School to career gives high school students a look at a variety of evolving high tech and high skill-based career choices in manufacturing.
If legislation passed in 1994 works as planned, public school students in Rhode Island schools will perform higher in standard national tests of math, language skills, science and art – and businesses will inevitably thrive on the skills, creativity and pride of an exceptionally educated and career-minded workforce.
The 1994 legislation – now the School-to-Career initiative – explicitly links the quality of public school education to the future of Rhode Island’s economy.
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The legislation actually reconnects a link between employment and the classroom that was among the principal reasons behind mass education in the first place: higher performance workers. This is how America will compete in the future, say Career-to-School supporters: not by working harder, but by working smarter.
Among school reformers, the School-to-Career initiative has what’s considered a distinguished pedigree, traceable back to the quality movement of the 1980s and a report, co-authored by policy magnate Ira Magaziner, titled America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages.
Pre-apprenticeship programs offer students structured on-the-job training with related theoretical instruction.
It’s an idea whose time has come – again. Remember the accelerated science programs of the Sputnik era? The computer age came out of those American schools.
Now, as the millennium sneaks up on cat’s feet, at every level – from the Governor’s office to the legislature to the Economic Development Corporation to the state Department of Education – the School-to-Career initiative is doctrine, as essential to school reform as smaller classrooms and teacher competencies.
Now it’s up to the teachers.
On the front lines, where real change has to happen, implementation is moving at a steady tramp, as people adjust. But it’s not a stampede yet.
School-to-Career activities mean teachers have to change their curricula, to incorporate more “real world” content. It means teachers have to re-educate themselves, too, with courses and in “externships,” adult internships at model operations like GlaxoWellcome Biopharm-aceuticals Inc. in West Greenwich.
”GlaxoWellcome is our poster child,” says Lizann Gibson, executive director of the Southern RI Regional Collaborative, administrator for the School-to-Career initiative in that part of the state.
”I am working with biochem teachers in two high schools. The teachers themselves volunteered on their own time. They went to Glaxo. They shadowed. They learned the industry inside and out. Last summer we put together our curricula, using the bioscience industry skills standards. Plus it’s all connected to SCANS.” SCANS stands for the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, the U.S. Labor Depart-ment’s effort “to determine the skills that our young people need to succeed in the world of work.”
“It’s fabulous,” says Lizann. “We’re using industry scenarios in a classroom.”
Recently, kids taught by these curricula went to their first student-designed “bioscience conference.” Lizann Gibson reports: “They could go to a workshop on PowerPoint. They could got to a workshop on HTML. They could go to a workshop on how to calibrate their pH meters. People from Glaxo came over. The CEO talked about the jobs that were available, the salary and the education level that was needed. The kids said, ‘Wow, a $44,000 salary. I could buy two $22,000 cars.'”
Let the cloning begin. Students in Exeter and North Kingstown high schools are now attempting to mimic biopharmaceutical procedures. “Glaxo clones human cells. But we can’t do that in high school,” say Lizann. “We’re going to clone plant cells instead.” It’s not all weird science. Students also have to learn good work habits. “They have to document the procedures, just like the laboratories do at Glaxo.”
To date more than 200 teachers have accepted the state’s School-to-Career challenge, while thousands of students have participated somehow. And not just high school kids considering their options. This year, on Groundhog Day, countless R.I. 8th-graders shadowed parents at work. In fact, Rhode Island is the only state in the country where the School-to-Career legislation mandates parental involvement.
”This is my passion,” says Lizann Gibson, once an English teacher and a former school board member in North Kingstown. “The old way of teaching was content-driven. Learned by rote. School-to-Career teaching is performance-based.” In other words, how well you use your knowledge in real-world situations, a focus reflected in the state initiative’s tagline: “Connecting Learning to Life.”
There’s one thing Lizann wants to be very clear about: “School-to-Career is not a program. It’s an initiative. Programs come and go. Initiatives are sustained. We are building a critical mass of teachers who understand the School-to-Career philosophy. We want to become part of the culture. We need to be locked into the curriculum. We don’t want people to look back and say, ‘Oh, that was what we did in the ’90s.'”
For more information about School-to-Career, you can contact the state School-to-Career office at 222-4922; or contact Lizann Gibson at 782-6540, e-mail: gibsonl@ride.ri.net
School-to-career intiatives are helping students explore career options in a variety of fields including technology, retail and manufacturing. Emloyers can take part in teacher externships, job shadowing, pre-apprenticeship and mentoring programs.
