Create options for careers in state’s schools

“Why hate school when you can love it?” Mason Tucker, a 10th-grader at Madera South High School near Fresno, told — well, asked — reporter Carolyn Jones of CalMatters.

In these post-pandemic days of secondary education, after a period in which so many students missed so much, and when schooling has been so adjusted of necessity — most of the adjustments not for the better — it’s the perfect question to pose.

Jones was writing last month about the push for alternatives to traditional classroom education that are ongoing in California — in particular, about what used to be called vocational education.

For decades now, having nothing to do with COVID-19, many older Californians have been pushing for a return to the availability of even the basic shop classes that formerly were required in the curricula for middle-schoolers. They got lost in the push for essentially everyone to go on to college after high school, and the need for more academic classes in order to do so.

That push for higher education was well and good, and it was partially fueled by concerns that students from minority and working-class backgrounds were being “tracked” into vocational classes while their middle-class peers were being prepared for university.

But the almost total elimination of alternatives to taking calculus and Advanced Placement English literature has been a classic case of going too far down that road.

Now, CalMatters reports, “More of the state’s high school students are enrolling in career pathway programs for skilled, high-wage jobs.”

In the Central Valley, that has included an agriculture pathway that means taking care of cattle,  sheep, horses, pigs, rabbits, chickens and a sweet-smelling tangerine grove.

But closer to home, at Long Beach’s Cabrillo High School, new ways of going to high school have meant the creation of a global logistics program in which students take advantage of being close to the huge Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and courses in supply chain management and international business aimed at preparing them for careers at the port.

It’s a direct partnership with the Port of Long Beach, Center for International Trade and Transportation, Long Beach City College and Cal State University Long Beach. More than 425 students are enrolled.

Students in one project learn to “analyze a country’s imports, exports and biggest trade partners. In another project, students examine a hypothetical solar panels company — where it manufactures the panels, how it ships the panels across the globe, and how logistics impact revenues.”

And in San Pedro, a charter school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Port of Los Angeles High School, has other pathways for training for port jobs, including a marine transportation pathway with classes in sailing, boat-building and navigation. The demand shows the need: 420 students applied for 250 spots in the freshman class, with winning students chosen through a lottery.

The availability of such programs shouldn’t mean that students in them aren’t required to take traditional academics as well. They may well choose the university path instead of a strictly vocational one. But a new Master Plan for Career Education was created by executive order by Gov. Gavin Newsom last August, because, while thousands of high schools have added or expanded career education in recent years, some still don’t offer such a program.

Options are key to upping the game of secondary education in California — the more options, the better for our state’s economic future.