By Mark
Why do we want every kid to be "college ready"?
True, the new phrase is "college and career ready," but I feel that the word career too often carries a distinctly cubicled and clean-fingernailed connotation. A very informal verbal and non-scientific poll of a few of my own students helped reinforce this to me. When given a list of professions, from plumber to welder to salesperson to doctor, I asked them to identify which ones were careers. Being a doctor, lawyer, businessperson, teacher, and nurse were immediately identified as careers. Without me even giving them the words, most kids identified being a welder, electrician, plumber, mechanic, and engineer as "just jobs, not careers." When I pushed for the difference between a job and career, most kids couldn't articulate it (and by then, the bell was ringing and I needed to get class started). A couple did say something about college being required for a career. In effect, "college and career ready" is redundant.
I got to thinking even more about this when a former student of mine came to ask for some advice about a paper he was writing in his English class. The students were looking at power structures in society and considering different perspectives on literary criticism, and he was learning about the Marxist literary critical perspective by considering the social and power dynamics of his hometown. His essay, tentatively titled "The Hill and the Mill" was attempting to explore the social and economic dynamics of a small town originally built around a local mill (the mill), but which has in the last decade and a half seen an influx of high-tech businesses (the hill).
The resulting shifts in the community are not inherently negative, but certainly precipitate changes in the culture. Many men and women have cultivated success and lucrative careers through hard work in the mill, just as many men and women have done the same up on the hill. Nevertheless, assumptions to the value of each are not unique to this small down. This dichotomy, oversimplified, is the divide in perception of what constitutes a "career" versus a "job."
I grew up on a small family farm (110 acres or so of alfalfa, bluegrass seed, and assorted etc.) in Central Oregon. I was a proud member of the FFA and enrolled in vocational agriculture classes each year in high school. On the farm, through FFA, and in ag class I learned to weld, build, cultivate, evaluate, calculate, and basically run a small business enterprise. I learned to advocate, negotiate, and speak persuasively in front of a crowd.
I never remember even once my parents telling me that I had to go to college. In addition to running the farm, my father taught high school math in a district 20 miles away and my mother was the head secretary at my high school during my childhood. You can assume from these jobs that my family valued education–and you'd be right–but I never felt pressured by them to get into college (even less so the pressure that only certain colleges were worthy), only pressure to learn and do my best.
Though my parents never pressured me, everyone else and everything else did. By the time I was ready to move on from high school, the dichotomy between "job" and "career" was deeply, deeply etched in my mindset. I greatly enjoyed FFA, but when I was a teenager, society had made clear to me that there were only two paths toward two different collars, and one was clearly more vaunted than the other.
An interview with Mike Rowe has been making the rounds on social media, and in it he mentions that there are about three million open jobs that employers are struggling to fill–and of those, only 8 to 12 percent require a college degree. Missing from the applicant pool are people with the kinds of skills that employers seek. Now, I have not been able to find the source of Rowe's statistics, but his statement seems to be in line with much of what I hear elsewhere–and I tend to appreciate his perspectives on work (as I have mentioned before on this blog).
The catchphrase "college and career ready" has far too narrow a connotation, and worse, has been translated to mean that every kid has to take three years of university-track mathematics, pass regurgitative standardized tests, and leap through hoops to check off requirements to earn a diploma.
The simple fact is this: to do "career ready" right, we need programs that are far more expensive than taxpayers seem willing to support. It is very inexpensive, in the grand scheme, to purchase a set of textbooks and pay a teacher to facilitate students' progress from chapter to chapter. What costs more is a shop, a technology lab, tools, an industrial kitchen, consumable materials, a greenhouse…and the list goes on. If we really cared about "college and career ready," we'd realize that funding schools to greater capacity isn't "throwing money at the problem," it is building what is necessary to give the public, policymakers, and our economy what each claims they want.
So back to my FFA experience. The skills I learned in my ag classes and in FFA are what have made me successful as a professional. My high school classes (with all due respect to my former teachers) served their purpose: to satisfy requirements so that I could earn that diploma. While the "college experience" enriched my life in other ways, I cannot cite a single class from my undergraduate experience that has significantly impacted the quality of my teaching. My masters program did arm me somewhat, but it wasn't the classes, it was the student teaching I did with three amazing educators that shaped me. The doing was where I learned.
Learning to do, doing to learn, earning to live, living to serve. That is the FFA Motto.
If we want to build students who are "college and career ready," we need to pay less attention to standards, curriculum, and testing, and give closer attention to what our students are doing.
I work at a Skills Center, and this is exactly what we deal with on a regular basis. In order to run the school, we have to convince students, parents, and school counselors (the third group being the most challenging sometimes) that the education students receive in a CTE program is NOT less than the education they receive in their traditional high school. The perception that ‘vocational’ education is somehow not as challenging is a deeply ingrained assumption that is difficult to counteract. I have had other teaching professionals tell me they think the Skills Center is for kids who don’t want to go to college. The implication there being that it is somehow not as good. The reality that when done well, CTE takes many of the academic core contents and makes them relevant and applicable. That doesn’t seem to get focused on. I wonder if this happens because when you talk about vocational education (which is the language still used in state law) people think about the wood shop class they took 25 years ago, and assume it is all like that.
You hit the nail on the head with your cost analysis. It’s too expensive for public schools to offer voc ed anymore.
And I suppose the reality is that public schools have taken on a social responsibility that is extremely expensive – offering health care, food, and family support to high-poverty kids. That’s expensive too, and as society fails to support poor kids schools realize they have to, because we’re looking those hungry, dirty, sick children in the face. My school offers everything from Lice Shampoo to eye-glasses to backpacks of weekend food to some of our students.
So while we’re told kids need to be career and college ready, many schools are spending everything they have just to help students be classroom ready.
Out of everything I did in high school, my experience in FFA is definitely something that has stuck with me. I learned to pursue an activity not for a grade, but because it was something I was interested in. I learned how to schedule my time in order to adequately prepare for competitions. I learned how to work as a member of a team.
In this era of college and career readiness, we definitely need to make sure that “career readiness” isn’t seen as a lesser option, and that we have robust Career and Technical Ed programs.
Yeah, Tom, I was surprised by engineer as well, but I wonder if some kids might not really know what that occupation is.
You mention that people who talk about kids not needing college aren’t talking about their own kids…granted, my oldest is only in the third grade, but I absolutely am talking about my own kids. Simply put, going to university is not the golden ticket it perhaps once was, and if it is any form of golden ticket, it is no longer the only ticket.
I do not want my own kids to go through high school assuming that (1) a college degree will guarantee a “good career” or (2) that the only jobs of value are ones that require a college degree. I want them to know that no matter what they want, the two things they have to do are work hard to do their best, and keep all doors of opportunity open.
I sat next to a guy just recently (at a gathering of my college friends, of course) when the conversation went to this and he was discussing how he has a great job, makes good money, but he is working alongside other guys his age who are just as good at their jobs and make just as much money…and the only difference is that he has student loan debt and they don’t. His sentiment: “I wish someone would have told me I could get here without having to pay so much for it.”
And yes, I am also talking about other people’s kids. I’m not saying college should not be a goal, but it should not be the goal that we ascribe to every kid who enters our system.
Having access to good vocational experience will not prevent anyone from getting into college if they want to take that track. If anything, that experience will only help. Vocational experience will enable a student to have more options: college, career, job, or other. A strictly college-focused curriculum is great for those kids who make it into college (and stick it out long enough to earn a diploma, which is a whole different issue no one ever wants to talk about) but if a kid leaps the college-track hoops and but lacks the means, interest, or capacity to go on, in our current system they then ALSO lack practical and applicable experience…and end up in those “mundane, low-paying grunt jobs that people get who don’t get into college.” I doubt strongly that kids with access to real skills-centric programs end up left with that kind of position as their only option.
Engineer isn’t a career? Hmm.
Sure, there are lots of unfilled jobs out there. Of course, the ones Mike Rowe features on his show aren’t the mundane, low-paying grunt jobs that people get who don’t go to college.
I’ve noticed that by and large, people who talk about kids not needing college aren’t talking about their own kids.
Love it! So true. There are students who do not have the ability to pay for college or do not qualify for government grants or loans due to undocumented status. When I worked at Pasco High School years ago, I was impressed by their vocational programs. They had a class that built and sold an entire house each year, and another class that did the same with a speedboat. They did an excellent job reaching out to their whole student body and preparing students for careers in vocational fields.