacher professional development opportunity offered by the Arizona K12 Center. Participants spend three days visiting work sites and talking to employees. Through Lesson2life, I have met not only call-center workers and journeymen but also engineers, epidemiologists, wildlife rescue experts, crime lab technicians, and international business people. I can always answer the question, "When am I ever going to use this?" I can also counsel students to consider JTED programs.

Throughout the country, about half of our high school students are enrolled in vocational classes. Hopefully, most teachers know about the vocational educational options their students have.

But what exposure have you had to the opportunities available to students with vocational training? Have you had opportunities to visit workplaces and meet employees to talk about what our kids will face?

If we are to help students become career-ready, we need to forge our own connections to other careers.

August (Sandy) Merz III, a National Board-certified teacher, teaches engineering and algebra and sponsors MESA at Safford K-8 International Baccalaureate Candidate School in Tucson, Ariz.

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Jennifer Martin

In the late 1970s when I was in high school, I shared classes with some boys whose fingernails were blackened by axle grease and whose futures, while potentially bright, did not generally include college plans. My school, like many of that time, had a whole wing devoted to educating students for such hands-on work as carpentry, sewing, cosmetology, cooking, and mechanics.

When I began teaching in 2002, the retractable electrical cords for power tools still hung from the ceiling of my middle school classroom. But the tools had been "surplussed," and the shop instructor was now teaching health class. Today these classes have been eliminated in all but one county high school, which specializes in trades education. I sometimes wonder if shop classes went away because of the potential for costly litigation over injuries. Whatever the reason, it's a shame!

In education today, there is much talk about educating the "whole child", addressing social and emotional development as well as academic skills. But I like to think of whole-child education as Rudolph Steiner did: Teaching "head, heart, and hands." We learn through and express ourselves with our bodies. Too often, we educators—and those who fund our work—fail to help children grow fully into their physical potential. We ignore the important causal link between the opposable thumb and human intelligence. We fail to recognize that touching the world makes us smarter.

Moreover, we've developed the misguided notion that the less we use our hands—on anything other than a keyboard—the more important and valuable we are. But in Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford accurately depicts the soul-killing tedium of pushing paper in the white-collar world and the joy that can result from manual labor.

In my high school today, I have students for whom college will be a poor fit, sometimes because of aptitude but often because of inclination. Others are well-suited to go to college, but they may find more joy in running electrical wire than in writing a legal brief. Rather than wedging all students into a future bound by the walls of an office cubicle, schools should give kids the manual skills that could free them to choose another path.

When I went to my 30th high school reunion a few years ago, I ran into several of those boys who'd had blackened fingernails. One of them had become a contractor, another ran a plumbing company, and a third owned a firm specializing in audio-visual systems. None had gone to college, but all were happy and prosperous. High school had given them what they needed. We should give this generation the same opportunities.

Jennifer Martin, an English teacher at Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., has taught nearly every grade of middle and high school at every skill level, from special education inclusion to advanced placement.

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Renee Moore

The majority of high school graduates in America do not go to college, at least not directly. But wait—in all of the high schools where I've worked, half of the students who enroll never graduate, and that's reflective of a longstanding national trend. So where are all those young people going?

The vocational career pathway has always been treated as low status in our antiquated educational hierarchy. In reality, this is just academic snobbery; the vocational careers have been some of the most lucrative and bountiful entryways to the middle class in America for a long time. For example, while almost 50 percent of four-year college graduates are unemployed, 60 percent of all nursing graduates in the U.S. come from the nation's community colleges. Add to them the dental hygienists, plumbers, electricians, heating and air conditioning technicians, auto mechanics, chefs, office workers, medical-equipment operators and technicians, cosmetologists, barbers, truck drivers, and machine handlers, just to name a few of the people on whom we rely daily, and we realize it's the traditional college route that should be called alternative.

Many of the traditional "college bound" students I have worked with over the years ended up being less prepared for the workplace than their vocational-career peers. Consider how many students have graduated from four-year colleges with degrees that were, for all practical purposes, worthless in terms of the job market. What promises (and overpriced loans) were they sold as they matriculated through those majors? Consider that we are graduating too many elementary teachers (and for the wrong reasons) rather than advising career seekers to go into the fields and geographic regions where they are actually needed.

The ugly truth: Much of our current educational system is more about maintaining social stratification than helping individual students reach their full potential. I see a need for more merging of all the post-secondary options rather than maintaining rigid, predetermined pathways. I support more blending of options, instead of needlessly pitting the vocational versus the academic. For instance, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and others are tackling our senseless devotion to making all college-bound students, regardless of their majors, master algebra, arguing for the option to take statistics or probability. Changes like these make even more sense given that our children and grandchildren are likely to have multiple careers rather than choosing one field for a lifetime. Education can no longer be something a person "does" once formally before entering the "real world."

As I see it, continuing education, re-training, and lifelong learning are the new reality.

All our children should be encouraged to do more real learning, and all types of learning should be available to whomever is interested.

Renee Moore, a National Board-certified teacher, has taught English and journalism for 20 years in the Mississippi Delta region at both the high school and community college levels.

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