Preparing students for the "knowledge economy"
In their articles yesterday and today, my colleagues Jamie Smith Hopkins and Steve Kiehl explore Maryland's shift from a manufacturing economy to a "knowledge economy," where workers need technical skills to find decent employment. This doesn't necessarily mean college, but at a minimum it means trade school.
Today's story followed Dr. Alonso on a tour of a five-year apprenticeship program in West Baltimore. A high school diploma is needed for entry into the program, and graduates are placed in jobs earning $60,000. In the classroom they visited, none of the 10 students had graduated from a city high school. Most were from Baltimore County.
So in a city where historically nearly half of students haven't even graduated from high school, how can Baltimore prepare its future workforce for the knowledge economy?
Alonso wants to provide more specialized training in high school, but finding the money and people with expertise to do so is challenging. It costs much more to run a trade-themed high school than a traditional one. And there is far more demand for the city's admissions-based vocational high schools -- Carver, Mervo and Edmondson-Westside -- than there are seats for qualified students.
A third of the 24 middle/high schools that the Alonso administration plans to open in the coming years are supposed to have a vocational focus. Of the six that opened this year, the Reach! School is designed to prepare students for jobs in health and construction. The two Friendship schools are college-prep, with an emphasis on science and technology careers.
But of the nine additional middle/high schools approved by the school board to open in 2009, all are college-prep and alternative schools; none is vocational. System officials say it's hard to find quality operators for such schools, and they are spending this year studying how to do that.
Baltimoresun.com's 
Comments
In order for this to happen the city school system will have to abandon a failed model for leadership and teaching. We must wake up an realize that many of the students and parents that we teach do not fall into the cookie cutter model of surrounding jurisdictions. The pressures of poverty, of living in highly pressurized situations (drugs, hunger, fear of or being homeless) create for a school system unique challenges that our current model fail to address.
Schools must become a center for service. Students have to go to a place where the whole child is addressed. A place where a teacher teaches and acts as a coordinator with the parent to access on site service. Those should range anywhere from a social worker, psychologist, nutritionist, medical care as well as before and after care that is more than just a teacher holding a after school homework club. A classroom must have two teachers working side by side to meet the academic needs of the child and a school leader must be one that is willing to be a collaborator rather than a dictator as is the case in so many schools. The idea of principal will have to come to an end. We will need to have an individual that can administrate, health, nutrition, social work, mental health and academic programs. So this might mean that you would have an academic leader and then a CEO.
The School System if it wishes to have children enter the type of program that must embrace technology in all classrooms PreK-12. The time has past where an old broken computer at the back of the room counts as a teacher using technology in instruction. Technology has to be a central tool in daily instruction not an afterthought as it is in many places. This will mean a huge paradigm shift in instructional models, in how our curriculum is written, and the way schools are funded to upgrade and purchase related professional development, and up to date software and hardware. (Fair student funding has placed technology and it's instructional use as an extra that many schools cannot afford)This is not an option to teach children of the 21st century if our goal is graduate more children from our high schools and provide for them the opportunities that they will need to break the chains of poverty, drug addiction etc. that have bound this city for years. If this does not happen it will be the children of the city standing outside on the sidewalks watching as the children of other communities walk into jobs and high tech opportunities in this city because we will have failed to wake up and meet their needs.
Posted by: A Former Teacher | October 21, 2008 8:22 AM
Book recommendation about this topic:
A Whole New Mind:How the Right Brained will Rule the World by Daniel Pink.
Posted by: A Former Teacher | October 21, 2008 8:27 AM