According to Philip Prale, assistant superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at Oak Park and River Forest High School, every student at the high school is encouraged to go to at least a junior college after graduating. They are also encouraged to choose classes that lead to a career.
That philosophy marks a major shift in education. Fifty years ago, there were “tracks,” one track for students going to college and another preparing them for a post-high school career in some trade. It was either/or. Now it’s both/and.
Nicholas Wyman, writing for Forbes online, said, “Ability tracking did not sit well with educators or parents, who believed students were assigned to tracks not by aptitude, but by socio-economic status and race. The result being that by the end of the 1950s, what was once a perfectly respectable, even mainstream educational path came to be viewed as a remedial track that restricted minority and working-class students.”
“The phrase that’s used now,” Prale said, “is ‘college and career.'” By college he means at least grade 14 or an associate’s degree. “Everybody is going to need some kind of college,” he said. “At the same time, all college experiences should lead to some kind of career.”
He used the example of a person working in a manufacturing plant. Increasingly these days the heavy lifting and repetitious work is being done by robots, but what happens when one breaks down? The factory is going to need people with two skill sets to get the assembly line moving as quickly as possible.
“They will probably need to know some coding or, at a minimum, some scripting of computer languages,” Prale said. “That means they will need some level of computer programming which we can provide in high school. They will also need some level of mechanical experience. They also need to know when to knock the side of the machine with a mallet to get it running again. They need knowledge they can get in the classroom and hands-on manufacturing experience.”
Matt Kirkpatrick, division head for Science and Technology, used the high school’s automotive program as a good example of what the school means by a career pathway.
“We have students who take our introductory and advanced auto courses,” Kirkpatrick said, “who go on to work with the CTA during a summer internship in one of their mechanic’s garages. This means that they have both knowledge and work experience to place on a resume after graduation.”
Regarding students who plan to attend a four-year college, Prale said they should be focused on the career for which they are preparing every time they register for classes. A big part of the reason for that kind of advice is the cost of education. “Between two-thirds and three-fourths of our students will attain a college degree within six years of graduation,” he said. “We’re opening up a conversation much more frequently with parents about what we’re calling ‘college and career experiences.'”
To illustrate this approach, Kirkpatrick used the example of a program he oversees called Project Lead the Way, “an engineering career pathway that offers kids an opportunity to study the general aspects of engineering and specialize in areas like electrical and civil engineering.
“We have four courses in this career pathway,” he added, “and all four of them are dual credit courses with Triton College. This means students who take courses in this career pathway will graduate from OPRF and be launched into an engineering program at Triton, or the college of their choice, with introductory courses already complete. This approach assures they’ve sufficiently explored their career and also may end up leading to an earlier/less costly graduation for their collegiate program.”
“We have an applied arts program,” Prale said, “which includes foods and nutrition, family consumer sciences, business education, broadcast communications and theater arts. We also have an industrial technology program with our science division because we found that they were doing more engineering and science applications. It’s not important what division a class is in. What’s important is that we have a commitment to our students participating in college-oriented and dual-credit experiences at every level of the high school, not for advanced placement students only but for everybody. We’re talking about college with our students at every level of the organization.”
Prale said OPRF is exploring the addition of career paths in cosmetology, culinary arts, and barbering.
