Category: CTE

Alabama high school requirements now allow students to trade chemistry for carpentry

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — In a corner of Huffman High School, the sounds of popping nail guns and whirring table saws fill the architecture and construction classroom.

Down the hall, culinary students chop and saute in the school’s commercial kitchen, and in another room, cosmetology students snip mannequin hair to prepare for the state’s natural hair stylist license.

Starting this fall, Alabama high school students can choose to take these classes — or any other state-approved career and technical education courses — in place of upper level math and science, such as Algebra 2 or chemistry.

Alabama state law previously required students to take at least four years each of English, math, science and social studies to graduate from high school. The state is now calling that track the “Option A” diploma. The new “Option B” workforce diploma allows students to replace two math and two science classes with a sequence of three CTE courses of their choosing. The CTE courses do not have to be related to math or science, but they do have to be in the same career cluster. Already, more than 70 percent of Alabama high school students take at least one CTE class, according to the state’s Office of Career and Technical Education/Workforce Development.

The workforce diploma will give students more opportunities to get the kind of skills that can lead to jobs right after high school, legislators said. But there’s a cost: Many universities, including the state’s flagship University of Alabama, require at least three math credits for admission. The workforce diploma would make it more difficult for students on that track to get into those colleges.

The law passed in 2024 alongside a spate of bills aimed at boosting the state’s labor participation rate, which at 58 percent as of January remained below the national rate of 63 percent. Simply put, Alabama wants to get more of its residents working.

Alabama is giving high school students a new pathway to a high school diploma: fewer math and science classes in exchange for more career and technical education courses. Credit: Tamika Moore for The Hechinger Report

The new diploma option also comes at a time when public perception of college is souring: Only 36 percent of U.S. adults have a lot of confidence in higher education, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Just 43 percent of Alabama high schoolers who graduated in 2023 enrolled in one of the state’s public colleges the following fall.

“The world of higher education is at a crossroads,” said Amy Lloyd, executive director of the education advocacy nonprofit All4Ed and former assistant secretary for the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education at the U.S. Department of Education. “Americans are questioning the value of the return on their investment: Is it worth my money? Is it worth my time?”

Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free newsletter on K-12 education.

One recent afternoon in Huffman High School’s architecture class, a few students in bright yellow safety vests were measuring a wall they had built. At the end of the semester, the project will culminate in a tiny home.

Lucas Giles, a senior, started taking architecture his sophomore year as a way to “be able to fix things around the home without having to call other people,” he said. The new workforce diploma option won’t apply to him since he’s graduating this year, but he said he likely would have opted for it to fit more architecture classes into his schedule — that is, until he learned it would make it harder for him to attend college and study engineering.

“I wouldn’t have the credits,” Giles realized.

Students who earn a workforce diploma and end up wanting to go to college after all can enroll in community colleges, or aim for state colleges that have less stringent admissions requirements, said Alabama education chief Eric Mackey. The key to the new diploma will be ensuring school counselors are properly advising students, he added.

“That’s where the counselor comes in and says, ‘If you want to be a nurse, then yes, you need the practical stuff at the career tech center — taking blood pressure and trauma support — but you also need to be taking biology, physiology, chemistry and all those things, too,’” Mackey said.

Because the diploma only makes sense for a specific subset of students — those who do not plan to go to a four-year college that requires more math or science and who cannot otherwise fit CTE classes in their schedule — counselors have a huge role to play in guiding students. As of 2023, there were 405 students for every counselor in Alabama’s public schools, well over the recommended ratio of 250 to 1.

Mackey said the state added career coaches in recent years to ease the counseling workload, but in many districts there is just a single coach, who rotates among schools.

Samantha Williams, executive director of the nonprofit Birmingham Promise, fears the workforce diploma may shut off students’ options too early. Birmingham Promise helps students in Birmingham City Schools pay college tuition and connects them to internship opportunities while in high school.

“Do you really think that all of our school districts are preparing students to know what they want to do” by the time they’re in high school, Williams asked.

Williams also worries that lower-performing students might be steered to this diploma option in order to boost their schools’ rankings.

Students who opt for the workforce diploma will not have their ACT test scores included in their schools’ public reports. Legislators decided that schools should not have to report standardized test scores for students who did not have to take the requisite math and science classes.

“The concern a lot of people voiced was ‘Hey, isn’t everyone just going to place the kids who are underperforming in the workforce diploma so their ACT scores don’t bring down the whole?’” Williams said. “There’s a strong perverse incentive for people to do that.”

Speaking to the state’s Board of Education last fall, Mackey warned the “furor of the state superintendent will come down on” anyone who tries to redirect students toward the workforce diploma because of low ACT scores.

Related: What happened when a South Carolina city embraced career education for all its students

At Headland High School in rural Henry County, Alabama, every student takes at least one CTE course, according to Principal Brent Maloy. The most popular classes, he said, are financial management and family consumer science.

“We don’t force them in — everybody registers themselves, they pick their own classes,” Maloy said. “But there’s just about a zero percent chance that a kid’s not going to have a career tech class when they graduate.”

The school has hosted information sessions for parents and students about the new diploma option ahead of next school year. In a poll of rising juniors and seniors, 20 percent said they would like to pursue a workforce diploma, and another 30 percent said they might be interested. Maloy is anticipating about 25 percent of students will actually opt in to the pathway.

Most graduates of Headland enroll in a two-year school after graduation anyway, Maloy said, and the workforce diploma won’t hinder that. But the high school has only one counselor for its 450 students, and making sure students fully understand this diploma pathway — and its limitations — is likely to add pressure and extra responsibilities on counselors with heavy workloads.

Students hold up the wall of a tiny home they’re building in a career and tech architecture class at Huffman High School in Birmingham, Alabama. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report

“There’s so much pressure on our secondary counselors already just to make sure that all of the boxes are checked before graduation. It’s going to put an extra box for them to check,” Maloy said.

Ultimately, state businesses and industries want this change, said Mackey, who started his career as a middle and high school science teacher.

“They were saying, ‘We really need students with skills over, say, calculus,’” Mackey said. “That doesn’t mean some students don’t need calculus — we want to still offer those higher math courses and higher science courses.”

But, reflecting on his own experience as a high school science teacher, “I can tell you that every student doesn’t need high school chemistry,” Mackey said.

The chamber of commerce in Mobile, Alabama, is one group that advocated for the workforce diploma. Career tech classes are a good way for students to better learn what they want to do before graduating high school, and they are also an avenue for students to get skills in high wage industries prevalent in Alabama, said Kellie Snodgrass, vice president of workforce development at the Mobile Chamber.

Less than half of high school graduates in the region end up enrolling in college after graduation, Snodgrass said, and only 20 percent of high-wage jobs in Mobile require a college degree. A large chunk of jobs in the state, and in Mobile in particular, are in manufacturing.

“It’s terrible when a student goes away to college and comes back and can’t find a job, when we have thousands of open jobs here,” Snodgrass said.

In an emailed statement, Trevor Sutton, the vice president of economic development at the Birmingham Business Alliance, said the diploma option was a “win for the state of Alabama” that would allow students a chance to learn both “hard and soft skills like communication and time management.”

Related: States bet big on career education, but struggle to show it works

At least 11 states have embraced policies that give students flexibility to use career tech courses for core academic credits, according to a review from the Education Commission of the States.

Like Alabama, Indiana also made changes to its diploma requirements in 2024. After more than a year of public debate, the state created three graduation pathways that are meant to lead to college admissions, the workforce, or enlistment in the military. Those changes will be effective for students in the class of 2029, or current eighth graders.

Having industry buy-in on career tech programs is important, said Lloyd with All4Ed, because most students will need either an industry or post-secondary credential to land a job with a comfortable wage.

“The reality is a high school diploma is not enough in today’s labor market to have a guaranteed ticket to the middle class,” Lloyd said.

The problem, Lloyd said, is most K-12 industry credentials have little use to employers. Only 18 percent of CTE credentials earned by K-12 students in the U.S. were in demand by employers, according to a 2020 report from the Burning Glass Institute.

The key in Alabama will be ensuring students are going into career pathways that line up with job demand, Snodgrass said. Out of the more than 33,000 CTE credentials Alabama high school students earned in 2023, only 2 percent were in manufacturing, which is one of the state’s highest need areas.

Still, attitudes toward high school CTE courses — once largely thought of as classes for students who struggled academically — have improved significantly over the years. And many schools offer CTE programs like aerospace, robotics or conservation that could help students get into high-demand undergraduate programs at universities.

“We’re increasingly blurring the lines between what has been historically siloed in people’s minds in terms of career education versus academic education,” Lloyd said. “Those are very often one and the same.”

Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath at gilreath@hechingerreport.org

This story about Alabama high school requirements was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

Join us today.

Source link

April 9, 2025
How CTE supports college and career readiness

This post on CTE and career readiness originally appeared on iCEV’s blog, and is republished here with permission.

For students to be truly prepared for their futures, they need academic knowledge, technical expertise, and workforce skills that translate directly into the workplace. As a career and technical education (CTE) instructor, I see firsthand how career-focused education provides students with the tools to transition smoothly from high school to college and careers.

More News from eSchool News

Many math tasks involve reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These language demands can be particularly challenging for students whose primary language is not English.

In recent years, the rise of AI technologies and the increasing pressures placed on students have made academic dishonesty a growing concern. Students, especially in the middle and high school years, have more opportunities than ever to cheat using AI tools.

As technology trainers, we support teachers’ and administrators’ technology platform needs, training, and support in our district. We do in-class demos and share as much as we can with them, and we also send out a weekly newsletter.

Math is a fundamental part of K-12 education, but students often face significant challenges in mastering increasingly challenging math concepts.

Throughout my education, I have always been frustrated by busy work–the kind of homework that felt like an obligatory exercise rather than a meaningful learning experience.

During the pandemic, thousands of school systems used emergency relief aid to buy laptops, Chromebooks, and other digital devices for students to use in remote learning.

Education today looks dramatically different from classrooms of just a decade ago. Interactive technologies and multimedia tools now replace traditional textbooks and lectures, creating more dynamic and engaging learning environments.

There is significant evidence of the connection between physical movement and learning. Some colleges and universities encourage using standing or treadmill desks while studying, as well as taking breaks to exercise.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. In recent weeks, we’ve seen federal and state governments issue stop-work orders, withdraw contracts, and terminate…

English/language arts and science teachers were almost twice as likely to say they use AI tools compared to math teachers or elementary teachers of all subjects, according to a February 2025 survey from the RAND Corporation.

Tags career, career and technical education, career readiness, college, college and career, college and career readiness, cte, Education, high school, need

Want to share a great resource? Let us know at submissions@eschoolmedia.com.

Source link

April 4, 2025
Community colleges are providing new opportunities for learning on the job in logging and oystering

SHINGLETOWN, Calif. — On a cold morning in October, the sun shone weakly through tall sugar pines and cedars in Shingletown, a small Northern California outpost whose name is a reminder of its history as a logging camp in the 1800s. Up a gravel road banked with iron-rich red soil, Dylan Knight took a break from stacking logs.

Knight is one of 10 student loggers at Shasta College training to operate the heavy equipment required for modern-day logging: processors to remove limbs from logs that have just been cut, skidders to pull logs out of the cutting site, loaders to stack and sort the logs by species and masticators to mulch up debris.

For centuries, logging was a seasonal, learn-on-the-job trade passed down from father to son. But as climate change and innovations in the industry have changed logging into a year-round business, there aren’t always enough workers to fill jobs.

“Our workforce was dying,” said Delbert Gannon, owner of Creekside Logging. “You couldn’t even pick from the bottom of the barrel. It was affecting our production and our ability to haul logs. We felt we had to do something.”

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

Higher ed, examined

Our biweekly newsletter delivers deeply reported higher ed stories directly to your inbox.

Around the country, community colleges are stepping in to run apprenticeship programs for heritage industries, such as logging and aquaculture, which are too small to run. These partnerships help colleges expand the workforce development programs central to their mission. The partnerships also help keep small businesses in small industries alive by managing state and federal grants and providing the equipment, courses and staff to train workers.

As industries go, logging is small, and it’s struggling. In 2023 there were only about 50,000 logging jobs in the U.S., but the number of logging companies has been on the decline for several years. Most loggers are over 50, according to industry data, and older generations are retiring, contributing to more than 6,000 vacant positions every year on average. The median annual salary for loggers is about $50,000.

Student logger Bryce Shannon operates a wood chipper at a logging site as part of his instruction at Shasta College in Redding, Calif. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

Retirements have hit Creekside Logging hard. In 2018 Gannon’s company had jobs to do, and the machines to do them, but nobody to do the work. He reached out to Shasta College, which offers certificates and degrees in forestry and heavy equipment operation, to see if there might be a student who could help.

That conversation led to a formal partnership between the college and 19 timber companies to create a pre-apprenticeship course in Heavy Equipment Logging Operations. Soon after, they formed the California Registered Apprenticeship Forest Training program. Shasta College used $3.5 million in grant funds to buy the equipment pre-apprentices use.

Related: Apprenticeships are a trending alternative to college but there’s a hitch

Logging instruction takes place on land owned by Sierra Pacific Industries lumber company — which does not employ its own loggers and so relies on companies like Creekside Lumber to fell and transport logs to mills.

Each semester, 10 student loggers like Knight take the pre-apprenticeship course at Shasta College. Nearly all are hired upon completion. Once employed, they continue their work as apprentices in the forest training program, which Shasta College runs in partnership with employers like Gannon. State apprenticeship funds help employers offset the cost of training new workers, as well as the lost productivity of on-the-job mentors.

For Creekside Logging — a 22-person company — working with Shasta College makes participation in the apprenticeship program possible.Gannon’s company often trained new loggers, only to have them back out of the job months later. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to train a new worker, and Creekside couldn’t afford to keep taking the financial risk. Now Gannon has a steady flow of committed employees, trained at the college rather than on his payroll. Workers who complete the pre-apprenticeship know what they’re getting into — working outdoors in the cold all day, driving big machines and cutting down trees.

Workers who complete the apprenticeship, Gannon said, are generally looking for a career and not just a seasonal job.

Talon Gramps-Green, a student logger at Shasta College in Redding, Calif., shows off stickers on his safety helmet. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

“You get folks that are going to show up every day,” Gannon said. “They got to test drive the career and know they like heavy equipment. They want to work in the woods. The college has solved that for us.”

Apprentices benefit too. Workers who didn’t grow up around a trade can try it out, which for some means tracking down an elusive pathway into the work. Kyra Lierly grew up in Redding, about 30 miles west of Shingletown, and previously worked for the California Department of Forestry as a firefighter. She’s used to hard work, but when she looked into getting a job as a logger she couldn’t find a way in. Some companies had no office phone or website, she says. Jobs were given out casually, by word of mouth.

“A lot of logging outfits are sketchy, and I wanted to work somewhere safe,” said Lierly, 25. She worked as an apprentice with Creekside Lumber but is taking a break while she completes an internship at Sierra Pacific Industries, a lumber producer, and gets a certificate in natural resources at Shasta College.

“The apprenticeship made forestry less intimidating because the college isn’t going to partner with any company that isn’t reputable,” Lierly said.

Related: In spite of a growing shortage in male-dominated vocations, women still aren’t showing up

Apprenticeships, with their combination of hands-on and classroom learning, are found in many union halls but, until now, was not known to be common practice in the forested sites of logging crews.

State and federally registered apprenticeships have gained popularity in recent years as training tools in health care, cybersecurity and telecommunications.

Federal funding grew steadily from $145 million in 2018 to more than $244 million during the last years of the Biden administration. That money was used to support apprenticeships in traditional building trades as well as industries that don’t traditionally offer registered apprenticeships, including teaching and nursing.

The investment aims to address the shortage of skilled workers. The number of working adults in the U.S. doesn’t align with the number of skilled jobs, a disparity that is only slowly recovering after the pandemic.

Labor shortages hit especially hard in rural areas, where trades like logging have an outsized impact on their local economies. For regional heritage trades like logging, just a few apprentices can make the difference between staying in business and shutting down.

Lucas Licea, a student logger at Shasta College in Redding, Calif., operates a loader. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

“There’s a common misconception of registered apprentices that they’re only in the building trades when most are in a variety of sectors,” said Manny Lamarre, who served as deputy assistant secretary for employment and training with the Labor Department during the Biden administration. More than 5,000 new occupations have registered with the department to offer apprenticeships since 2021, he said. “We can specifically support unique small occupations in rural communities where a lot of people are retiring.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who was confirmed earlier this month, said in her confirmation hearing that she supports apprenticeships. But ongoing cuts make it unclear what the new federal role will be in supporting such programs.

However, “sharing the capacity has been an important way to get apprenticeships into rural and small employers,” said Vanessa Bennett, director at the Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. It’s helpful when employers partner with a nonprofit or community college that can sponsor an apprenticeship program, as Shasta College does, Bennett said.

Once Knight, the student logger, completes the heavy equipment pre-apprenticeship, he plans to return to his hometown of Oroville, about 100 miles south of Shingletown. His tribe — the Berry Creek Rancheria of Tyme Maidu Indians — is starting its own logging crew, and Knight will be one of only two members trained to use some of the most challenging pieces of logging equipment.

“This program is awesome,” said Knight, 24. “It’s really hands-on. You learn as you go and it helps to have a great instructor.”

Student logger Dylan Knight drives a masticator, which grinds wood into chips, as Shasta College instructor Chris Hockenberry looks on. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

Across the country in Maine, a community college is helping to train apprentices for jobs at heritage oyster, mussel and kelp farms that have struggled to find enough workers to meet the growing demand for shellfish. Often classified as seasonal work, aquaculture jobs can become year-round careers for workers trained in both harvesting shellfish and planning for future seasons.

“I love the farm work and I feel confident that I will be able to make a full-length career out of this,” said Gabe Chlebowski, who completed a year-long apprenticeship with Muscongus Bay Aquaculture, which harvests in Damariscotta, Maine. A farm boy from rural Pennsylvania, Chlebowski worked in construction and stone masonry after high school. When his parents moved to Maine, he realized that he wanted a job on the water. With no prior experience, he applied for an oyster farming apprenticeship and was accepted.

“I was the youngest by five years and the only person who’d never worked on water,” said Chlebowski, 22. “I grew up in a landlocked state surrounded by corn fields. I had the work ethic and no idea what I was doing in boats.”

Related: Modern apprenticeships offer path to career — and college

The apprenticeship program was launched in 2023 by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which joined with the Maine Aquaculture Association and Educate Maine to create a yearlong apprenticeship with Southern Maine Community College. Apprentices take classes in shellfish biology, water safety, skiff driving and basic boat maintenance. Grants helped pay for the boots, jackets and fishing bibs apprentices needed.

“The workforce here was a bottleneck,” said Carissa Maurin, aquaculture program manager for GMRI. New workers with degrees in marine biology were changing their minds after starting training at aquaculture farms. “Farms were wasting time and money on employees that didn’t want to be there.”

Chlebowski completed the apprenticeship at Muscongus Bay in September. He learned how to repair a Yamaha outdoor motor, how to grade oysters and how to work on a 24-foot, flat-bottom skiff. He stayed on as an employee, working at the farm on the Damariscotta River — the oyster capital of New England. The company is known for two varieties of oysters: Dodge Cove Pemaquid and Wawenauk.

Oyster farming generates local pride, Chlebowski said. The Shuck Station in downtown Damariscotta gives oyster farmers a free drink when they come in and there’s an annual summer shucking festival. But the company is trying to provide careers, Chlebowski said, not just high-season jobs.

“It can be hard to make a career out of farming, but it’s like any trade,” he said, adding that there is work to do year-round. “Welding and HVAC have trade schools and apprenticeships. Why shouldn’t aquaculture?”

Chlebowski’s apprenticeship turned into a career. Back in Shingletown, students in the logging program hope for the same result when they finish.

Until then, they spend Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the woods learning how to operate and maintain equipment. Tuesdays and Thursdays are spent on Shasta College’s Redding campus, where the apprentices take three classes: construction equipment operation, introduction to forestry and wood products and milling.

At the end of the semester, students demonstrate their skills at a showcase in the Shingletown woods. Logging company representatives will attend and scout for workers. Students typically get offers at the showcase. So far, 50 students have completed the pre-apprenticeship program and most transitioned into full apprenticeships. Fifteen people have completed the full apprenticeship program and now earn from $40,000 to $90,000 a year as loggers.

Related: Some people going into the trades wonder why their classmates stick with college

Mentorship is at the heart of apprenticeships. On the job, new workers are paired with more experienced loggers who pass on knowledge and supervise the rookies as they complete tasks. Pre-apprentices at Shasta College learn from Jonas Lindblom, the program’s heavy equipment and logging operations instructor.

At the logging site, Lindblom watches as a tall sugar pine slowly falls and thuds to the ground. Lindblom’s father, grandfathers and great-grandfather all drove trucks for logging companies in Northern California.

An axe sticks out of a freshly cut tree at a logging site used to train student loggers enrolled at Shasta College in Redding, Calif. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

This is a good area for apprentices to “just be able to learn at their pace,” he said. “They’re not pushed and they can get comfortable in the machines without developing bad habits along the way.”

Lindblom, who studied agriculture education at Chico State University, spent all his breaks during college working as a logger. He works closely with the logging companies that partner with the program to make sure he’s teaching up-to-date practices. It’s better for new loggers to learn in this outdoor classroom, he said, than on the job.

“The majority of these students did not grow up in logging families,” he said. “This is a great opportunity to pass on this knowledge and share where the industry is going.”

Contact editor Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingereport.org.

This story about learning on the job was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

Join us today.

Source link

March 19, 2025
Trade union partnerships hold promise for high school students

DANVERS, Mass. — It’s a rainy fall day in New England, but that doesn’t stop a group of students at Essex Tech North Shore Agricultural & Technical High School from donning work boots and hard hats and getting to work building a vegetable wash station on campus. This afternoon, they are installing wire mesh and prepping for a concrete pour under the watchful eye of Laborers’ Local 22 member Chris Moore, their teacher. “Hard hat hair don’t care,” reads the sticker on the hat worn by a young woman in the program.

The construction craft laborers track at Essex Tech, which Moore helps lead, is one of only a few high school-based programs in Massachusetts co-sponsored by a trade union. Students are initiated in union norms and expectations early on. Two Essex Tech teachers in the program are Local 22 members, with the New England Laborers’ Training Academy, which runs the laborers’ apprenticeship, paying Moore’s salary. As seniors, students can attend union meetings. And after graduation, many of them go straight into a union apprenticeship, fast tracked to a journeyman’s license. For all these reasons, Owen Paniagua, a 16-year-old junior, described the program as “a golden ticket to job security,” noting that he has learned everything from carpentry and concrete work to excavation and masonry.

“We feel as laborers that we should be in the schools,” said Lou Mandarini Jr., the retired business manager of Local 22 who now helps run the union’s school partnerships. “This is where your workforce is … If you treat young kids with respect, once they buy into your program, they are dead loyal.”

Students in the construction craft laborer program gather around Dave Collins, masonry head, before leaving to work on a project at Essex North Shore Agricultural & Technical High School in Danvers, Mass. Credit: Sophie Park for The Hechinger Report

In several states, including Massachusetts, Maryland and Louisiana, trade union leaders have forged similar, groundbreaking partnerships with high school CTE programs in recent years, ponying up their own resources for the efforts. There’s also been an uptick in training alliances between trade unions and community colleges. In a 2023 brief, AFL-CIO leadership encouraged these partnerships. “No one knows better how to do a job than someone who does the job,” the brief stated.

Whether more unions decide to embrace this advice likely will play a large role in determining the long-term health and vibrancy of both career and technical high schools, and the trades themselves.

Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

Twin trends are fueling some of the efforts: rapidly declining trade union membership, particularly in the Midwestern states; and up to $850 billion in infrastructure investment under the Biden administration (though some of that is in limbo because of an executive order from President Donald Trump), including designated funding for partnerships between education and labor.

Yet progress has been piecemeal and halting. And it’s too early to tell whether isolated partnerships across the country will translate into widespread change, said Taylor White, the director of postsecondary pathways for youth at the Center on Education and Labor at the think tank New America. “Schools and unions speak very different languages,” she noted. The same, she added, is true of employers and schools.

The longstanding dearth of partnerships says a lot about the history of America’s trade unions, which traditionally have operated as insular, sometimes parochial institutions, preferring to maintain tight control over their membership pipeline, and their training. In some communities, such as Milwaukee, that insularity kept unions predominantly white and male for generations. “Historically a lot of the high-paying skilled trades were handed down from father to son,” said Lauren Baker, a former education director in the printers’ union who also led Milwaukee Public Schools’ career and technical education program between 2002 and 2012. “That kept the trades looking a certain way.”

Mandarini, the retired union leader, said that in the past, “old timers didn’t help the young people.” But increasingly, he said, he hopes that mentality will become an anomaly.

Owen Paniagua, 16, and Isabella Gonzalez, 17, both juniors in the Construction Craft Laborer program at Essex North Shore Agricultural & Technical High School, pose for a portrait at Essex Tech in Danvers, Mass. The Essex Tech program’s partnership with the laborers’ union helps to foster job prospects for graduating students. Credit: Sophie Park for The Hechinger Report

For decades, many vocational school students have been held back by a lack of meaningful partnerships with both unions and employers at their schools, often leaving them without relevant training or clear pathways into jobs. “There’s skepticism from unions and employers that high school kids are ready for real training and real work,” said White, of New America.

There’s also been a longstanding desire on the part of many unions to maintain tight control over who can access often coveted apprentice slots.

Until recent years, most trade union apprenticeships in the Milwaukee area had admissions criteria that shut out many women, low-income, and Black and Hispanic city residents. “They were such closed communities, and it was a long process of breaking down some of those walls,” Baker said.

Related: Apprenticeships are a trending alternative to college but there’s a hitch

Back in the mid-1990s, Baker was the first woman to run a printing apprenticeship program for the union. In part to open up the field to as diverse a pool as possible, Baker abolished a requirement that apprentices had to be high school graduates. “Pretty much all a high school diploma told me was that they sat in a chair for four years,” she said, pointing out that many of the apprentices came from the academic bottom of their graduation classes. “I caught holy hell from the apprenticeship community for doing that,” she said.

While the SATs and other college entrance exams have at times been accused of being biased toward privileged white students, Baker said some of the apprenticeship admissions exams were challenging for anyone who hadn’t grown up in the home of someone already working in a specific trade. A question might presume that an applicant had experience helping fix their family’s car, for instance, something that young men were far more likely to have done — and those growing up in urban areas, where fewer households own cars, were far less likely to have done.

For decades, those tests contributed to keeping the construction trade unions, in particular, predominantly white and male. Only two of 16 Milwaukee area construction unions enrolled at least 20 percent Black apprentices in 2007, according to a report from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Two of the unions, glazing and tile setters, had no Black apprentices in a city where, at that time, nearly 40 percent of the residents were Black.

Much of that bias and insularity continues in some Boston-area construction trade unions, said Travis Watson, who serves as a commissioner of the Boston Employment Commission and has critiqued some of the unions for their lack of racial diversity, citing specific practices that make it harder for prospective Black members to get a foothold. “If you look at every big downtown project in Boston, there are very few Black people who are working on union construction projects,” he said.

Some of the local unions have made changes to their admissions process to become more accessible to applicants from diverse backgrounds, said Danyson Tavares, who worked for several years in leadership positions at YouthBuild Boston, a pre-apprenticeship program that helps prepare young people of color in the city for jobs in the construction and design industries. But other unions might take applications only once a year or remain secretive about their standards and curriculum. “The electrical union is the one we really want to have more relationships with, there’s such a demand for that workforce,” Tavares said. “We’ve slowly started to penetrate but it’s a lot more work than I expected.”

One 25-year-old who recently finished his pre-apprenticeship in carpentry at YouthBuild said he got an interview with the union but was turned down for an apprenticeship for reasons that he said weren’t entirely clear. “I kind of felt like I wouldn’t get in,” said Keyshawn Kavanaugh. He found a non-union job easily at a company that he likes a lot, but he acknowledges that “the union is the best place to work,” at least from the standpoint of benefits and pension.

In Milwaukee, Baker said she’s seen some positive changes since she ran the printers apprenticeship, with more local unions developing inclusive and transparent admissions. “The trades themselves began to realize that they needed to look beyond their natural base in order to fill jobs,” she said. “It became more apparent that there is a vast opportunity out there with women and people of color.”

Related: States bet big on career education but struggle to show it works

The idea that Massachusetts laborers should invest time and money in local schools originated over 20 years ago, when Mandarini and other Local 22 leaders decided they were neglecting a potential asset: kids. Mandarini proposed a pilot partnership to the vocational school in Medford, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, which started in 2002. It wasn’t easy at first. “How do you adapt to a public school?” he said. “There was a lot of learning that we had to do on both ends.”

The union had to fight against a perception that a four-year college degree was the only path to a stable, rewarding career, Mandarini said. It helped with recruiting to explain to prospective students that, at that time, union laborers could expect to retire with an annuity of about $1.2 million, he added. (In Massachusetts, laborers typically earn between $90,000 and $100,000 annually, and that annuity is now more than $2 million, Mandarini said.)

A school bus sits in a parking lot at Essex North Shore Agricultural & Technical High School in Danvers, Mass. Credit: Sophie Park for The Hechinger Report

Over the years, the partnership model has spread to eight career and technical schools in Massachusetts. At some, the union pays a teacher’s salary, and at others it does not, Mandarini said. “We want to be in every vocational school in Massachusetts,” he said, “and hopefully every vocational school in New England. That’s where our workforce is coming from.”

In rural western Louisiana, it was a private company that encouraged a local trade union to partner with public high schools. The company, CapturePoint, which sells carbon storage services, reached out in March 2023 to the local branch of the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry, asking if the union would help build out a new career and technical track at the Vernon Parish School District.

To make it happen, the company paid for the electricity, classroom equipment and furniture to help turn an old woodworking shop at one of the district’s high schools into an updated welding shop. CapturePoint also took on several ongoing costs, paying for student transportation — the students can come from nine different high schools — and some administrative expenses. The union paid for some reconstruction and all the tools, and provided an instructor. The school offers the space and enrolls 30 students, who can skip their first year of apprenticeship if they join the union after graduating, thereby starting at a higher pay rate. “All of us have skin in the game,” said Lance Albin, who led the partnership for the union.

At high schools with trade union partnerships, there’s no shortage of interested students. Isabella Gonzalez, 17, creator of the “hard hat hair don’t care” sticker, said she hopes to move straight into an apprenticeship with Local 22 when she graduates in a year and a half. Aspiring laborers learn more diverse skills than students in related tracks like plumbing and electrical, she said, opening up the possibility of a greater variety of work.

That day last fall, juniors in the program practiced using a compactor to prep the ground for installation of a patio floor, part of the final stages in rebuilding a large cottage on campus. The construction students have been involved in the project since they poured the cement for the foundation in the summer of 2020, wearing masks during the pandemic’s early days, even outdoors.

By afternoon, the students had transitioned to another work in progress: the vegetable wash station by the greenhouse, where they needed to install enough wire mesh and rebar to do the concrete pour early the next week. “Put your hard hat on and help out,” their teacher Moore reminded a group of students holding back as the rain hardened. “No … statues here.”

Students in the Construction Craft Laborers program at Essex North Shore Agricultural & Technical High School lay mesh while working on a greenhouse washing station at Essex Tech in Danvers, Mass. Credit: Sophie Park for The Hechinger Report

Students say the partnership with Local 22 provides them increased career security and the confidence that they are learning relevant, up-to-date skills: Moore until recently worked part time in the field, including on Boston’s project to restore the tunnel to the city’s Logan Airport.

Paniagua, the 16-year-old student in the program, said he can command a higher pay rate than most of his peers at a part-time carpentry and landscaping job because of the expertise he has gained in the Essex Tech program. He’s used the extra money to buy two new trucks. The union partnership has also allowed him to make more thoughtful, informed choices about career steps, he added. Leaning on his teachers as mentors, Paniagua said he decided to continue studying at a specialized welding school in Wyoming after graduation to maximize his future earning potential. “We know what we want to do here and get on it,” Paniagua said, noting that it’s a stark contrast to some of his friends who are conflicted about the value of a four-year college degree. “We’re not lost,” he said, “or wasting money.”

Former President Joe Biden was exceptionally supportive of the labor movement, and specifically of partnerships between unions and schools. Some labor experts expect some of that support might continue in the new Trump administration. “We’re seeing indications of a Trump administration that might not be as hostile to unions as you might think,” said Shalin Jyotishi, founder and managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at New America. He cited Trump nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer, opposed by many in the business community, for Labor secretary, and the president’s support of the longshoremen’s union over their anti-automation stance.

In any event, “these bottoms-up innovations are already happening locally,” Jyotishi said. “Federal decisions can help or hurt … odds of success, but the proof-of-concept is already out of the bag.”

Related: For some students, certificate programs offer a speedy path to a job

A bigger question mark may be whether there is the will to expand capacity significantly on the ground. Some of the existing programs have not yet reached students in the most underserved communities who could potentially benefit most from a fast track into a union apprenticeship.

In Massachusetts, for instance, many of the high schools the laborers work with have become increasingly selective in admissions. Students from low-income homes were 30 percent less likely to be accepted at the state’s vocational schools in 2023 and 2024 than those from wealthier households, according to an analysis by the Boston Globe. Similar disparities existed for students receiving special education services and English learners.

The laborers have yet to expand their partnership model to Boston’s Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, where nearly all of the students are Black or Hispanic, about 85 percent come from low-income households, and 92 percent are identified as “high needs” — an umbrella term in Massachusetts that includes students with disabilities, English learners and low-income students, among other groups.

Madison Park, part of the city’s public school district, has some partnerships and many strong programs and instructors, said Bobby Jenkins, an alum and long-time advocate of the school. But the chronic turnover of both superintendents and school leaders in recent years has hindered progress in undertaking some more ambitious partnerships.

Isabella Gonzalez, 17, a junior in the Construction Craft Laborers program at Essex North Shore Agricultural & Technical High School, compacts gravel at the Larkin Cottage, a project site at Essex Tech in Danvers, Mass. Credit: Sophie Park for The Hechinger Report

Mandarini agreed that political and bureaucratic obstacles have made it more challenging to partner with Madison Park. But the union has made it a priority and is in promising talks with city officials about partnering with the school when a proposed new facility might be completed.

“When I was part of the building trades, I used to say, ‘I don’t understand why you aren’t taking more kids, especially in the city of Boston,’” Mandarini said. “Every single trade should be in (Madison Park).’”

For now, that attitude has not spread to all union leaders. It will take a cultural shift from trade union groups to expand their school partnerships beyond scattered, boutique programs. Among other things, they will need to prioritize flexibility and the learning and growth of young people more than they are accustomed to, said White, of New America.

She noted that many union leaders seem aware that they have a pipeline and recruitment issue but remain unsure what to do about it. More school-based partnerships could help not only with that challenge but also with reenergizing and selling unions to future generations of workers — and voters, White added. “All of the polling suggests that young people are pretty pro-union,” she said. “There’s a missed opportunity on the part of unions if they don’t capitalize on that.”

Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445 or shah@hechingerreport.org.

Reporting on this story was supported by the Higher Ed Media Fellowship, where Carr was a fellow in 2024. This year, Carr has a fellowship from New America to report on early childhood issues.

This story about trade unions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

Join us today.

Source link

February 11, 2025