Tag Archives: vocational education

Now that the holiday season has passed, students across the nation are settling back into their school routines. Despite the snow outside, for many college and high school students summer is fast approaching and with it the desire to gain professional skills through an apprenticeship or internship. These students recognize that industry experience is vital to a complete and well-rounded education. To back their claim, the Colorado Workforce Development Council has released its newest Talent Pipeline Report. The report’s number one recommendation?   “Accelerate and Deepen partnerships between education, business and industry to develop Colorado talent.”   That’s right, just as my friend Connan Houser at the Independence Institute claimed, It’s time for more public-private cooperation in education. I wish my school would consider this idea–I could design buildings for a company using Legos or help the accounting department with my abacus.   As exemplified by one of the movements leading enterprises, the effort to vitalize the relationship between business and education in Colorado is proving to be successful.   CareerWise, a Colorado nonprofit apprenticeship program, has had over half of its partner companies renew and agree to bring aboard a second group of students this coming fall. It has […]

As most of my readers know, there are few things I love more than field trips. Education policy is great, interesting stuff, but it sometimes becomes too easy to lose oneself in the spreadsheets and numbers and studies and… you get the point. But education is about kids, not statistics or esoteric policy arguments. That’s why it’s so important for us edu-wonks to get out there and see education in action—especially in places where districts are forging ahead on paths designed to provide more options to their students. With all that in mind, I took a very cool field trip this week to St. Vrain Valley School District’s Career Development Center (CDC) in Longmont. If that sounds familiar to those of you who follow the work of the Independence Institute Education Policy Center, it’s because my policy friend Ross Izard mentioned the center in “Altering Courses,” his most recent private school profile. The profile takes a look at Crossroads School in Longmont, an alternative private school that serves kids who haven’t been able to find a good educational fit anywhere else. Crossroads has an agreement with St. Vrain under which its students can attend classes at the CDC. Very cool. […]

You probably assume a prolific blogging prodigy like myself eventually will head to a prestigious 4-year university — maybe even with Doogie Howser-like potential. But what if when I turn 16 some day my heart is set on a career as a plumber or a chef? You wouldn’t deny me that, would you? Writing for the America’s Future Foundation, Liam Julian of the Hoover Institution says we could take a big bite out of our high school dropout problem by engaging more students in vocational education programs — particularly those that integrate academics directly with students’ career aspirations, providing greater relevance to many teens (H/T Heritage Insider): Imagine a 17-year-old who does not want to attend college (or at least not right away); who finds parsing Macbeth maddeningly immaterial; who yearns to learn a practical skill and put it to use; who feels his personal strengths are being ignored and wasted; who is annoyed by his school’s lackluster teachers, classroom chaos, and general atmosphere of indifference. Too often, such a pupil has no other options. He has no educational choice.