A Fair Trade in Education

The Los Angeles school board took a small step toward extending its efforts at reform to the district’s floundering high schools last week when it approved a plan to link high school students to the vocational training program the district already runs for adults. The proposal would create mini-high schools of a few hundred students each on the campuses of the district’s 11 occupational centers, which offer training in dozens of careers, from carpentry to culinary arts to computer repair. Students would take a college-prep academic program for part of the day and spend the rest learning skilled trades.

Vocational education has received short shrift in recent years as districts struggled to amp up academic offerings and obsessed over the high-stakes tests now used to measure a school’s success. Concerns about tracking minority students into dumbed-down shop classes, coupled with the high cost of fitting classrooms with modern training equipment, helped cut the number of vocational courses in California schools by 75% over the last two decades. Despite the focus on raising test scores and sending more kids to college, two-thirds of L.A. high school students still fall short of the “proficient” level in reading and math, and one-third drop out before earning diplomas. And the majority of the district’s graduates go straight to work rather than on to higher education.

Studies show that pairing a career-training program with ambitious academic courses not only lowers the dropout rate but improves student performance in English, math and science. “If you can show a kid, ‘This is why you need science or algebra, in order to read these charts or understand these building plans,’ that’s a real motivator,” says Ed Burke, a former history teacher who worked with school board member Jon Lauritzen to draft the vocational education resolution.

Ideally, graduates of the program would be prepared to enter a four-year college or pursue a career in a trade they enjoy. The plan offers other benefits as well: Hosting classes at the adult training centers can help relieve overcrowding on high school campuses, create the kind of small learning communities at the heart of high school reform and provide struggling students with adult role models. “You have students who are acting up in high school and they go to one of these centers and they’re sitting next to someone like their father,” Burke says. “It’s amazing the influence that can have.”

The district already operates a network of career training programs funded by state and federal adult education grants, and more than 65,000 of the district’s 185,000 high school students enrolled in a training center class last year. This proposal, which relies on yet-to-be-approved funding from the school bond measure on the March ballot, builds wisely on that interest. Done right, it can equip graduates with two sets of tools and a new range of choices.