Trashing School-to-Work
At a recent reunion, a former college classmate with whom I had long ago lost touch smiled benignly while another old friend described her journey from union organizer to real estate agent. But when I reported that my job involved me in school-to-work activities, he recoiled in horror. He told me in no uncertain terms that school-to-work opens the door to corporate control of the schools and the narrowing of education to the preparation of worker drones, who question nothing about their place in society or their rights as democratic citizens.
Several weeks later, I opened The New York Times to find an attack on school-to-work playing on fears of a different kind of control. An Op-Ed by Lynne V. Cheney, the former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, presents school-to-work programs as a form of centralized planning that robs some young people of the chance to choose a career and diverts many more from placing their focus where it belongs--on their academic studies. This is a theme sounded repeatedly in mounting conservative attacks on school-to-work. "School to Work: Is Government Micromanaging the Lives of Our Children?" is the rhetorical question posed by the conservative Heritage Foundation on a leaflet inviting liberals and conservatives alike to come hear "the truth" about how school-to-work "requires students to participate in vocational training," forcing them to "choose a career pathway by 8th grade."
Although disagreeing about which "cabal" to blame, critics from both the left and the right seem to view the crisis in our high schools in terms of conspiracies to control our children and to lower the standards for academic work. This is a simplistic and misleading view that diverts attention from the very real problems that schools have to address in order to prepare our young people for an increasingly complex world. Even the most well-intentioned efforts to improve student performance will fail without sufficient attention to two particularly critical problems: student disengagement from the traditional academic curriculum and the disconnection of young people from adults. When communities embrace school-to-career strategies, it is precisely out of a desire to focus on these realities of...
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