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Learning Matters: Education tends to get overlooked during campaign talk

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Given all the recent campaign rhetoric about financial insecurity and under-employment in our country, I’m struck by how little has been said about public education — beyond the cost of college tuition — as if education were unrelated to jobs or the economy.

There are plenty of reasons to explain education’s absence from debate topics, starting with the century-long separation of academics and workforce preparation. It took a long time for schools to become worlds of their own, in which successful students were set apart for continued, post-secondary academics while workforce preparation was left to the “non-college bound.”

Outside the relatively small circle of long-committed career technical education teachers, academia and workforce worlds are only beginning to merge again in the public education consciousness. It’s fair to say most students and their parents — not to mention their teachers — still view school work in terms of “purely academic” grades and credits rather than life skills or career development.

Another reason education hasn’t been a hot-button economic issue could be its reputation as a long-term strategy with no easy fixes. People prefer quick results: better jobs now. Adding to the tepid interest is the fact that career-technical education — science, technology, engineering, arts and math, incorporated in project- and-work-based learning — is an issue with broad support, not an attention-getter for campaigns.

Lost in the campaign dramas are the positive outcomes beginning to appear as a result of bipartisan legislation — the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act — that is expanding career education to help individuals overcome barriers to better employment.

Supporting both statewide efforts and local partnerships of schools, colleges, nonprofits, and businesses, the legislation is helping shift career education to the forefront of discussions on economic growth and development.

The Adult Education Block Grant, or AEBG, consortium is one such partnership beginning to make a difference in Glendale. Led by the Garfield Campus of Glendale Community College, the “partnership for a strong California workforce” includes the Glendale Unified School District, the Verdugo Workforce Development Board, the Department of Rehabilitation, the Glendale Youth Alliance, Glendale Public Library, Armenian Relief Society, International Rescue Committee and the Glendale Communitas Initiative.

With support from the grant, students at the Garfield campus will have the opportunity to meet with a representative from the Department of Public Social Services. They’ll also have access to case managers from the Verdugo Job Center for help with job searches.

The Glendale Youth Alliance will send representatives to assist with work-readiness training for out-of-school youth ages 16-24 and to link students to on-the-job training where it is available. The Department of Rehabilitation will provide information and services to students with disabilities.

English-as-a-second-language and adult literacy classes at partner sites will also be expanded with help from the grant.

Garfield’s Student Success Center, under the direction of Maria Czech, will soon be expanding its services to include college and career preparation classes for adults with disabilities.

The center, according to its brochure, already serves approximately 1,200 students a semester, providing computer-aided instruction, one-on-one tutoring, small-group instruction and individualized instruction for students wanting to improve their basic skills, prepare for a GED or complete a high school diploma.

Scott Anderle, Glendale Unified’s assistant director of student support services and the district’s representative to the AEBG consortium, shared with me his gratitude for the relationships established during the time spent in consortium meetings and conferences.

“I’d never met Maria Czech,” he said, and now he’s working with her to keep track of students the district refers to the Garfield campus. Czech, for her part, said she looks forward to more meetings with high school counselors, like the one Anderle arranged recently, to keep them apprised of programs available to their students.

Meanwhile, through a partnership with the Glendale Community College main campus, AEBG will continue to support the Uniquely Abled Academy as it begins a second session for individuals with high-functioning autism, “training people with special skills for specialized needs in the workforce.”

Candidates and voters may not talk much about the economic developments underway in education, but they ought to know about them, so they can share the information with the people who need help.

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JOYLENE WAGNER is a past member of the Glendale Board of Education. Email her at jkate4400@aol.com.

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