Vocational education: a hands-on approach

Whether it’s higher education, secondary or primary education, we know we need to be training the next generation so young people can help make a better future.  But because of the current economic crisis, there isn’t necessarily the money to make that happen. So lawmakers are trying harder than ever to determine what works best.  And it just might be... work.  KALW’s Nathanael Johnson reports on programs that connect students to practical applications for the job market. 

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Jeremy Bryant and Terry Fernandez are smoothing out wet concrete in a fine winter drizzle. They're wearing paint-stained, padded overalls and sweatshirts - perfect clothes for the job, but this is actually a form of school – it’s the Youth Employment Partnership, or YEP, in Oakland. And it’s a type of schooling that Fernandez likes.

TERRY FERNANDEZ: We have to measure the squares make sure they are the right size so they even out. We really pretty much learn how to put down the concrete, where they might do hours of training in the classroom but we do it out here hands on.

Both of these young men dropped out of high school. And it’s pretty easy for Bryant to put his finger on the thing that his high-school lacked.

JEREMY BRYANT: They didn’t offer work they just offered 8 hour a day school, 45-minute classes – you know, where the work at?

It’s hard to be motivated if you don’t see how your education is going to help you achieve your goals. Fernandez had a reason to work hard in school: Sports.

FERNANDEZ: Oh in high school I did pretty good from freshman year to junior year but my senior year I just started failing and the pressure was on and I didn’t follow all the way through. I didn’t make it onto a college football team and then I was stuck and I couldn’t go no more.

Without football, he didn’t have a plan for college.  And it just didn’t seem like it was worth the money unless he knew exactly what he wanted to do. But at YEP, he says, it was clear how the lessons were going to help him in the real world. And there was another thing: the teaching here takes a form that sticks with him.

FERNANDEZ:  I wasn’t really good with measurements before I got here – but I got a lot better cause I was able to see it, they would show you with a ruler … you can use a ruler and you can put it against the wood and then cut it. And then be precise and then you say all right I did it, and you got that achievement.

YEP's executive director Michelle Clark says it’s not that students who fail in high school are dumb.

MICHELLE CLARK: Some of the smartest kids I’ve ever met are kids who left high school when they were maybe 14 or 15.

Almost every time, she says, if a student is struggling, it’s because they have some personal drama colliding with an unconventional learning style. According to the National Institutes of Health, fifteen percent of the U.S. population, about one in seven Americans, has some type of learning disability. That means, there are lots of kids out there who have a hard time learning out of a book.

CLARK: We see all kinds of kids with varying stages of developmental dyslexia who are incredibly smart – but their processing ability of info is very hands on. So when we put them in a different environment they are superstars. … Their confidence that they are going to be okay in the world changes, and their confidence that they are smart changes, and everything with their behavior and their drama starts to follow.

What Clark has seen through practical experience, David Stern has seen in the numbers. He’s a professor at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Education, and he’s spent his career gathering hard data to show what works to keep kids in school. In the late 70s he started studying something called Career Academies.

DAVID STERN: Which were schools within schools with practical themes.

The theme might be electronics, or computers. Students would do all the core academics plus a class related to that theme. The kids also spent some time at a business where they could see a practical application for their studies. When Stern crunched the numbers on these students he had been studying he found that they did – surprisingly well.

STERN: Oh! It looked like the kids in the so called academies, were improving their grades, improving their attendance, and more likely to stay around than comparable students in the same high school.

Other independent studies corroborated Stern's findings. The question then, is what part of the academy model was working? The family-like atmosphere? The real-world themes? The hands-on experience with businesses? Stern says it was probably a little bit of each, but his bet is that the most powerful part may be the ability to provide some motivation for learning besides the promise of college.

STERN: College is also a very abstract idea and it seems like more school and yet more school – and if school in the 9th and 10th grade  isn’t a very exciting place for you, the idea of more school and yet more school isn’t going to really excite you.

Stern says there are different learning styles, but he says that any form of learning will fail if the student just doesn’t care.

STERN: Is this with your hands your eyes, well yes, it’s all of the above. 
 
JOHNSON: It sounds like the important thing though is it’s with your heart.
 
STERN: Yes yes, or at least that it appeals to some interest.

But Stern allows that motivation is only one issue. Perhaps a larger one, he says is lack of stability. More than half of students move from their primary or high-schools, often following parents who are looking for work.

STERN: And we know that kids who move from one school to another are more likely to drop out.

For all the technical solutions that can be found in different education models, the basic necessity is some kind of cultural support system. Fortunately for Terry Fernandez, he's found that foundation in his home.

FERNANDEZ: My family, they’re proud. I came home in my uniform and they was just smiling talking about ‘Oh look at Terry, he’s in his work uniform, it was positive, they made me feel good, like I was a working man.

In these tough economic times, with jobs in short supply even for experienced workers,  it may seem perverse to be educating a new crop of electricians and builders. But those students learning the trades today could be the scientists and entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
 
For Crosscurrents, I'm Nathanael Johnson.