High School Reform

High School Reform

School-to-Career Programs with

Diploma at the end of High-School Education

For too many students, our high schools are not working. Many drop out. Others stick it out for the diploma, but feel that they are just marking time. Too many emerge without the high-level academic skills we say all should have and without adequate preparation for further education and successful careers. This is the unfortunate but natural product of a century old high school system based on the premise that only some students can learn to high standards.  

Vocational education in particular has long been criticized for channelling some students -- particularly low-income and minority students -- away from academic achievement in return for a promise of specific technical skills that too often are rendered obsolete by rapid changes in labor markets, job requirements, and youths' career goals. Moreover, in low-income communities, the problem is not just inadequate skills but insufficient jobs that use those skills. On the other hand, if infused with high academic content, vocational education and school-to-career programs have a great deal to offer schools. Teaching methods traditionally used in vocational education -- active learning, students' demonstration of skills through a project, and coaching relationships, for example -- are at the heart of what we now know, from educational research, is good academic instruction for students.

Implications for Career-Related Learning in High School

The start of the 21st century will signal the beginning of wide-scale consideration of competency- or proficiency-based assessment systems in education. While new initiatives have been debated in the policy arena for the past decade, these types of assessments continue to gather support for many reasons. First, proficiency-based assessments are more in alignment with constructivist approaches to learning which are growing in popularity at the high school level. Second, the general public, employers, and college admissions officers continue to express distress at the lack of knowledge and skills that high school graduates demonstrate based on national and international measures of learning and achievement. The global economy has shifted the dialogue from concern about students' performance on norm-referenced, conventional paper-and-pencil assessments to criterion-referenced measures of a set of "new basics" that include students' use of technologies and soft skills such as problem solving, teamwork, and effective interpersonal communications. Finally, the widespread acceptance of student learning outcomes as the core measures of educational quality suggests that proficiency-oriented assessment will be central to policy and program improvement efforts.

When we try to move toward competency- or proficiency-based assessments, alignment issues are fundamentally important yet highly problematic. Educational standards or competencies must be both vertically and horizontally aligned. The central concern of the curriculum articulation dimension (vertical integration) is the degree to which standards and performance benchmarks for graduation from high school are similar to admission requirements for college. There is widespread agreement that high schools need to prepare all students for some form of postsecondary education, yet the extent to which high school certificates and college admissions portfolios should portray similar or dissimilar competencies and / or performance benchmarks remains an open question.

Integrating Vocational and Academic Education

In high school education, preparation for work immediately after high school and preparation for post-secondary education have traditionally been viewed as incompatible. Work-bound high-school students end up in vocational education tracks, where courses usually emphasize specific skills with little attention to underlying theoretical and conceptual foundations. College-bound students proceed through traditional academic discipline-based courses, where they learn English, history, science, mathematics, and languages, with only weak and often contrived references to applications of these skills in the workplace or in the community outside the school. To be sure, many vocational teachers do teach underlying concepts, and many academic teachers motivate their lessons with examples and references to the world outside the classroom. But these enrichments are mostly frills, not central to either the content or pedagogy of secondary school education.

Traditional schooling has tended to isolate skills and teaching. An extremely solid barrier has often separated academic from vocational courses. We explicitly propose that schools should fully integrate vocational and academic education.  

Integration is a powerful tool to help students gain advanced academic competencies by showing them how academic ideas work in the real world and why they are important. It enables students to understand many different types of information and to use that information to solve problems and make decisions. It is also vital to ensuring that vocational education does not serve as a second-class track within schools, and within society. When vocational students come out of programs with basic and advanced academic skills, they can choose from a much wider array of education and work opportunities.  

The key features of integration are: 

• encompassing all of the academic areas -- math, reading, writing, science, and social studies,

• including both basic and advanced skills in each of those academic areas, and

• teaching academic knowledge and skills in a vocational context, not just in a vocational education class.

Integration is not reached by simply identifying what academic competencies are already addressed in a vocational program. Nor is it accomplished by teaching one or two competencies from each academic area. It requires taking the content of academic and vocational curricula and developing methods to align, sequence, and mutually reinforce academic and vocational concepts and skills.  

The ultimate goal is to achieve full integration of the entire vocational curriculum with the entire academic curriculum. Integration should be through a sequential course of study leading to both academic and occupational competencies. 

Successful integration of academic and vocational education is very closely related to, and aided by, strong instruction in all aspects of an industry. Focusing on all aspects of an industry provides a very rich and open-ended framework for bringing in the full range of academics in exploring all the issues that have confronted that industry. It helps avoid the danger of seeing integration as a form of "dumbing down" academics to teach only the academic skills needed to prepare students for a very narrowly defined occupation.

All Aspects of the Industry

It is proposed that students be given a comprehensive perspective and range of skills across an industry. It is required that school curriculum "provide students with strong experience in and understanding of all aspects of the industry students are preparing to enter", and identify eight aspects in particular (which can encompass the following types of knowledge and skills):  

"planning" (e.g., examined both at the industry level and at the firm level; various forms of ownership, including cooperatives and worker ownership; relationship of the industry to economic, political, and social context).  

"management" (e.g., methods typically used to manage enterprises over time within the industry; methods for expanding and diversifying workers' tasks and broadening worker involvement in decisions).  

"finance" (e.g., ongoing accounting and financial decisions; different methods for raising capital to start or expand enterprises).  

"technical and production skills" (e.g., specific production techniques; alternative methods for organizing the production work, including methods which diversify and rotate workers' jobs).  

"underlying principles of technology" (e.g., integrated study across the curriculum of the mathematical, scientific, social, and economic principles that underlie the technology).  

"labor issues" (e.g., worker rights and responsibilities; labor unions and labor history; methods for expanding workers' roles).  

"community issues" (e.g., the impact of the enterprise and the industry on the community, and the community's impact on and involvement with the enterprise).  

"Health, safety, and environmental issues" (e.g., in relation to both the workers and the larger community).

Approach

There could be many possibilities to use work-related applications both to teach academic skills and to prepare students for college. One approach is to organize high school programs around broad industrial or occupational areas, such as health, agriculture, commerce, hospitality, manufacturing, transportation, or the arts. These broad areas offer many opportunities for wide-ranging curricula in all academic disciplines. They also offer opportunities for collaborative work among teachers from different disciplines. Specific skills can still be taught in this format but in such a way as to motivate broader academic and theoretical themes.  

Problem 

Despite the many possibilities of innovative initiatives that suggest the potential for an integrated view, the legacy of the duality between vocational and academic education and the low status of work-related studies in high school may continue to influence education and education reform. In general, programs that deviate from traditional organization and format may still be viewed with suspicion by parents and teachers focused on three-year  / four-year college.

Final Solution

After discussing the afore given facts and status of secondary school education in India , we conclude with final suggestions to tackle  

•     We need to vocatinalize the curriculum from 8'Th standard onwards with a combination of traditional subjects taught in an integrated fashion and vocational subjects.

•     All the vocational subjects should be designed to recognize skills used in the workplace. They should show that someone can actually do a job, and not simply that they know how to do it in theory.

•     Depending on various situations, student should have different qualification and training needs. The qualifications are proposed at 5 levels, starting from 8'Th standard onwards till 12'Th standard. The following explanations may give a general idea of the level of qualification proposed:

      o Level 1 qualification – 8'Th Standard: This is an introductory award for those new to the area and cover routine              tasks or basic knowledge and understanding.

      o Level 2 – 9'Th Standard qualifications are for those with some knowledge of and ability in the area and                        acknowledge individual responsibility.

      o  Level 3 – 10'Th Standard qualifications recognize complex work involving supervisory ability.

      o  Level 4 – 11'Th Standard demands specialist or technical expertise.

      o  Level 5 – 12'Th Standard requires the application of complex principles and techniques involving responsibility             for human and material resources.

 •   Some of the representative areas of expertise in which the qualifications could be offered are as follows:

 1.       Agriculture, horticulture and animal c are

2.       Business, administration, commerce and management

3.       Catering and hospitality

4.       Construction

5.       Creative crafts

6.       Customer service and security

7.       Education, training and development

8.       Electrical and electronic engineering

9.       Furniture

10.   Gas, electricity, water industries

11.   Hairdressing and beauty

12.   Health, Care, Early Years and Community Services

13.   Information technology

14.   Manufacturing

15.   Media and photography

16.   Motor vehicle servicing and repair

17.   Process Industries

18.   Production and maintenance engineering

19.   Retail and distribution

20.   Sport and recreation

21.   Textiles, clothing and footwear

22.   Travel and tourism

•     The core idea is that Diploma in Engineering, ITI qualifications are abolished, instead they are built into the school education till higher secondary.

•     Those students who wish to branch out can branch out at any level starting 8'Th standard onwards at any level starting level being 1.

•     Those students who wish to pursue college education can do so without having to face any problems.

•     In this scheme of things there are a few basic provisions which should remain to gain the full advantage of this scheme

•    From level 1 to level 3 the choice of area of expertise should not change.

•    The choice of level can change at level 4 and should not change till level 5

•    However, while admitting the students to further course of studies, the students' choice of area of expertise                should not become a limiting factor.

•    The student should be able to choose any branch of study after finishing standard 12'Th.

Benefits

There are several benefits expected from this scheme of things 

•     Every student learning in high schools will be equipped with practical education, which can help him / her to earn a decent living, in case they cannot continue to study further.

•    If successfully implemented, this scheme will reduce the load on higher education, as the students will be gainfully employed or self employed by the time they finish there 12'th standard education. Hence, the quality of higher education may also improve.

•    All the ITI's and Diploma colleges in the state may start offering education from 8'Th standard till 12'th standard instead of offering ITI or Diploma. This way the intake of these colleges / institutions may improve, which otherwise currently is suffering. This will also make available several additional institutions for school education, with ready infrastructure in one stroke.

•    In earlier efforts of vocationalization of education in the state of Maharashtra the efforts fell flat, as they were exclusive efforts to either vocational education or academic oriented education. In this scheme of things this anomaly is removed which itself is a major benefit.