How do you know a student is ready for the workplace? What does it take, for starters: good writing, math skills, the ability to follow directions, creative problem-solving? Is it safe to say anyone with an SAT score over 1,200 will do fine? How about a B+ grade-point average?
Rhode Island education leaders have been trying to answer these questions for years, and they’ve implemented extensive reforms, using the hands-on, work-focused approach of the National Center on Education and the Economy’s New Standards.
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But despite all the effort, Education Commissioner Peter McWalters told the state Economic Policy Council at a June 3 meeting that most students still can’t seem to apply their skills to the real world. In state exams, youths who score in the 95th percentile on basic skills “drop to the 40th percentile” when asked, say, to solve a word problem requiring applied geometry skills.
A new wave of reforms is focusing on that issue, McWalters said. But to really get to the crucial question – how students will do at real-life jobs – schools need to hear from employers.
So as youths across Rhode Island start completing high school portfolios, senior projects and other tasks to demonstrate their skills and knowledge, state officials plan to take the students’ work to businesses, to ask: “Is this work-ready?”
If employers really want to help, McWalters added, they can take it even one step further, by evaluating students directly at oral presentations, to help the schools set benchmarks.
That’s how students are assessed at the state-owned Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Centers (the Met School), an alternative school that, McWalters said, has done more than any other in Rhode Island to create a “real-world connection” for youths.
Instead of traditional classes, the Met gives students individual learning plans based on their own interests, with in-depth projects and internships and mentors to expose them to the workplace.
“We use the world” for teaching, Met Director Dennis Littky told EPC members. And every nine weeks, the world comes in to evaluate students: Instead of traditional tests, each youth must give a one-hour presentation to an audience of teachers, parents and outside guests – a test not only of their knowledge, but of verbal skills, poise and confidence.
Met students do not, for the most part, do well at standardized tests, which critics see as evidence that the school doesn’t really work. But Littky said the Met’s focus is much closer to employers’ priorities.
“Employers don’t ask, how did you do in the 11th-grade No Child Left Behind test, or what were your SAT scores,” Littky said. And though 80 percent of the Met’s students are poor, last year it had a 94 percent graduation rate – compared with 57 percent for Providence schools – and all of its students were admitted to college.
“We say what we care about is how are kids are doing when they’re 30 years old,” Littky said.
It’s not a figure of speech; the Met has a full-time staffer devoted to tracking its graduates.
No one expects all of Rhode Island’s schools to become like the Met – Littky himself acknowledges that old-style schools work fine for some students, and said, “I think what’s needed is choice for people.”
Money is the biggest obstacle, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri said. Not only is it expensive to open brand-new schools or radically transform old ones, he said, but competition for limited resources has created a major tension between mainstream schools and new ones.
“You can’t dismantle the existing system while you’re trying to create options,” Carcieri said. In fact, the governor’s 2006 budget has been criticized for boosting charter school funds by $4.1 million, and Met funding by $1.6 million, while increasing aid to districts by only 2.7 percent.
But McWalters said some of what the Met is doing – and in a different way, the state-owned Davies Career & Technical High School as well – needs to happen “at every school,” and employers are crucial in that.
“We’ve got to get more kids into internships that aren’t just feel-good, spend-a-day-at-a-business things,” McWalters said.
