Though it sounded like the same old, same old to me, Santiago Jackson couldn't help but smile. He loves that line.
Until it became Brewer's mantra, "I hadn't heard the words 'career-ready' coming from a superintendent for a long time," says
Jackson and his colleagues are in the midst of putting together a blueprint to increase and improve the delivery of career-oriented classes to LAUSD's vast student body. By June or July, they hope to have mapped out the district's current hodgepodge of offerings in this area and developed a plan for better distributing these resources.
Although it hasn't gotten much attention, their effort could prove as significant as anything anybody is doing to try to shore up not only the long-term health of our schools but also our city's economy and, in turn, the very fabric of our society.
"There really are important opportunities here," says UCLA professor William Ouchi, the author of "Making Schools Work."
It wasn't very long ago that putting kids on a career track was frowned upon by many folks — and for good reason. For years, vocational education was little more than a dumping ground for children of color, including those who should have been encouraged to attend four-year universities.
As a result, these programs "fell off the table in the late '70s and '80s and went missing for almost 25 years," says Jackson, who himself took up the printing trade at L.A.'s Manual Arts High School in the 1960s.
Some continue to worry about stereotyping students and unfairly curtailing their options. Yet when done right, today's career curricula are a smooth blend of technical and academic training.
Students still have to master core subjects that give them the chance to go on to college (at least community college), if that's what they eventually choose. But, where appropriate, the coursework is tied directly to their career goals. Electives, meanwhile, provide plenty of chances to gain hands-on experience — to actually stick your head under the hood of a car, say, or drive a nail into drywall.
By getting a taste of the real world, students often begin to make a link between what they're learning today and what they could be earning tomorrow. For a teenager who might otherwise be bored and jaded and ready to drop out of school, research indicates, this connection can be a powerful motivator to stay and study.
"I see it every day — how self-esteem is raised," says Wendy Ramirez, the principal of LAUSD's
This week, she and I strolled the campus, which was teeming with activity. In one room, students bused in from Lincoln High were poring over the carcasses of broken computers, getting ready to fix them. Would-be automotive technicians (nobody calls them "mechanics" anymore because the work is mainly computerized) huddled in a garage. In another spot, a student eagerly scanned a flier advertising a new class on solar-panel installation.
The skills center serves both minors and adults. But the idea for this facility, along with 10 others that the district has, is to start focusing more and more on the needs of ninth- to 12th-graders.
Next year, 350 pupils from Roosevelt High will be relocated here and taught a series of classes that revolve, in large part, around environmental science.
This is one of 178 so-called small learning communities and small schools — most of them with career-related themes — approved by LAUSD in the last nine months or so. "We've begun to get some real momentum," says David Rattray, president of Unite-LA, an affiliate of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce that fosters workforce development initiatives.
In addition, LAUSD has 79 special career academies — essentially schools within a school — up and running.
The push by the district is part of a broader movement sweeping the nation and the state. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a product of a vocational education in
The level of interest, compared with five years ago, "is just amazing," says Rebecca Baumann, an aide to Assemblywoman Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley), who has written a measure that would direct as much as $1 billion annually toward voc ed.
For all this, though, tremendous challenges remain. Statewide, there is a shortage of trained vocational instructors and, despite the governor's enthusiasm and the bevy of bills being considered, not enough money in the pipeline. School standards need to be revamped so that students (and teachers) are judged on reaching milestones in career education, as well as academic achievement.
Locally, Jackson and his team must strike the right balance between centrally organizing LAUSD's fragmented vocational operations and not suffocating them inside the bureaucracy.
The district may also need to allow for more flexible hiring rules to attract people with strong business backgrounds to its faculty — something that may not sit well with the teachers' union. Jon Lauritzen, the biggest advocate for career education on the school board, could be a key to making this happen. "Everybody says Jon is a tool of the union," notes his chief of staff, Ed Burke. But he says that Lauritzen has opposed the union in the past and is determined to "lead the way" on this.
More, too, needs to be done to involve local businesses. "I don't think we've reached out" nearly enough,
And all of this must be moved on quickly. At present, about 45,000 LAUSD high school students are on a career-education path. That's far too few in a district with more than 207,000 high school students and a dropout rate that hovers between 33% and 50% (depending on who's doing the counting).
It won't be cheap to get there.
A couple of weeks ago, after I wrote about L.A.'s disappearing middle class, a number of readers contacted me and suggested that vocational education could be a valuable tool to help stem this alarming trend. I agree.
The question, in the end, is whether LAUSD is up to the job.
Before I left the skills center, I stopped for a few minutes and watched a couple of dozen students clad in yellow hard hats training to be power-line workers. This is one of the center's showcase courses — and rightly so.
Graduates earn $70,000 or more out of the gate. The occupation takes brawn and brains — the strength and stamina to clamber up a giant pole and dangle in the air, and the ability to problem-solve (by using Ohm's law, geometry and algebra).
As a Southern California Edison manager helped guide one student heavenward, I got the feeling that this was a metaphor for something. But what?
Has LAUSD finally figured out a way for students to reach new heights? Or will all this turn out to be pie in the sky?
• Rick Wartzman is an
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