Education Week - April 24, 2013 - 16

EDUCATION WEEK

APRIL 24, 2013

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FOCUS ON: CAREER READINESS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

undertaking: Mr. Lopez manages
more than 50 industry partners
for an advanced-manufacturing
pathway alone. (It’s in the process
of creating 12 paths in all). The best
examples hinge on substantive relationships between industry officials and educators, always tricky.
Drawing in part on the practices
of other countries, states want such
pathways to make high school more
relevant; inform students of the options that await after they remove
their caps and gowns; and, most
importantly, engage youths in challenging courses that don’t close the
door to higher education.

Fresh Catalyst
The renewed emphasis on job
preparation in Illinois appears to
be catching on nationally, too.
In his State of the Union address,
President Barack Obama pointed
to the German system of work apprenticeships. His fiscal 2014 budget request seeks some $300 million in grants to tighten the links
between high school and careers.
While most of the state action has
been in development for some time,
an influential 2011 report issued
by the Harvard Graduate School
of Education also helped catalyze
some of the new activity. It contended the “college for all” push has
not served some students, and since
its appearance, eight states have
committed to setting up high-quality pathways, in partnerships with
Harvard and Jobs For the Future, a
Boston-based nonprofit group.
States are in different stages of
their work. Officials in Tennessee,
for example, are working to begin
career education as early as 7th
grade and have begun to finance
some regional projects to knit together courses of study.
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo
recently announced plans to designate 10 more schools to follow the
example of the Pathways in Technology Early College High School,
formed through a partnership between public education and ibm.
(See related story, Page S4 of the
pullout report in this issue.)
Georgia’s state board of education
this month approved standards for
“foundational” courses across 17
broad career clusters, such as energy and information technology.
All freshmen will be required to
take at least one and encouraged to
continue a sequence as they progress through high school.
Georgia, Illinois, New York, and
Tennessee are all participants in
the Jobs For the Future network,
as are California, Massachusetts,
Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio.
While the idea of building careerrelated pathways in high schools
is an old one, participating states

highlight several new areas of
focus, many of them rooted in lessons drawn from European systems
of work-based learning.
For one, proponents of the approach say, pathways should be
tightly linked to labor demands
and careers that are likely to be in
demand, as pathways are abroad.
“The majority of jobs in this area
are in advanced manufacturing and
health care—that’s the bottom line.
And the shortages exist in those
areas,” said Lillian Hartgrove, a
vice president for the Highlands
Initiative, a four-county economicdevelopment project in the Upper
Cumberland region of Tennessee.
The project is crafting pathways
in those two fields and planning a
third in information technology.
Second, advocates say all students should have the flexibility to
change paths without forgoing the
academic credits needed for entry
to two- or four-year institutions.
At Wheeling High, Principal
Lopez recounts that the health
pathway encouraged one young
woman to enroll in ap Biology,
while another realized that she
didn’t want to deal with blood and
chose another direction. “And both
are successes. It doesn’t cost them
anything at this stage to switch
between pathways,” he said. “It’s
always based on their interest.”
Finally, states are grappling with
how to provide students with intensive work-based learning experiences. Of all the challenges facing
states, that may be the toughest.
In the words of Mr. Lopez: “How
do you get not one or two, but hundreds of kids a real experience in a
field they’re interested in? In fine
arts, I want kids to be curating in
museums or working with studio
musicians. Those are the pieces
that are harder to fit.”

ematics. “Everyone is talking about
different standards, different skills,
different credentials.”
That’s partly why one major part
of the project is the creation of eight
“learning exchanges,” one for each
broad area such as agriculture and
the it fields, that will serve a role
similar to that of the Swiss professional associations. The exchanges
will act as intermediaries with companies to develop curricula, expand
access to lab space and equipment,
train educators, and provide feedback on current course sequences
and structures, Mr. Tyszko said.
Illinois is supporting the exchanges with part of its $43 million
grant from the federal Race to the
Top competition, but funding is an
issue for most of the states.
State policymakers acknowledge
it probably isn’t feasible for most
U.S. high school students to experience an extended, Swiss-style
apprenticeship, but they do believe
that efforts could be better than the
typical “career day.”
In Tennessee, the public and private partners in the Upper Cumberland project are discussing
whether it’s feasible, for instance,
to use online learning so students

Photos by Philip Scott Andrews for Education Week

Alternatives
Emerging
For Students

FROM TOP: Rocco Tieri
teaches his students
stretching in a sportsmedicine class at
Wheeling High School,
north of Chicago.
Students are prepared
for higher education and
exposed to career fields.
From left, Julia Mach,
Arianna Roldan, and
Kaeleigh Willming
demonstrate medical
care during a class.

A Role for Business?
Business engagement is one area
in which many of the state partners
have looked to the Swiss model. In
that country, professional associations play a quasi-governmental
role in helping to outline the competencies students need to master
in each occupation, helping keep
training consistent and uniform.
In the United States, by contrast,
“we tend to involve business and
industry mainly monetarily,” said
John D. Barge, Georgia’s schools
superintendent. “We need to do
more than ask them for money,
such as involving them in the development of curriculum, problembased learning, and the evaluation
of student skills.”
And industry certifications in the
United States often are proprietary,
not shared across an occupation.
“We have folks on these [advisory]
boards everywhere, but there is no
standardization or uniformity to
our approach,” said Jason A. Tyszko,
the deputy chief of staff for the Illinois commerce and economic-opportunity department, a partner in
the Illinois stem Pathways project,
a public-private venture to engage
more secondary students in jobs in
the high-growth fields of science,
technology, engineering, and math-

can see an interactive knee surgery,
Ms. Hartgrove said.
Mr. Tyszko said businesses could
also facilitate more relevant experiences by sponsoring competitions in
which students are asked to solve a
real-world problem of interest.
Under an Illinois pilot project,
for example, Abbott Laboratories, a
health-technology firm, sponsored
a design contest for high school
students in which they analyzed
different forms of hiv testing and
conceived new ideas to improve
dissemination of testing and treatment in rural areas of the world.

Tracking Specter
State officials are also having to
be creative with sources of money.
Danielle Mezera, the assistant
commissioner for career and technical education for Tennessee, has
repurposed a state reserve fund
under the federal Carl D. Perkins
Career and Technical Education
Act into a competitive-grant program. The state offers extra money
to regions, among them Upper
Cumberland, that meet specific criteria related to the pathways work.
Among other steps, the state is
pressing regions to consider closing

old career and technical programs
that no longer lead to in-demand
jobs. That’s difficult, in part because
much of the information districts
report as part of the Perkins Act,
which supports both high school
and community college programs,
is incomplete, leading to a degree of
unreliability, Ms. Mezera said.
“If you are very diffuse in how
you approach your program, if
you’re scattering the opportunities,
you’re essentially providing pathways that will lead to nothing,” she
said. “If you are more focused in
what you are going to offer, you’re
able to shift your resources accordingly to actually grow that intentional focus.”
For all the excitement over the
new initiatives, the work raises the
specter of old wounds, too. State
officials scrupulously avoid the
word “tracks” to describe workbased learning opportunities because of its associations with oldschool shop and welding classes
reserved for less academically capable students.
The debate still seethes, most
recently in Texas, where lawmakers are considering rolling back
some graduation requirements
in the name of giving students

more career options.
For critics like the Washingtonbased Education Trust, an advocacy
group for disadvantaged students,
the focus on pathways risks re-creating a system in which students
of color are disproportionately led
toward less rigorous curricula and
weaker instruction.
So far, that hasn’t been the case
at Wheeling High. Graduation
figures show that roughly 90 percent of students go immediately on
to postsecondary education, with
about 55 percent of that figure
going to a two-year college and the
remainder to four-year schools.
“I never tell my kids what their
future needs to look like,” Mr. Lopez
said. “My job is to help give them options. When you cross the stage and
shake my hand on the day of graduation, I want you to have a number
of doors open, so you say, ‘Which do
I want to go through first?’ ”
Special coverage on the alignment
between K-12 schools and
postsecondary education is
supported in part by a grant from
the Lumina Foundation, at www.
luminafoundation.org. Education Week
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.

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Education Week - April 24, 2013

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