WASHINGTON — Earlier this week, the Southern Regional Education Board unveiled a report calling for revamping career and technical education and integrating it into college-prep high school curricula with a goal of keeping students engaged and focused and better prepared for college and the work force.
The report, titled “Crafting a New Vision for High School: How States Can Join Academic and Technical Studies to Promote More Powerful Learning,” reveals that at least one in four high school students don’t graduate on time, if at all, and “many of these young adults blame a curriculum that is neither relevant nor challenging as a central reason for their disengagement.”
The report also finds that many students who do make their way into college won’t graduate, as “barely one-half of those who begin a four-year degree graduate within six years,” and the news is worse at community colleges, as only about one in five students earn an associate degree or a specialized career certificate within three years.
Gene Bottoms, SREB’s senior vice president for school improvement and the report’s lead author, says that many schools systems’ emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing is partly to blame for why so many students disengage, drop out or underperform.
“The emphasis has been so focused on passing the exam that an awful lot of at-risk students spend so much time in the early grades of high school on what I call test-prep instruction that they have become very bored with school and are not very much engaged in challenging learning opportunities,” Bottoms says.
“If we can begin to link quality academics in more schools with high-quality career and technical studies through project-based learning, we can come up with a means to turn more students on to high school, reducing the dropout rate and preparing more students for further study and for good employment,” he adds.
