Links for 04/19/10

Rick Hess on Rep. Harkin's proposal to inject "emergency spending" for education:

Harkin imagines, I presume, that our kids and grandkids will one day thank us profusely for putting them even deeper in debt so that districts can avoid trimming unaffordable benefits, taking a hard look at operations, closing underutilized facilities, or seeking more cost-effective ways to deploy staff.

Ben Miller:

universities matter in student outcomes. Schools’ financial aid allocation and state’s subsidy decisions have a real and dramatic effect on how quickly their students are able to degrees

Association for Career and Technical Education attempts to define career readiness:

three areas of strength that students need if they are to be ready for the various demands of a 21st-century workplace.

One is a strong core of academic skills that would launch them into good jobs or entry-level college work without remedial classes...to be “truly career-ready,” students also must know how to apply those academic skills in the context of the jobs they do

Special attention should be given to skills that employers often cite as deficient,

“employability” skills, such as adaptability, collaboration, and critical thinking, and “technical” skills that are specific to particular fields, such as those required for industry licensure or certification.

David Bunting, executive director of the Iowa Association for Career and Technical Education, as quoted in an IHE article:

We always tell career teachers to integrate reading, writing and mathematics into their curriculum, but we never tell, say, English teachers to integrate work skills

The college-level biology teacher, for instance, should be inspiring students to careers in biology and telling them what’s out there for them. When we talk integration, we only think the career-tech [instructors] should do it; the academics should do it, too. Maybe what we need to do is put much more emphasis on what’s going to be used