http://m.godvine.com/Teacher-
Listen to the Story
4 min 54 sec
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Interesting podcast on vocational higher ed.
http://www.npr.org/2015/02/02/
http://www.npr.org/2015/02/02/
Economists Say Millennials Should Consider Careers In Trades
Chris Arnold/NPR
This story is part of the New Boom series on millennials in America.
As the economy continues to recover, economists are seeing stark differences between people with high school and college degrees. The unemployment rate is nearly twice as high for Americans with a high school diploma as for those with a four-year college degree or more.
But economists say that doesn't mean everybody needs a four-year degree. In fact, millions of good-paying jobs are opening up in the trades. And some pay better than what the average college graduate makes.
Learning A Trade
When 18-year-old Haley Hughes graduated from high school this past summer, she had good grades; she was on the honor roll every year. So she applied to a bunch of four-year colleges and got accepted to every one of them. But she says, "I wasn't excited about it really, I guess."
So instead of going that route, Hughes is taking a different path: an apprenticeship through the big New England power utility company NStar. In one of her recent classes at an NStar facility outside Boston, the classroom work was actually more exciting than some people might like.
Courtesy of Earl Benders
Lara Allison is one of the instructors. On a recent morning, she was teaching Hughes and the other utility worker apprentices how to protect themselves if something bad happens while they're down under a manhole cover in an underground electrical substation.
"An arc flash — that's the thing we worry the most about," Allison says.
An arc flash is a highly energized bolt of electricity, an explosion of electricity in a sense, that jumps from an energy source to another spot that's grounded or that the energy can flow into. Allison tells the students that if they wear the wrong clothing and they get hit by an arc flash, their clothes can catch on fire and get seared into their skin. "It's really, really hot," she says.
On her apprenticeship, Hughes already has been down working in those underground substations.
"I loved it, it was great," she says.
Hughes says another thing that's great is that taking this path into the high-skilled trades is a lot cheaper than a four-year college would have been.
$40,000 Vs. $2,400 Per Year
"The student loans would be ridiculous," Hughes says during a break from class. "The schools I was looking at ... were like $40,000 a year." In the long run she thought that was just too much.
By comparison, NStar is partnering with nearby Bunker Hill Community College to offer students the opportunity to earn a two-year associate degree. Hughes has some scholarships and NStar pays some of the cost, so for Hughes, the price tag works out to about $1,200 a semester. Hughes says she's been paying that herself, and so she expects to graduate with no debt.
Hughes is also getting a lot of on-the-job training and taking a wide range of courses at the community college: English, math, a computer science course and even a psychology group dynamics class. Then there are the classes directly related to power utility work: DC theory, AC theory, physics, engineering and business etiquette. Not bad for $1,200 a semester.
'Averages Lie'
After graduating, 90 percent of the students get jobs with the power utility NStar (which is in the process of changing its name to Eversource Energy). Starting base pay is about $58,000 a year.
On average, it is certainly true that people with a four-year college degree make more money than those with a two-year degree or less. But there is plenty of nuance behind that truth.
"Averages lie," says Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
He says the problem with those averages is that people who work at RadioShack or Target get lumped in with master carpenters and electricians.
"You can get a particular skill in a particular field and make more than a college graduate," he says. For example, he says the average electrician makes $5,000 a year more than the average college graduate. And the country is going to need a lot more skilled tradespeople.
Related NPR Stories
"The baby-boom workers are retiring and leaving lots of openings for millennials," Carnevale says. He says there are 600,000 jobs for electricians in the country today, and about half of those will open up over the next decade. Carnevale says it is a big opportunity for that millennial generation born between 1980 and 2000.
With so many boomers retiring from the trades, the U.S. is going to need a lot more pipe-fitters, nuclear power plant operators, carpenters, welders, utility workers — the list is long. But the problem is not enough young people are getting that kind of training.
Not Enough Training
Hughes says she chose to work in the trades, in large part, because she went to a vocational high school. A lot of her friends are going into the trades. She got comfortable there with wiring light switches and doing basic electrical work and learning about the industry. But there aren't nearly as many of these types of programs in high schools as there used to be.
"We made a mistake," Carnevale says. "Back in 1983, there was the 'Nation at Risk' report in which, quite rightly, we all were appalled at the quality of education in America."
After that, he says, most high schools focused on academics and getting students ready for college. For a lot of parents, they wanted their kids to have a four-year degree. But Carnevale says, in the process "we basically obliterated the modernization of the old vocational education programs and they've been set aside."
Carnevale says we should bring those programs back and we need to be preparing a lot more young people for good, well-paying jobs in the trades. And he says that means we need better training programs at high schools and community colleges in partnership with businesses in scores of different industries around the country.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Changing the World
Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen get real about the issues America has their generations facing.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
DANTE RAMOS GLOBE COLUMNIST
The vocational revolution
IN THE topsy-turvy world of American education in 2015, it’s remarkable when a teenager from an affluent suburb finishes high school with practical skills.
Eighteen-year-old Jack Gallagher comes from Needham, the kind of town that families seek out for its public education system, and he grew up on a block abundant with high-powered professionals. But by his account, he was always the odd kid out. So after middle school, he enrolled at Minuteman High, a regional public vocational school in Lexington, and chose the horticulture and landscaping track.
There’s a powerful expectation — call it middle-class autopilot — that kids from decent homes will take a standard college prep curriculum in high school and then move onto four-year colleges. Somehow, it’s been OK for burned-out lawyers to turn to carpentry or organic farming, but lots of upscale college-educated parents would wrinkle their noses should their children skip college and go straight to handcrafted furniture and artisanal Brie.Gallagher was among a small focus group of students (selected, I should note, by school staff) whom I met at Minuteman last week. His ambitions now include sustainable farming, and he hopes to get a degree from the agriculture school at UMass. But he and his classmates also have training that could prove useful immediately upon graduation, or in finding lucrative side jobs in college. In the horticulture program, students learn to operate tractors and Bobcats, and they earn industry certifications that make them immediately more attractive to prospective employers.
Yet the dynamics are changing amid high debt loads for recent college graduates and proliferation of jobs that require technical proficiency but not a bachelor’s degree. In these circumstances, vocational high schools — long scorned as out-of-district placements for troubled students — offer a model that the rest of the education establishment should emulate.
In recent years, economists and tuition-paying parents alike are asking whether the costs of college have escalated beyond the value of the degrees. Meanwhile, even as the Obama administration recently proposed free access to community colleges, it’s raising the pressure on four-year colleges and universities that leave graduates with big debts and no prospects.
In December, the US Department of Education issued a draft plan to rate schools that take federal financial aid. The criteria — loan repayment rates, graduation rates, and accessibility to disadvantaged students — reflect the legitimate concerns of a government that shovels billions of dollars into higher education every year.
The ethos at Minuteman differs in one key respect from traditional schools.
Colleges and universities have reacted with alarm, insisting that academic quality can’t be captured in such crude terms. By any objective standard, though, some degrees from some institutions provide students little benefit at significant cost.
Both four-year colleges and the high school curriculums that lay the groundwork for them are built to keep students’ career options open, for better or worse, well into their 20s. The ethos at vocational schools like Minuteman differs in one key respect: Through the hands-on experiences that these schools offer, students must reckon early on with their own talents and needs.
Self-awareness goes a long way. Gallagher, the senior studying horticulture, was initially attracted to the biotechnology track but figured out that he prefers working outdoors, digging in dirt, and jumping in holes. In the school’s engineering program, Julio Esparza came to realize he enjoys making things that are imaginable but don’t yet exist. Now a senior, he hopes to become an industrial and product designer.
Historically, the knock on vocational high schools was that they steered teenagers — often poor kids, minority kids, and kids with special needs — into low-skill jobs and denied them the academic training to choose a different path. Today, Emma Clemente, a senior in Minuteman’s environmental technology program, has better options. Because of the certifications her program offers, she’s qualified for a job at a water treatment plant, but she’s applying to four-year schools and hopes to study aquatics and fisheries science.
Because of the increasing technical sophistication of blue-collar fields and the advent of high-stakes tests such as the MCAS, vocational schools have been forced to beef up their academics. The calendar at Minuteman devotes a week to vocational instruction, and the next to traditional classroom courses, which run the gamut from reading to AP English and AP Calculus. On MCAS, students score as proficient or higher at rates approaching the state average — noteworthy for a school where about half of students are classified as having learning disabilities or other issues requiring special interventions.
For certain teens, a hands-on exposure to soil science or hydrogeology is bound to feel more meaningful than a richer helping of literature in the classroom. Either way, students benefit when they have to confront their own strengths and weaknesses — and when adults confront their preconceptions about what an education looks like.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Happy New Year!
I re-read an article about the "11Habits of An Effective Teacher" written by Carrie Lam. The following five are my favorite.
2. EMBRACES CHANGE.
3. SPREADS POSITIVITY.
4. FINDS INSPIRATION.
5. MAKES A DIFFERENCE.
With the new year upon us, let's reflect on these habits and remember that "teachers need to adopt a growth mindset, one that allows them, in Darwinian terms, to easily adapt to the new circumstances without getting stuck in ruts and grooves."
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
This is a fabulous resource. Please take the time to watch the video.
A Principal's Perspective: Collaboration and Reflection
How do you create a collaborative school environment? In this video, Ida Price Middle School principal Deb Negrete and math coach Sally Keyes discuss Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and how to support reflective practitioners. See how their focus on problem solving, critical thinking, and formative instruction has increased student participation and comprehension.
http://educore.ascd.org/Resource/Video/4066b890-78f0-49ec-ad94-11a3824749fd
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