Teacher Tea
Is "College for All" Still the Answer? A New Perspective
In Education Next’s "Career and Technical Education for All," authors Michael B. Horn and Daniel Curtis explore the need for a shift in education towards a more career-focused approach. They point to the limitations of previous "for All" movements, like "College for All" and "Computer Science for All," which often fell short of their career preparation promises.
The authors discuss several programs that are successfully bridging the gap between K-12 education and the workforce. These programs (such as Big Picture Learning, World of Work, and CAPS) offer students opportunities to explore various career paths through real-world experiences and mentorship from industry professionals.
By partnering with businesses and industries, these programs provide students with practical skills and knowledge, which ultimately enhances their employability and future career prospects. They also help students make informed decisions about their educational and career paths, and that makes for a more personalized and meaningful learning experience.
It’s also important to demonstrate the potential benefits of such partnerships to employers: increased workforce capacity, community engagement, and a stronger local talent pool.
Students will need certain skills to become successful as adults, and many of these skills are quite subtle. They require long-term investment in order to fully develop; for instance, critical thinking and interpersonal communication become stronger with consistent reinforcement over time, and as the student matures. Teachers have become accustomed to the regular refrains from their students: what they’re learning “doesn’t matter” or they “won’t use it.” Career-centric education may very well be a remedy for this, but it comes with a cost: more time spent on career education means less time spent on core academics, so career readiness may come at the expense of academic competence. Teachers often find themselves stuck in a precarious position between teaching academic content and cultivating student engagement that reflects their interests. These two things are not always the same, and not always in alignment. And then there is the bigger conundrum of what even constitutes a relevant skill. Who gets to decide what a given student will necessarily need, and who gets to determine what matters, particularly when student interests and goals can range widely?
How can we prepare students for the future, when their potential is undiscovered and highly unique? A more career-centric approach might provide more individuality and direct connections to the real world.