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Thursday, April 19, 2012

The European High School Apprenticeship Model and American "CTE" - Dana Goldstein

The European High School Apprenticeship Model and American "CTE" - Dana Goldstein:


The European High School Apprenticeship Model and American "CTE"

I've written about some innovative New York high schools that combine traditional academic learning with workplace internships and apprenticeships. But most American teenagers have little access to experiences like these, and the Obama administration's new blueprint for career and technical education, released today, would do little to change that.
The additional $1 billion in proposed CTE funding would be directed mostly toward improving existing programs and making them more relevant to the economy's needs; many of these programs provide very little or no actual workplace learning outside the classroom, and instead present a fairly traditional curriculum through the "lens" of a particular field, such as healthcare or engineering.
To vastly expand access to high-quality workplace learning experiences for high school kids, we would need to build up a robust infrastructure linking businesses and schools, in order to help workplaces become sites for