Schools Tackling Job Training Needs : L.A. District Develops Programs for Non-College-Bound Students

If the experts are correct, half of the children in Karen Schain’s sixth-grade class at Valerio Street Elementary School in Van Nuys are on their way to careers as well-paid technicians and managers.

The rest--now eager, curious 11- and 12-year-olds--face a life of work as minimum-wage clerks when they graduate from high school in the year 2001.

As jobs change, warn economists and educators, so must job training. Public schools, once seen as the uniquely American way to instill uniform culture and academic training, are increasingly being judged on their ability to train large numbers of children for a future that may not include college.

“At the present, we are not preparing our kids for the kind of society we are going to live in,” said Carole Kennedy, a board member of the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals.

Based on his own study, James Catterall, a professor of education at UCLA, predicts that in six years more than half of the jobs will be in areas that typically require only a high school education. And although only 25% of available jobs are likely to require a college degree, about 35% of students will have a diploma from a four-year institution.

The statistics fuel a growing debate over college preparation, vocational education and how schools can best prepare students for a future workplace that is uncertain and changing, particularly in Southern California.

“The worst thing in the world is you could have a child who decides not to go to college, but who has no knowledge and no skill in any other area,” Schain said. “Ninety-nine percent of the teachers in (the Los Angeles Unified School District) are trying desperately hard to get these kids ready.”

Earlier this summer, Schain’s sixth-graders sat in their portable classroom, surrounded by brightly colored placards with aphorisms such as “In his dreams, even the smallest kitten can be a tiger!” and thought aloud about what they want to be when they grow up.

Karo, 11, wants to be an engineer because he likes working on his family’s computer. Amalia, 10, wants to be a teacher. Georgiana, 11, wants to be the first woman President. And Luis, 12, wants to be an astronomer.

“I like to study the planets,” Luis said. “They have a lot of moons and some of the moons have radiation and craters.”

In the meantime, they wait for their few minutes on the classroom’s computer and talk about careers in terms of choosing academic paths and exploring the prerequisites of various jobs.

In a bid to keep children on track, the Los Angeles district is pushing more work-based learning programs, said Jim Konantz, the director of career development for the district.

One model used is a federal Department of Labor report that concluded three years ago that schools need to do a better job.

“More than half our young people leave school without the knowledge or foundation required to find and hold a good job,” said the report by the Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills titled “What Work Requires of Schools.” The report stated, “Young people will pay a very high price. They face the bleak prospects of dead-end work interrupted only by periods of unemployment.”

To become competent workers, the study concluded, students need the ability to identify, organize, plan and allocate resources; to work with others; to acquire and use information; to understand, monitor, improve and correct social, organizational and technological systems, and to work with different kinds of technology.

Translating those goals into the classroom involves more work-based learning programs, Konantz said. The idea is that in addition to learning good work habits and interpersonal skills, students can learn practical applications of their classroom work and then bring their real-world experience back to the classroom.

An example is the Youth Service Academy, in which 600 of LAUSD’s most at-risk students participated, Konantz said. The school day was lengthened, curriculum was changed to reflect work skills, and students got real jobs in city departments after class.

After one semester at work, students improved their grades, Konantz said, from 225 grades of A to 400. Failing marks fell from 200 to 100, then virtually disappeared.

Another example, Konantz said, is the creation at 25 high schools of career-cluster programs, or high school majors, such as math, business, engineering, languages, child development, travel-tourism and humanities. Each career cluster offers revamped vocational-type training in which students learn basic skills such as writing and math in the context of learning about the chosen career.

All students need reading and writing skills, Konantz said. But if they can learn those skills by reading technical manuals and writing data summaries, all the better. Sometime around the turn of the century, he said, all Los Angeles students will choose a career cluster by the time they enter ninth grade.

“We have a system that tends to push people along to higher and higher degree levels,” Catterall said. “What’s happened over the last 30 or 40 years is that we’ve raised the credentials required for given jobs--a sort of credential inflation. At the same time, anyone looking at the meaning of a high school diploma or a college degree has expressed dissatisfaction with what those levels tend to produce.”

Not all are convinced that practical education is the definitive answer. Programs such as the career-cluster major, already in place in Oregon high schools, have been criticized as a return to tracking, forcing students to make early decisions that will affect the rest of their lives.

Historians point to the turn of the century, when tracking was first introduced largely in response to growing numbers of immigrant students.

But as industry changed and technology bounded beyond the reach of the schools’ ability to keep up, vocational training increasingly fell into disfavor, Catterall said. By the 1970s and 1980s, policy-makers targeted the vocational/technical track as one in which undertrained teachers taught low-achieving students on out-of-date equipment.

But as an increasingly intolerant economy gives newcomers little breathing room and the level of students’ interest in their education continues to plummet, experts say that well-tuned vocational training ought to be making a comeback.

“Why can’t you teach reading by technological books?” asked Kennedy of the national principals group and the principal of the New Haven Accelerated School in Columbia, Mo. “There isn’t any reason why kids can’t have an integration of curricula where you put science and reading together.”

Most schools are more worried about next year’s achievement tests than about the next century’s work force, said John Hall, an elementary school counselor and the former LAUSD coordinator for elementary school counseling.

Being charged with such a responsibility, he said, is simply overwhelming.

At Valerio, Schain schedules each student for a 15- to 20-minute turn each week on the classroom’s old-model Apple computer, in lieu of computer lab.

She borrows microscopes to show them. She takes them on field trips to area businesses. She asks guest speakers to come in and talk about how they got their jobs.

She has faith, she said, that she sends her children off knowing she did the best she could.

Catterall, however, said he is worried that the best the schools can do might not be enough.

“I’m not particularly optimistic that our educational system will change significantly in the directions that we say and believe are necessary,” he said. “If we do achieve significant change, it will be somewhat unprecedented and a wonderful surprise.”