Regarding the NPR report on Washington States vocational/career tech for public schools: FIRST, THE LIVING WAGE IN WASHINGTON IS AT LEAST $15/17 AN HOUR AND NOT $13. SO, THESE MECHANICS ARE GRADUATING TO POVERTY WAGES IN A FIELD THAT HISTORICALLY PAID FAR MORE TO START. SECOND....UNIONS ARE BEING BUSTED BY THIS ATTACK ON UNION APPRENTICESHIPS! This reports talks of the Bill Gates privatization scheme for public education that has public schools as human resources departments for corporations. What a way to maximize corporate profits they say! They say students are graduating without the skills needed to do a job so they are trying to create an entire system of publicly funded job training programs that focus a student on one skill set all paid for by taxpayers and student tuition. So, if you go to these career colleges and get a degree for dental hygienist or auto mechanic you will find yourself having to go back to a career college to get yet another degree if you need to change directions. Each time the goal is to make you ready to work from day one with no job training at the point of hire. SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATIONS!!!! PROFITS ARE SOARING WITH THIS POLICY BROUGHT TO US BY NEO-LIBERALS! Here is what has been in existence for decades------when we had a thriving economy and strong labor wages and benefits and corporations had profits enough. A student graduates from high school with a broad course of strong liberal arts and humanities tied with either a professional track or a vocational track. The students received strong class content in all subjects so regardless of what they decided when they graduated.....they were ready for most career directions. You either go to university where you again had strong liberal arts and humanities with your career major and when you graduated you were ready for any number of career directions in your major.....for example science.....not only dental hygiene. That science degree allowed you to move to research, laboratory, public service, all with just a little on the job training. How about that student graduating with a vocational track? Well, they could go to a two year community college for an associates degree or they could go right from high school into a union apprenticeship found in most trades. Those apprenticeship programs over several decades were known all over the world for quality training and were open for all to apply. A company hired someone to a job and then paid for their training with the union sharing cost.....no taxpayer money involved. The worker got the job first and then was trained for the job and paid while they worked. This system allowed all students a direction after school and allowed for a broad-based democratic education that gave that student choices in career changes. What we know from a decade of this corporate education reform that has for-profit career colleges doing the job of the union apprenticeships and requiring all this training be done before someone is hired is this----most people go through these corporate trainings and then do not get jobs. So the student and taxpayers hand profits to these training programs and then there are no jobs to be had. WHEN YOU ARE TRAINED ON THE JOB YOU HAVE A JOB ALREADY FOR GOODNESS SAKE! It is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money and funding meant for meaningful degree financial aid. Half of all public education financial aid went to these career colleges and most students did not get jobs. So, what this report from Seattle tells us is how this dysfunctional system of job training is now going to move to high schools and in fact Baltimore is already doing this. We had a report on the Medical Arts high school and the dental hygienist program. I went to the news paper to see the job listings for dental hygienist in the Baltimore area and there were about a dozen listings. Now, this is a high school program rotating several groups of youth through a program that also has for-profit and other training groups doing the same thing. THEY ARE CHURNING OUT TONS OF STUDENTS PREPARING FOR DENTAL HYGIENE JOBS THAT WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE IN THE BALTIMORE AREA. It is a mess. They are doing this with Emergency care programs for ambulances. When all is said and done these students generally end up in home health care earning poverty wages with no way to change direction. Well, we are told.....go to where the jobs are for dental hygienist. The point here is that when K-12 concentrates on strong broad educational achievement people have more of an ability to navigate to different career paths as needed. Will students from vocational schools test as well on SAT if they decide to try that course? If we look at Baltimore where students are doing Teach to the Test with Reading and Math as the primary subject at the loss of all other subjects, you see we are making little progress. When the focus is vocational there is even less. Brown vs the Board of Education and equal opportunity and access was about all public schools giving children the opportunity to choose a direction in their lives. What these school privatizers are trying to adopt has pre-school testing deciding what skills these children may have and tracking them accordingly with parents and students having little say. That is happening now in Baltimore as parents are finding the school choice being more directed to these charters/vocational tech schools. Baltimore schools were sadly neglected in funding and oversight for decades so resources and staffing failed to meet the needs of our students. We want strong public schools that allow all students a chance at career paths they choose! *************************** Apprenticeship From Wikipedia, Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a structured competency a basic set of skills. Apprenticeships ranged from craft occupations or trades to those seeking a professional license to practice in a regulated profession. Apprentices (or in early modern usage prentices) or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships. Most of their training is done while working for an employer who helps the apprentices learn their trade or profession, in exchange for their continuing labor for an agreed period after they have achieved measurable competencies. For more advanced apprenticeships, theoretical education was also involved, with jobs and farming over a period of 4–6 years. To be successful, the individual must have perseverance, ambition, and initiative. Like a college education, the successful completion of an apprenticeship term does not come easily, but is the result of hard work on the part of the apprentice. In practically every skilled occupation, more than fundamental knowledge of arithmetic is essential. The ability to read, write and speak well is beneficial in any walk of life, but in some apprenticeship occupations it is more important than in others.[1] ************************************ Possible Deceptive Practices Posted September 27, 2011 in Possible Deceptive Practices by MT Moderator High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust. It’s not surprising there is deception in the online school system or we wouldn’t have created the scam blog. What is shocking to us is the accrediting agencies turning a blind eye to the abuses even while the Obama administration is passing stringent new laws about graduate employment numbers. We knew we should be leery of some schools, now we know to be suspicious of accrediting agencies and their lack of action. Every potential student should read this and more. High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust. ****************************************** Stimulus Allocates Billions for Job-Training Opportunities By John Rossheim, Monster Senior Contributing Writer With tens of millions of people unemployed or underemployed, and with blue-chip industries from automotive to banking in distress, the US workforce sorely needs help. So the new funding for job training provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is a well-timed boon to American workers. ******************************************** Job Retraining May Fall Short of High Hopes Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times By MICHAEL LUO Published: July 5, 2009 CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich. — For the second time in three years, Mike Hutchins, a laid-off automotive engineer, is preparing to enroll in job retraining at a local community college, this time to become a civil engineering technician. But he has no idea if he has chosen the right path.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 16:49:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015