Post-secondary options sides aren’t far apart
Wednesday, January 16, 2008Written by: WonkMom
In Rona Wilensky’s article in the most recent HeadFirst e-newsletter, she makes a number of great points, warning us not to create an education system that shoehorns all kids into the expectations of a traditional four-year liberal arts education. Our policy discussions seem to be swinging back and forth wildly, between a “college for all” focus and an emphasis on the differing needs and interests of kids who may or may not want to go to college.
Guess what – everyone is right, to a point. Our education system must guarantee that kids who want to go through a traditional college experience are prepared for it, and that includes those kids who are usually subject to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” (can’t believe I just quoted Geo. Bush) and those kids who decide as seniors that maybe college is the place for them after all.
Yet our education system must also guarantee that there are many different and challenging pathways that accommodate the interests and dreams of kids who don’t want that four-year academic experience.
We can do this. We know how – it’s just hard to implement, and it’s going to take time to figure out how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Take a look at the report from UCD’s Center for Education Policy Analysis on career and technical education in
Career and technical education should not be the only path either, but the field’s current reform efforts as it struggles to be both meaningful and rigorous are a useful example for education reform as a whole.
As Rona rather subtly points out, we have a lot of people looking at P-20 education reform right now: the P-20 Council, whatever the governor’s plan turns out to be, the HB 1118 graduation guidelines council, CDE’s revision of standards, and so on. It’s an embarrassment of riches that is starting to make a lot of people nervous about who’s leading the parade.
What if we agreed on a simple guiding principle as everyone does their work: the education system in
Anybody have any problems with that?
January 16th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
No problem with that, the devil’s in the details on any of these designs. Interestingly, one of the exemplary schools described in the UCD report is the Denver School of Science and Technology. It is a school with a strong liberal arts program that also engages students through internships and more hands-on rigorous engineering. It’s a school that does both well knowing that students need to be engaged while having a strong liberal arts education.
While I agree that there needs to be more thought about “College for All,” I worry that Rona misses a few points in the critique of the “College for All” movement. She seems to discount the value of rigorous liberal arts undergraduate education. Few graduates of Colorado College, Santa Cruz or Yale would say the skills, knowledge and habits they learned in college were irrelevant.
And more importantly, most that promote a more relevant education pipeline (that may not include college), rarely talk about the huge inequities by race and class in the current college track system. “All” is ridiculous for any group but shouldn’t we expect and support Black, Brown and low-income kids to have the same college success rates as middle and upper income white folks? We should also support kids to be prepared to for non-college career tracks if they choose but we shouldn’t do one track for rich and another one for poor.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Both “WonkMom” and Van show great insight in their comments, moving away from a false dichotomy between “preparation for college” and “preparation for work.” I’m particularly impressed with how well both commenters have highlight the importance of a system where all students are academically challenged — where low-income students of color are not shunted off into unchallenging low-track or vocational tracks, and where a student can decide as a senior that college is right for her after all (and not look back at a transcript and education that failed to prepare her for that choice).
The “multiple pathways” approach mentioned by WM is advocated by University of California professors Norton Grubb and Jeannie Oakes in a recent report published by the EPIC Policy Center in Boulder. See http://www.epicpolicy.org/node/526
Grubb and Oakes present the multiple-pathways approach as an alternative to a narrower and more rigid idea of rigor, exemplified by exit exams and ramped-up course-taking requirements. The latter ideas could also be valuable, perhaps helping to avoid the dumbed-down low-track curriculum that Van warns against; but that approach can also lead to some unintended consequences, including lost relevance and a set of learning opportunities that can be less rich.