Credit: Neil Hanshaw

Credit: Neil Hanshaw

With the winner's circle set up on the land'southward multimillion-dollar grant plan to aggrandize career education, grant recipients must now go down to piece of work to keep their promises.

The winners of the California Career Pathways Trust laid out some aggressive goals for the coin. The $250 one thousand thousand fund is believed to exist the largest investment in the nation to expand teaching programs that requite students hands-on work experience on their path to graduation.

Grants were awarded to 39 partner groups that pledged to create stronger links between schools, community colleges and businesses to better prepare students for jobs that are in high demand in local economies. The former, competitive grants were awarded in three categories: up to $15 million, up to $six million and up to $600,000.

All told, the state handed out $248 meg under the fund, with the remaining money to be distributed later on in a manner all the same to be determined, state officials said.

Such connections between education and business are seen as vital to ensuring that what students acquire in the classroom is relevant to skills needed in college and careers. Many of the programs follow a linked learning approach, which typically offers a multi-yr high schoolhouse program in which career themes are integrated throughout the academic work and culminate in an internship or other job experience in a student'due south senior year. Students participate in a small learning environment with close relationships with teachers and receive individualized attention and support throughout their high school years.

Fostering collaboration

"We've worked on minor projects, just certainly not to this degree," said Tiffany Morse, director of career education in the Ventura County Office of Education, a fellow member a regional consortium that won a $13.ii 1000000 grant, amongst the largest offered. "We have a new age in education of collaboration and we are really taking that to centre. That seemed to be one of the chief focuses of this grant, to interact beyond silos."

In addition to the county office, the Ventura County partnership includes the Ventura Community College Commune, 7 school districts representing 15 high schools, three adult schools, the local Workforce Investment Board and more than 50 employers, including lemon and avocado grower Limoneira, the Ventura Canton Lodging Association and car tool architect Haas Automation.

"This is the largest-scale collaboration of this kind" in Ventura County, Morse said.

In 5 years, the partnership aims to profoundly expand the number of pathways available to the region'southward students, setting a goal of serving more than 35,000 students in 62 career pathway programs.

One pathway beingness launched this fall will introduce students to careers in aviation through a partnership with the Career Education Center at the Ventura Canton Part of Education and Channel Islands Aviation, which runs a flight school and provides other services at the Camarillo Airport. The two-year Air Academy volition allow students to learn how to build and fly unmanned aerial vehicles – or drones – as well every bit complete flight ground school to learn the basics of aviation. Upon completing the pathway, students will exist eligible to take a certification test, which would apply toward a airplane pilot'south license.

"As far as I know, nosotros're the simply ones with a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) curriculum statewide," Morse said.

Each of the Ventura County pathways is to exist coordinated with community colleges, assuasive for piece of cake transfer from high schoolhouse to customs college and also increasing opportunities for high schoolhouse students to have college courses through dual enrollment agreements.

Concern leaders will piece of work closely with educators to ensure that pathways are beingness developed to meet workforce needs, and each pathway will include at to the lowest degree one work-based feel for students.

Large plans

Other major grant recipients have laid out equally ambitious proposals:

Los Angeles Unified received $15 million for its proposal targeting loftier-growth Southern California industries, such as medical technology and environmental resource. Educational partners include the nearby Centinela Valley Unified High Schoolhouse District too as nine customs colleges in the expanse. Businesses in the partnership include the Boeing Company, Kaiser Permanente, Tyson Foods and the Southern California Gas Company.

In the Bay Area, a consortium led by the Oakland-based Peralta Community College Commune received $15 1000000 to bolster programs in engineering science, public service, digital media and other fields. That proposal seeks to link 11 schoolhouse districts and regional occupational programs in Alameda and Contra Costa counties with expanse community colleges and Workforce Investment Boards in a and so-chosen "East Bay Interstate 80/880" consortium – named for cardinal freeways running through the region. Participating businesses include Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Children's Hospital Oakland, the Alameda County Sheriff's Part and the Richmond Police Department.

Officials hope that the strength of those collaborations will keep the pathway programs going long later the grant runs out. Grant applicants had to build out five-year budgets to show how the programs would be sustained.

"We're trying to build something that works, then that each district or schoolhouse will be able to pay into it and keep information technology going," said Karen Engel, interim director of development for the Peralta Customs Higher District.

The Peralta consortium hopes to boost the number of pathway programs in the region it serves to 55, upwardly from 33, and increase educatee participation from 12,000 to 18,000.

Seeking more

The Career Pathways Trust was spearheaded last year by Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento.

Interest in the grant was so bang-up – the state Section of Education received 123 grant applications, request for about $709 one thousand thousand in total funding – that Steinberg is working to secure an additional $300 million for a like grant next year.

Research suggests that students who participate in linked learning programs have higher graduation rates than peers in traditional high school programs and are more than likely to be on track to have more of the courses required for access to the state'south four-year universities.

However, a Feb report of 9 districts participating in the California Linked Learning Commune Initiative was less clear on whether the programs raised standardized test scores. The study, by enquiry firm SRI International, said that scores on tests varied greatly across districts, without whatsoever consequent results between the students in pathways and those in traditional programs.

The grant program will too practice little to settle debates over the future of career technical education in California. Advocates fear that career programs – especially regional occupational programs, which are expensive to run and maintain – will lose footing nether the land's new funding plan for schools, the Local Command Funding Formula. The funding plan eliminates mandated, or categorical, spending on career technical educational activity and instead gives districts leeway to spend state money as they see fit. Others argue, however, that the Career Pathways Trust is evidence of a stronger focus on academically rigorous linked learning and career pathway programs that will better prepare students for college and careers.

Even so, state Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, wants to restore $384 meg to career technical education in the state budget. He has also introduced legislation that would protect funding for regional occupational centers, which provide job training to assistance students enter the workforce directly out of loftier school.

The Career Pathways Trust is "a step in the right direction," Muratsuchi, who chairs the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Educational activity Finance, said in a statement. But he said the money wouldn't replace the need for dedicated funding for career technical education programs.

Michelle Maitre covers career and college readiness. Contact her at mmaitre@edsource.org and follow her on Twitter @michelle_maitre . Sign up here  for a no-cost online subscription to EdSource Today for reports from the largest education reporting team in California.

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