Mutilated Beyond Recognition
California's antiquated high school graduation requirements fail students. They're not aligned with today's careers and colleges.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell attempted to change that with Senate Bill 1795, introduced by Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-San Fernando Valley. First, the Senate gutted the bill, turning a proposed new 15-course required sequence into a voluntary pilot program for high schools. Then the Assembly Education Committee completed the evisceration. This bill isn't about improving the state's graduation requirements anymore and the gutted remainder isn't worth passing.
Legislators are caught up in arcane debates about the meaning of "rigorous" course work. What Californians want is graduation requirements that give kids the widest range of options after high school. They want their kids to be job-ready and college-ready.
The proposed 15-course sequence recognized that basic academic skills underlie all workplace environments. It also recognized that students are not just future workers, but also participants in our 200-year-old democracy. It aligned graduation requirements with minimal college entrance requirements.
If you want to see the good results of requirements that meld academic and career-technical skills, look no further than California's 500 successful career academies. Those began in 1981 as a way to prepare students at risk of dropping out of high school for work and college.
SB 1795 advanced the notion of a seamless transition between high school and the world of work and college. That effort was defeated by the California Teachers Association, which rewrote the bill, and by vocational and technical associations looking to the past, not the future of career-technical education. O'Connell and Alarcon will have to try again next session.
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