CTE (Part 2)

Old Mantra: Decatur Public Schools – the Destination District / New Mantra: Decatur Public Schools – CTE for the 450

If you don’t recognize the acronym by now, CTE is “Career and Technical Education”.  Duane had an article in April describing all the potential jobs coming to Decatur, how we don’t have people with the skills to fill those jobs, and then how DPS might be a key to help with this issue.  Additionally, I had an article in August of last year, when Duane and I started our CTE investigation in earnest, asking for more CTE discussion by our district.  I can easily say that what DPS does related to CTE is the biggest philosophical journey Duane and I have been on since we started writing these articles two years ago.  Currently, we don’t have a meeting or discussion about District 61 without CTE coming up, and this is from a base of absolutely zero conversations two years ago.  The 3rd-grade reading gate is a close second, but like banning cell phones, the reading gate is something that will happen in Decatur (or the state of Illinois), but the question remains whether we will choose to help our DPS students now and let current students benefit from those changes, or if we’ll wait until the state takes action.  (Recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "How can you say you’re for civil rights, how can you say you’re for the poor when you’re condemning those children to not being able to read?  By the time they’re in third grade, they’re never going to read.")  CTE is, however, a different animal.  It will be difficult for the state to mandate CTE because so many things are necessary for a solid CTE program, it will be difficult for the state to pass laws requiring building new facilities, or mandate new classes that aren’t in the 3 R’s that the states rule-making career academics feel are necessary.  And so, it will be up to local districts to accomplish the extremely important job of branching out from traditional academics into teaching kids and young adults the skills required to flourish in a changing world.

Back to our journey for a bit...  Ten years ago, when the mantra was “every kid should go to college” I admit (and Duane does too) that I was all in.  In hindsight it seems absurd– with so many students dropping out of college after a semester or two, and with debt from student loans topping $1.6 trillion in the US by March 2023 (according to the Federal Reserve the average balance owed on a federal student loan is $37,574, and the average balance on a private loan is $39,590) – but at the time it made sense to me that the way to get ahead in life was to go to college, and everyone should take that opportunity.  We know so much more now.  College attendance rates are dropping again because the reality is, well, everyone isn’t meant to be an accountant, or an engineer, or a lawyer.  I didn’t have to recognize this, it became obvious as kids started dropping out of college after only a year, saddled with thousands of dollars in debt.  Obama famously got it wrong, but once again, it’s hard for me to be critical because I was in complete agreement at the time.

Then about a year and a half ago, we started seeing more and more education-related articles about how to prepare kids for the workforce if they decide not to go to college.  That got us asking some different questions, and so we did some “back of the napkin” calculations and (summarizing because Duane laid it out here) of our 500 or so high school freshmen each year in Decatur Public Schools, only about 50 of those will eventually get a 4-year college degree.  This was the ah-ha moment when we thought, “What are we doing for the other 450 kids!”  Really, and I can’t stress this enough, we are listening to the state tell us what we need to teach, and we spend so much time worrying about test scores, and we continue to teach obscure history and English and math facts to unengaged kids that do not care now and never will so that the 50 or so kids that manage to make it through college have a little easier time?  Really?  Look, I’m not anti-education.  I’m even a big proponent of a strong liberal arts education system for kids who want it and are ready for it, but you’ve got to make it interesting and relevant.  Instead of teaching obscure geometry proofs to the 450 that aren’t ready, or don’t care, how about teaching geometry-for-carpentry or voltage calculations for home wiring?  Instead of teaching to the Fastbridge test, how about teaching to the IBEW test, so kids can come out and become union electricians making $60,000?  Doesn’t this make sense?

Speaking of money, and besides the fact that a lot of kids aren’t suited for college, studies show that attending college hardly matters anymore in developing wealth.  According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2019…

Among families whose head is white and born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium of a terminal four-year bachelor’s degree is at a historic low; among families whose head is any other race and ethnicity born in that decade, the premium is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Isn’t this counter to everything we’ve been told by our public school system to believe? So why are we so fixated on preparing everyone to attend college?  Wouldn’t we we all - teachers, parents, and kids alike - be happier if we started preparing students for life rather than college?

What should we do?

Our plan to create more CTE opportunities in DPS has three components:

1. change the high school curriculum to include more (much, much more) CTE-related coursework,

2. reimagine our middle schools, and

3. move to more homogeneous learning groups in elementary school.

Changing our HS curriculum will be slow and laborious, but we need to do a few things right now to prepare.  Since the hot topic of conversation with the School Board will be our building infrastructure in the next few months, we need to start now to plan to close one of the high schools.  We’ve written about this, but isn’t it obvious that we will be able to offer a much more diverse curriculum with all the kids and teachers under one roof?

And, since we’re talking about high school - we need to ask if the Ag Academy is mostly helping the 50 or so eventual college graduates that will (of course!) be OK anyway, or are we doing enough in that building to help the 450 that need it the most?  Duane and I are big Ag Academy supporters, but just as our opinion about whether every kid should attend college has changed, so has our attitude about how we can best utilize an awesome facility at our district’s disposal.  Ten years ago, when the facility was imagined, we were in a different mindset, but ideas about the best use of that space should change.  The goal to broaden students’ horizons towards Ag related fields – a narrow band that often means college (at least the way it’s presented now), should perhaps be modified to focus more on the 450 eventual non-college graduates to help them get great jobs after high school.  To reiterate, the Ag project is a great start.  We've laid a foundation which we need to build on.  You might sometimes still start from the ag influence with the knowledge that, for example, there's so much more to electrical work than ag work.  The "Ag" teachers will show the role of electricians in building grain elevators, but those same concepts clearly translate to the electrical infrastructure of our new $38 million elementary building.  (How many of the electricians that worked on the new Ellsworth Dansby Jr. Magnet School do you suppose are DPS graduates from the last 10 years?)

I’m not going to rehash my reimagining middle school article, except to say that this is what we will do with the closed high school - create a new district-wide middle school - and this is the time in a child’s life when we will attempt to engage them with the possibilities of both a life where they go to college or a life where they don’t have to.

As for elementary school, we’ve spent the last five years mandating that kids are on the same page at the same time in every classroom in the district.  Just as we recognize differences in children from the neck down, we need to recognize there could be differences from the neck up too.  Let’s move to homogeneous learning groups in elementary school to prepare kids for both college and/or a life that doesn’t require an advanced degree.  Are we helping that 6th grader who can’t understand the math lesson by forcing him to keep up with the college-bound kids?  And are we helping the 2nd graders who can’t yet read the letters C-A-T by making them sit in the same lesson as kids who are reading books?  I know I’m trivializing some of the RTI that goes on in some of the buildings, but if we move to reading and math groups early in a kid's development, everyone will be better off.

OK.  I know what I’ve laid out so far simply rehashes much of what Duane and I have been saying over the last two years – closing a high school, reimagining middle school, and homogeneous learning.  Again, again, and again.  But this is just the starting point – the simple, important first steps toward the broader goal of developing a CTE – Student Engagement based district.  We are going to write more on what the actual CTE curriculum might look like later, but for now let’s just start with the realization that we are currently doing jack-shit for the 450 kids that need it most.  Let’s change the dialogue in DPS to start with - “How can we help the 450?”