Vocational schools become the latest front in the battle for educational equity

What the writer below appears to fail to understand is that tradesmen are not dumb.  You have to have a pretty good level of abiity to do a trade successfully.  So requirements aimed to filter out dummies are essential.

The proposal below is to bypass those filters for some students.  It will be futile.  If the kid cannot do the work he will just waste his own time and the time of those who try to help him

Underlying the proposals appears to be an assumption that the filters are in some way unfair or wrong.  That should be tested before any changes are made.  The filters are presumably the product of long experience and any alternative is unlikely to be an improvement


As a middle schooler in Worcester, Priscilla Sanchez had typically fuzzy notions about the sort of career she might one day pursue; options ranging from forensics to cosmetology appealed to her. Either way, Sanchez dreamed of going to the city’s vocational high school, where she knew she could build a career without going to college.

Sanchez was a bright student, but her record wasn’t perfect: A fight in middle school had led to a suspension. But teachers had told her she was smart and encouraged her to apply to the highly sought after Worcester Technical High School. When Sanchez didn’t hear back, she blamed herself. “I thought maybe I wasn’t smart enough,” said Sanchez, now 20. “[Tech] was known as a school for smart kids with a good record.”

The problem wasn’t with her, but with how vocational education has changed and — some would say — lost its way.

Many of the state’s 37 vocational schools have come under fire recently for using their admissions criteria to screen out struggling students like Sanchez — exactly the sort of non-college-bound striver they were built to serve. Over the past two decades, the schools have been transformed from their blue-collar roots into high-tech training centers that prepare students equally for college or for well-paying jobs in the trades. Today, some are better funded than nearby public schools, and they have become increasingly selective in who they admit.

But enrollment figures indicate — and a growing number of activists and officials contend — that schools such as Worcester Tech are shutting out more challenging and disadvantaged students, taking advantage of the autonomy the state grants in admissions to cherry-pick more academically prepared students with better discipline records. They are behaving a lot like exam schools, with similar invidious effects, and mayors from across Massachusetts want the state to intervene, dictating more closely how the admissions process should work.

A Globe review of state data shows that some of these schools have become whiter and wealthier, enrolling fewer students with special needs or who are still learning English than many of the largest school districts that direct students their way. Meanwhile, students like Sanchez are being turned away.

At Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School, for example, only about a quarter of students come from low-income families, even though two of the largest cities in the area served by the school — Gardner and Fitchburg — have student poverty rates over 50 percent.

The gap is particularly stark when it comes to students who are still learning English. The vast majority of the state’s regional voc-techs enroll English learners at significantly lower rates than many of the largest districts they serve.

For example, nearly a quarter of students in Lowell Public Schools are still learning English. But fewer than than 10 percent of students are English learners at the Greater Lowell Technical High School, which also accepts students from the much smaller towns of Dracut, Dunstable,and Tyngsborough.

“It’s really a civil rights issue,” said Mark Hawke, town administrator for Westminster, which sends students to Montachusett Tech. “So many kids are getting left out.”

In late January, Hawke joined nearly two dozen mayors who signed a letter urging state education officials to require some vocational schools to abolish their selective admissions processes and adopt a lottery system instead. Currently, Massachusetts permits vocational schools “to determine which applicants have an ability to benefit” from a voc-tech education using admissions criteria that include student grades, counselor recommendations, discipline and attendance records, and perhaps a student interview. The state leaves it to individual schools to assign value to each category.

“These schools have used their selective admissions authority to admit students largely on [the] basis of their academic performance,” the mayors wrote in the Jan. 30 letter, addressed to Massachusetts education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley and Secretary of Education James Peyser. “The lack of fundamental fairness in regional vocational admissions has persisted for far too long.”

Without forceful state action, they added, some schools “will be unwilling to relinquish their ability to bolster school performance through selective admissions.”

For decades, the state’s vocational schools served as a critical bridge for non-college-bound students, providing a path to steady work in the trades for children from poor or working-class families, many of them minorities or immigrants. Vocational schools were a place that offered a chance for everyone, even if they weren’t high-achieving students.

The mayors argue that although vocational schools have used admissions criteria for decades, the state’s 1998 implementation of the MCAS prompted many voc-techs to prioritize student achievement and attendance.

Vocational school administrators quickly learned they could raise their school’s MCAS scores — and by extension, its reputation — simply by choosing stronger students.

“It is hardly surprising that public schools with the authority to select their students would recognize it as a competitive advantage and give preference to applicants with stronger academic, attendance, or discipline records,” the mayors wrote.

Some of the state’s most demographically imbalanced schools had already come to the attention of Riley, who sent letters last November to six of the schools, citing “enrollment discrepancies” with their surrounding student populations.

At the time, Riley said he planned to propose revisions to state regulations for voc-tech admissions this spring. In the meantime, he exhorted the superintendents to identify policies and practices “that may be impacting equitable student access ... and to voluntarily enact changes.”

But Kevin Farr, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators, said the schools are simply following state guidelines.

“It’s all within the current regulations,” said Farr. “The criteria are fair.”

Lewis Finfer, co-director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, compared the problem at the more exclusive voc-techs to the controversy over Boston’s exam schools, which critics have long charged use an admissions process that disadvantages low-income applicants and students of color.

“When you have a ranking system by grades, and attendance, and discipline, you end up favoring middle-class students, more so than kids who are from poor and working-class backgrounds,” said Finfer. “Public schools should be equally open to all students.”

At some schools, however, the picture is quite different. Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School, which serves affluent towns such as Belmont and Lexington, enrolls disproportionately higher rates of low-income and special-needs students. Meanwhile, at Belmont High, where only about 7 percent of students are poor, 80 percent of graduates earn a post-secondary degree within six years.

Another outlier is Boston’s Madison Park Vocational High School, which unlike many voc-techs does not use performance-based admissions criteria. The school has significantly higher numbers of low-income and special-needs students than the rest of the district. Not that it has served them particularly well: After years of decline, Madison Park was deemed “underperforming” by the state in 2015 and has yet to emerge from turnaround status.

But in many other communities, voc-techs have become highly sought after options, rivaling, or even surpassing nearby high schools in terms of the success of their graduates.

Officials at Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School said they had about 275 kids on the waiting list last year. Statewide, the number is closer to 3,000, according to a spokesperson at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

The state funding formula also gives vocational schools a boost for staff and materials not found at other schools, and voc-techs frequently outspend their traditional counterparts by many thousands of dollars each year on a per-pupil basis.

Hawke said the schools can be so flush that Gardner once received textbook donations from Montachusett Technical, or Monty Tech.

“The stuff they were getting rid of was newer than the stuff we were still using,” said Hawke, who formerly served as Gardner’s mayor. “They really don’t want for anything.”

But Monty Tech, one of the schools flagged by Riley, arguably does not serve the students who could most benefit from its resources: Just 1 percent of students at the school are English learners, a rate dwarfed by that of the largest city sending students to the school, Fitchburg, where the rate is closer to 16 percent.

Sheila M. Harrity, Monty Tech’s superintendent-director, acknowledged that the school of roughly 1,400 students has lower English learner rates.

“We are trying to address that,” she said, adding that application materials are offered in Spanish and that she was proud of their progress so far. “Last year we had eight students [learning English], and this year we’ve almost doubled it to 15.”

Similarly, Greater New Bedford Regional Tech, another school identified by Riley, has much lower rates of poor students, students with special needs, and Latino students than its largest sending district, New Bedford Public Schools.

But the largest discrepancy lies with those still learning English: Whereas nearly 30 percent of New Bedford students are still learning English, the group makes up less than 4 percent of the voc-tech’s student body.

“There are enormous disparities,” said Mayor Jonathan Mitchell of New Bedford, who signed the letter. “They don’t have a legitimate educational basis to justify it.”

But James O’Brien, Greater New Bedford Tech’s superintendent-director, blamed officials at the sending districts rather than the voc-tech’s admission procedures. He said some area middle schools don’t allow his school access to eighth graders to tell them about the technical high school.

“Those different subgroups are not applying to our school because they're not aware of what we have to offer,” said O’Brien.

Mayor Mitchell countered that fully 75 percent of eighth-graders from New Bedford schools apply to the voc-tech, which he said accepts about 60 percent of them.

O’Brien said he’d be willing to expand the vocational school’s enrollment if he had the funding.

“If the money’s flowing our way, we can get very creative with a schedule,” he said. “We’ll accept them all. But at some point, when do the floodgates stop?”

Given the state’s range of schools and student populations, there’s no quick fix to the mayors’ concerns, said Thomas Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents.

“It is not a simple issue where we can just make some admissions policy changes and it’s going to solve the problem,” he said. “It varies a lot from one place to the next.”

When she wasn’t accepted at Worcester Tech, one of the schools flagged by Riley, Priscilla Sanchez wound up at the city’s struggling North High School. False fire alarms were common, she said. There were a lot of fights. Many of her classmates were suspended, and she found the school chaotic and full of distractions.

Sanchez said she eventually got pregnant and dropped out of school altogether. She said she later earned her GED and is now studying criminal justice at North Shore Community College.

Even so, she thinks often of how things might have turned out differently if she’d gone to Tech.

“I think I’d be farther than I am now,” she said. “I just kind of stepped back a bit.”

SOURCE





Some MBA Programs Are an Overpriced Credential, but Others Give Real Value

Once a hot degree, the MBA is now being questioned by more and more people. Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler, for example, recently wrote that “the cost is prohibitive.” As a professor who teaches in the now questionable program, please allow me to provide some insight.

Before I go on, here’s your disclaimer. I enjoy teaching my MBA students. If I was on the outside looking in, I could easily go scorched earth. Given that I believe teaching is my calling, I think I provide value. But, I’m also not naïve. There are many flaws with the MBA in 2019—but there are still some good reasons to seek one.

The main flaw in the “burn it down” media regarding higher education is that the practices of elite programs are often projected onto the landscape of all of higher ed.  This is akin to the flawed thinking that suggests the “average CEO” earns what those fat cat CEOs take home.

When people imagine grocery shopping, most don’t gravitate to Whole Foods. It’s likely Walmart, Costco or a local supermarket. When they picture a personal vehicle, it’s not The Ultimate Driving Machine, rather it’s more likely to be Toyota, Chevy, or Honda. When discussing the MBA in general, it’s more appropriate to think of programs at a regional state university than Harvard of Stanford.

Only a relative handful of the total granted MBAs are from the elite schools. Decreasing enrollment at elite schools does not have to signal gloom and doom for everyone else. While the lesser programs may aspire to be elite, they also know that their “customers” exist in a different market segment. Most MBA students are working adults seeking to change careers or to bolster their resumes.

Additionally, lots of them learn nothing about business at all in college, and only later, when they’re trying to advance in the business world, do they realize that they have big knowledge gaps to fill. But those bright and hard-working adults don’t want to take out a second mortgage to do so.

Thus, to keep down the cost, some “non-elite” MBA programs have moved partially or wholly online, as it has at my institution, where MBA enrollment has increased tenfold. Critics will argue already inferior programs will be even more watered down as professors become system administrators of standardized assignments. Yet, given the video and audio software available, online courses have the potential to be as good, or better than, traditional courses – especially when considering how much informal online learning already takes place.

Students report feeling engaged in my courses because I deliver leadership training in a podcast fashion that can be replayed at any point. They also appreciate that I allow flexible deadlines so that they feel more in control of the flow of the class, which is in line with how many of them consume content (e.g. iTunes U and YouTube).

While that may not convince purists, when the MBA is delivered effectively and efficiently at an appropriate cost, students leave with an educational background in accounting, finance, marketing, leadership, and strategy.

Unless the landscape changes, though, widespread college closings due to the higher ed bubble bursting or through an industry shift toward apprenticeships, on-the-job training, and employment testing—adults will still seek such signals, often for extrinsic benefits, and colleges will try to provide the best MBA programs for these degree seekers.

Yet, as I indicated above, I’ve heard all the criticisms. For those readers who are fans of that red meat style of critique, here is your tomahawk steak. MBAs are said to be a waste of time and money. As management scholar Henry Mintzberg wrote 15 years ago, the wrong people are pursuing an MBA at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. They mistakenly believe that simply attending more school will better educate them for success in their next job.

Back when an MBA wasn’t so common, the degree was a stronger signal to the job market that you may possess something unique. In 1955, colleges granted ten times more undergraduate business degrees than MBAs. Now, it’s virtually one-to-one. It seems like everyone has an MBA. It’s the new bachelor’s degree.

You’ll be more successful learning on the job, the critique continues. You can even buy books like The 10-Day MBA and What they Don’t Teach you at Harvard Business School and get the knowledge at a fraction of the tab.

It’s easy to bash the MBA, because it’s not what it once was.
Then there is that “post-Enron,” virtue signaling mandatory ethics course designed to protect the school from an association with nefarious business practices. Yet, it’s highly unlikely that the course has ever discouraged any aspiring white-collar criminal from immoral practices.

So with all those flaws, why should anyone waste their time with an MBA?  I’ll end with the same advice I give to my undergraduates when they ask me that question.

Make it a rational decision. Do your research. Begin with the end in mind.  In order to get the most out of an MBA, the adult learner needs a cost-benefit analysis involving location (elite vs. non-elite schools) and program type (full-time vs. part-time).  If you have the funds and the time to make the MBA your full-time job, target a full-time program at the best school that will accept you. Once there, excel in class and grow your network. You’ll probably land a solid position with this strategy for now.

If your situation requires you to stay at your current job, remain close to your home, and possibly have your company pay for the tuition, target a part-time program in the local market or research fully online MBA programs from non-predatory institutions. This strategy will provide you with some new tools and a credential to add at the end of your name that, like many of the students in my program, you can leverage at some local company where all of management has the same degree.

It’s easy to bash the MBA, because it’s not what it once was. But then again, neither is your music collection, your communication devices, and your television. The difference is that while the latter examples have evolved, the MBA is at the point where it will either become a Betamax or an Apple Watch. Time will tell.

Programs that understand the need to effectively position their MBA against the other post-secondary options will find a good market, but those that waste students’ time and money won’t.

SOURCE







Brisbane teachers fail kids in maths

NEARLY three-quarters of students in years 8-10 were taught maths by teachers from outside the field, a survey of Brisbane students has found.

The revelation is in a survey by Australian Catholic University mathematics education lecturer Dr Michael Easey, who surveyed 423 students.

Having an out-of-field maths teacher made a staggering difference to which level of mathematics students chose to study in years 11 and 12. "From this study, it is very evident that if teachers are qualified to teach mathematics, students were more likely to select more mathematically demanding upper-secondary mathematics courses, mathematics B but especially mathematics C," Dr Easey said.

"In this study, some students choosing to study mathematics B or mathematics C provided written comments that suggested a feature of their experience of learning mathematics were teachers who were 'expert', 'enthusiastic', and `challenging'."

Of students surveyed, 274 identified which subject level they would choose, with 22 per cent opting for mathematics A, 30 per cent choosing mathematics B and only 12.5 per cent choosing mathematics C.

Students who had no, or only one, out-of-field mathematics teacher across years 8 to 10 were more than 20 times More likely to choose maths C over maths A in senior years. Students who had two out-of-field mathematics teachers were only three times more likely to choose mathematics C over mathematics A.

Data from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) shows one in three secondary mathematics classes is taught by an out-of-field teacher around Australia.

AMSI schools program manager Janine Sprakel said it was of great concern that the number of students choosing to study mathematics in senior secondary school and university was dropping. "Our future is STEM - that is well established," she said.

"It makes sense that the teachers who are trained in mathematics suggest to their students that they would be capable of undertaking mathematics at a higher level in Year 12 and in university."

She said while there were great teachers without a background in mathematics teaching, specialist teachers had a different level of understanding and enthusiasm.

Queensland Teachers' Union president Kevin Bates said there were shortages of specialist teachers, particularly in mathematics, sciences and information technology design, which increased workloads.

From the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of 8.3.20