As NonDoc recently highlighted earlier this week, Rep. Mickey Dollens (D-OKC) is promoting Apprenticeship Oklahoma, an “earn while you learn training model that combines real-world hands on training and job related education geared towards teaching the skills necessary for the jobs of tomorrow.”
The apprenticeship program would be a model for the type of partnerships that the Oklahoma City Public School System needs. Students would engage in concurrent enrollment at a career tech or a community college and receive paid on-the-job training. Ideally, Apprenticeship Oklahoma would collaborate with Career Tech and the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education.
Apprenticeship Oklahoma is a no-brainer on multiple levels. It would be an ideal starting point for the bipartisan cooperation we must bring back. Business-minded people should be impressed by its forecast return of $1.47 for every dollar invested in student apprenticeships, and it would build on our community’s strengths, our heritage of each generation mentoring our youth.
Apprenticeship programs embody pragmatism
I don’t want to distract from Dollens’ win-win policy by being critical of past OKCPS policies, but the apprenticeship program would be a big step away from ideology-driven policy making and toward one of evidence-based pragmatism. Before the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, most of my classes benefited from students who dual enrolled with MetroTech. The big flaw with the program was that it was limited to high school students with a clean disciplinary record. Had we opened such a program to younger students before they started to have disciplinary problems, our most vulnerable kids would have benefited the most.
Before 2001, the overriding fear was that students would be tracked into classes that wouldn’t lead to college. So, adults who held a certain education philosophy would say that we had to respect the right of each student to choose college. They ultimately did so by taking away many students’ rights to make a key decision on their career path.
Many schools have maintained, expanded and modernized their approach to incorporating career education into public schools. The team effort that provides the apprentice option to teens must always be vigilant in counseling students – not accidentally tracking them.
Apprenticeship exudes a timeless ethos
Under no circumstances should we send some kids down a second-rate track. When I participated in field trips to MetroTechs in the early 1990s, we were told that new technologies require complex and challenging learning. We were also told, correctly, that their students wrestled with concepts as complicated and deep as those ideas studied in college prep classes. In high-challenge schools, I bet today’s classrooms are more likely to offer the second-class curriculum.
On the other hand, apprenticeship is a concept that should inform our public-education discussions. We need to reclaim its timeless ethos, with caring adults guiding young people. And in this digital world, the cross-generational learning would go both ways. Together, we must invent new digital technologies and digital literacy, as well as a system of ethics that helps kids control their devices instead of being controlled by them.
Make schools into ‘boot camps for life’
I’d go even farther: In our obsession with remediating skills so students can pass bubble-in tests, we created test-prep “boot camps.” A great education commentator, the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, contrasts that narrow mindset with the more humane view of schools as “boot camps for life.” We need to reclaim schools as places that once again practice hands-on learning. We need an apprenticeship system where generation-to-generation conversations about work and life, as well as ideas, are ubiquitous.
And I’d expand the concept to teacher training. I’d make a culture of apprenticeship the cornerstone of teacher education.
