College and career readiness up close and personal
CSBA task force continues work, visiting programs in Antioch and Porterville
November 2013
Site visits to the Antioch and Porterville unified school districts gave members of CSBA’s Linked Learning Task Force a chance to talk with students, teachers and governance team members about their models for creating college and career success.
“The students I met seemed to be much more focused on preparing for what they want to do after high school than I remember being as a high school student, when we didn’t have any idea,” Jack Dilles, a task force member who also serves on the board of the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, said of the Oct. 11 visit to Antioch’s Dozier-Libbey Medical High School. “Teachers and students were very engaged, and everything in that school was geared toward interdisciplinary activities.”
The medical high school is one of six Antioch Linked Learning Pathways academies that offer four-year sequences of career technical education courses, linking content across the curriculum and connecting classroom learning to real-world applications. The visit was the latest by the task force, which is researching the state’s experience with CTE. The 2013-14 state budget safeguards existing regional occupational centers and programs, the most time-honored approach outside of college-preparatory study to readying students for success in future careers. Categorical program restrictions on most of the funding that local educational agencies receive for ROC/Ps and adult education have been eliminated, but LEAs that ran the programs in 2012-13 must maintain their level of effort on them through 2014-15.
Porterville Pathways
Porterville’s nine-academy Pathways program, which task force members visited on Sept. 27, also aims to make learning relevant and academically rigorous. This is complemented through the district’s top-notch business partnerships that have led to countless internships and other work-based learning experiences for students.
Task force members had an opportunity to interact with Gilbert Bareng, project manager at the architecture, planning and interior design firm of Mangini and Associates, who has been an instrumental partner in Porterville’s engineering pathway.
“My role is to step out of the business partner role and step in as an educator,” said Bareng.
CSBA task force member Hayley Buettner, who serves on the Porterville school board, said the Pathways program is an especially effective way to engage students who previously struggled academically, but the program also enrolls a cross section of students that are representative of the overall student population.
“When our superintendent brought this strategy to the board, we were very excited,” Buettner said. “We’re six years into this, and now our board sees all our budget and policy decisions through the Linked Learning filter.”
CTE: Best practices
Linked Learning is one of a number of related approaches to preparing students for college and workplace success. The program builds upon and often complements longstanding efforts by ROCPs, which specialize in career technical education. Porterville’s Pathways has won a CSBA Golden Bell Award in the CTE category.
The work of CSBA’s Linked Learning Task Force continues, with upcoming site visits planned at CTE/ROP programs throughout Solano County.
“The goal of the site visits is to provide CSBA members with experiences to see ROP-based Linked Learning sites in action,” explained Angelo Williams, Ed.D., CSBA’s assistant executive director for Policy and Programs. The task force is developing guidance for the association on public policy recommendations and legislation stemming from the California Department of Education’s Multiple Pathways to Student Success Report. That 2010 document looks at the state’s experience with career technical education from the establishment of regional occupational centers and programs in 1967.