- The mental image most people have of career and technical education is taken directly from a mid-century General Motors training video: Enthusiastic young men in denim replacing serpentine belts and laboring over alternators. Failing that, the scenario might take place in a wood shop or a welding station. But trainees at Willy’s Café—a student-run coffee shop in a Willamette, Oregon, high school profiled this week on NPR—are picking up a different set of professional skills. The program is one of an assortment directed by the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA), a venerable vocational initiative that specializes in retail and marketing training, and its student-workers are there to absorb the basics of professional comportment. As part-time baristas, bank tellers, and graphic designers, they’re acquiring the “soft skills” of customer service that will make them valuable to future employers, especially if they choose to supplement them with a college degree or two-year certificate. Even better, they don’t have to deal with engine grease on their overalls.
- The fight over Common Core was basically a local foofaraw blown into a national story by political opportunists. In case you’re just coming back from a half-decade mission to Saturn: The standards were adopted by state legislatures as a means of improving instruction, but they expressly left it to district- and school-level practitioners to decide how to reach the more rigorous benchmarks. Now we’re starting to see stories like this one, from Ohio’s out-of-the-way Mercer County, where superintendents and principals are approvingly reporting that the United Nations’ black helicopters have stayed grounded and local control has been preserved. Now that Common Core is pretty much here to stay, there’s something amusing in hearing folks finally discover for themselves the good news that its advocates have been trying to spread since President Obama’s first term (“Nope, turns out it’s actually not a curriculum. Or an education takeover masterminded by the One World Government, actually”). On second thought, nah—none of this is funny at all. I’ll take the last few years of my life back, please.
- For such a carefree band of swashbuckling choice advocates, we at Fordham have always been fairly tough on online charter schools. That’s because a whole lot of virtual charters—and we’re not alone in this discovery—kinda suck. Our own report on Ohio’s troubled crop of e-schools is due out next month, but most observers agree that the sector is plagued by chronic academic underperformance that leaves its students years behind their traditional public school counterparts. We shouldn’t close the door to online schools’ potential just yet, though; online instruction is an approach with natural appeal for thousands of students with irregular home lives, health complications, or highly mobile families. In Education Next, Tom Vander Ark and Greg Richmond give a good summation of the lousy status quo and a few suggestions on how to improve matters. In a world where virtual charters obviously aren’t going anywhere for the time being, we could do worse than heed their suggestions.
