By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has been a frequent target of criticism in First Teachers. We make no apologies for that. The man is a hard-core leftist and has governed accordingly. Beyond that, corruption charges have been leveled against him as well.
But we have to give credit where credit is due. De Blasio has cooperated with the plans to implement the career and technical education programs (CTE) initiated ten years ago during the time Michael Bloomberg was mayor.
In Bloomberg’s words, “Career and technical education has been seen as an educational dead-end. We’re going to change that. College isn’t for everyone, but education is.”
The reforms are designed to institute in New York City the much-admired technical training that is found in many European countries.
It has become commonplace to hear people bemoan the phenomenon of young people with worthless college degrees working in fast-food restaurants. You will often hear the comment that “it would have been far better for them to have learned an in-demand skill such as plumbing or repairing computers.” New York City’s CTE is designed to correct that imbalance.
According to a report written for the Manhattan Institute by Shaun M. Dougherty and Tamar Jacoby, CTE will be designed to answer the complaint made by many employers that “the young people they hire don’t have the skills to succeed on the job.”
CTE aspires to do more than the vocational school model of the past. It seeks to “prepare young people for high-demand, high-paying jobs, but also for further education for their careers,” by providing an “academically rigorous” curriculum that combines traditional academic subjects with “the rudiments of a technical trade” acquired in “a hands-on work environment.”
“They acquire professional work habits, from punctuality to project management. But this preparation for the world of work isn’t at the expense of college readiness. On the contrary, in an era when one-third to half of all new jobs are expected to require more than high school but less than a four-year college degree, a principal goal of the new CTE is to prepare students for postsecondary education and training.”
What does this mean in practice? According to Dougherty and Jacoby there will be “work-based learning” on site with the companies in and around New York that have agreed to participate with CTE, “actual work on the job at a company or in the public sector.” Currently, “some 50 of the city’s roughly 400 high schools are dedicated exclusively to CTE. Nearly 75 others maintain 220 additional CTE programs — effectively, schools within schools, where students can concentrate in a CTE subject area.”
The emphasis will be on “work-based learning,” an “ideal borrowed from Europe: The model is German or Swiss apprenticeship, where high school students spend half the week in the classroom and the other half on the job, learning by doing. It’s not just exposure to the world of work in Europe; it’s actual work — with workers’ hours, adult responsibilities, performance pressures, a boss, and a paycheck.”
The organizers of CTE realize that they must “start small,” since “few ninth-graders in the United States are ready for a full-fledged internship” and that the program’s “industry partners will respond best to a series of graduated requests” since the experience will be new for them.
“Schools will start out with things such as a guest lecture by someone from a company, a walk-through at a job site, job shadowing and mentoring, culminating in an internship, meant to approximate the European ideal, albeit shorter — usually a month or two in the summer, sometimes drawn out over a semester.”
It sounds promising on paper. The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding. The United States is littered with the remains of educational reforms that went nowhere, everything from the “open classroom” to “schools without walls” to “holistic grading.”
That said, CTE’s goals are laudatory. No one thinks what we have now makes sense: students graduating from college with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to repay and no marketable skills. The key will be whether society can put an end to the belief that the only path to a good job is through college. It might take some time to accomplish that.
We have lived since the middle of the 20th century with the idea that “trade schools” are a path to a menial job and a lower-class lifestyle. Seeing a significant number of technical workers who graduated from CTEs without student loans to pay off, making more money than the college grads working at Starbucks, could get the message across to our young people and their parents.
On another topic: Our readers will be pleased to hear that two Jesuit professors at Georgetown University lobbied to have a pro-life speaker onstage with Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards when she spoke on campus on April 20. They will not be pleased to hear that the university organizers of the event rejected their request.
Catholic Education Daily, a publication of the Newman Society, reported that the proposal, made by “two senior Jesuit professors, Fr. Stephen Fields, SJ, and Fr. Ladislas Orsy, SJ,” was designed to help facilitate the “free exchange of ideas.” It was rejected by the organizers of the event, the campus newspaper The Hoya reported.
Catholic Education Daily quoted Fr. Fields:
“It’s wounding to me that students in a Jesuit school would reject the good counsel of two senior Jesuit professors. We had a plan to promote the full free exchange of ideas, and so heal a deep rift on our campus. It pains me that the Lecture Fund seems to have put its own career plans over our community’s integrity.”
Fields continued, “We thought that [the Lecture Fund] would surely be interested in a full, free exchange of ideas, so we suggested that they have someone like Helen Alvaré or Kirsten Powers come, not as a debate, but perhaps as two speakers. Then both of them together would field questions from everybody in the audience and that way both sides of the issue could be aired and the opinions of our students could be helpfully informed on the spot.”
It is the unfortunately familiar syndrome: The free exchange of ideas is championed by secular leftists when it serves to advance their agenda. Political correctness reigns for the same purpose.
One final topic: S.E. writes to recommend to our readers a book entitled No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools, by Samuel Carter Casey. It provides specific examples of high-performing, high-poverty schools that have achieved their success not by pumping more money into them, but through hard work, commonsense teaching philosophies, and successful leadership strategies, which the author contends can be replicated.
The publisher is the Heritage Foundation. The book can be ordered from amazon.com.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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