Don't Job Shadow Me

Thursday is Job Shadow Day, so a few local high school administrators, clearly desperate, have called to ask if some of their students could come watch me work.

Back when I was a dashing foreign correspondent with a safari suit and a big expense account, this might have been an intriguing prospect for the teenagers involved. But now I am an education reporter. The students are likely to find me in a classroom watching a teacher teach (job shadow hell to a student who has to do that all year) or at my desk sending e-mails, making telephone calls and clattering away at my keyboard.

Job shadowing has its place. I have told all those schools they are welcome to send their kids. But watching me Google the proper spelling of "sophisticated" is not the kind of sophisticated (thanks, Google) vocational education that I have been learning about from many readers who responded to my Jan. 10 column about California high school teacher Chris Peters.

Peters challenged my view that high schools should try to prepare as many students as possible for college, and not give students diplomas unless they have passed English, algebra, biology, U.S. history and other courses that prepare them for the demands of higher education. Peters thought this ignored the needs of bright students who didn't want to go to college and yearned instead for top-flight vocational courses that would prepare them for good jobs. I said 15-year-olds were too young to decide they were not going to college. Peters said if high schools insisted they stay on a college track, they would drop out of school altogether.

As usual, readers pointed out my many areas of ignorance. I was told the experts do not call these courses vocational education any more. The proper term is Career and Technical Education, or CTE.

Some people said I was dismissing carpentry, plumbing and electrical work as careers for dummies. On the contrary, I think people in those fields do much more good than I do, taking a paycheck for repeating the research and thoughts of others. Linda Kotulan's e-mail reminded me that a young person in Bangalore, India, could write this column and nobody would know the difference, but our "service providers -- mechanics, plumbers, contractors, electricians, etc. -- cannot be outsourced to other countries and are in no danger of downsizing as anyone attempting to find quality repairmen/women will attest to."

Still, I have interviewed many people who regret not keeping their options open in high school. They were shoved into a vocational track before they had the experience and maturity to determine if that was what they wanted, and had to scramble later to get a college education. Sonia Delgadillo, in her response to the column, said her immigrant parents did not see the point of college and her high school counselors failed to encourage her despite her good test scores. It was not until her mid-thirties that she was able to earn a college degree and become a teacher.

It is much less common for people to tell me they regret sticking with English and math and social studies in high school. Those who decided later that college was not for them find it relatively easy to find a career that doesn't require a bachelor's degree.

But, many readers asked, why can't high schools do both college prep and career prep with the same students? Gary Hoachlander, president of MPR Associates, a firm in Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, Calif., dedicated to education research and school improvement, made the right point. "Without question," Hoachlander said, "vocational education is badly delivered in very many high schools around the country. But so are mathematics, English, science and social studies. The great challenge for high school improvement is figuring out how to do both well, to prepare students for college and career in ways that complement and reinforce each other."

In Michigan, the failure to pull this off has led to a fight over a state school board proposal that all high school students complete a curriculum close to what is required for admission to the University of Michigan. Timothy J. Bartik, president of the Kalamazoo school board, said he and his fellow economist Kevin Hollenbeck, a former president of the Michigan Association of School Boards, agree with Peters that such rules are bad for many students. Making everyone get ready for a four-year liberal arts college, Bartik said, is "unnecessary from a labor market perspective, and would increase high school dropout rates and damage alternative education programs and career and technical education programs."

John Deke said he thought Peters and I were defending mutually unrealistic visions of how high schools should be run -- "a comparison of hypothetical, dream programs, sort of like debating whether Superman could beat Green Lantern in a fair fight." But, he said, the educational realities were on my side, since the best option for students at the moment is to spend high school "learning how to be a productive student" and then go to college or technical school to "learn how to be a productive worker."

This was also the view of Mary Catherine Swanson, the founder of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program for which Peters is the coordinator at Cajon High School. AVID is an upper elementary through high school system that prepares low-income students for college-level courses. "We have proved for over 25 years that almost all students are capable of completing a college preparatory curriculum," she said.