Shannon Nickinson
What have we learned from all of this?
After spending months working on a series of stories about the state of education in the Pensacola metro area for the Studer Community Institute, I couldn’t help but learn – a lot.
The days of the traditional 9-12 high school model may be nearing an end.
Economic development experts and business leaders talk about the need to build a skilled, adaptable workforce, one full of people who can solve problems, think critically and use technology in every aspect of a field or workplace.
Communities with people like that are the kind of places businesses want to set up shop. Especially in a world where lots of work can be done from anywhere.
One of the cornerstone evaluation tools we use to gauge the success of a school system is its graduation rate.
But we use it in a vacuum. We use it as if the world we send our 18-year-olds into is the same as it was a generation ago, when that diploma was the guarantee of employability it used to be.
What if we judged our schools not only by the number of students who graduate in four years, but also by the number of students who graduate with industry certifications, like Microsoft Office, or a trade certification in construction or electrical?
Or by the number of students who earned college credit through Advanced Placement or dual enrollment? And what if we expanded the kind of institutions we allowed our schools to partner with for dual enrollment, like Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University?
What if, as I heard it suggested, art classes were to include a certification in Final Cut Pro or Adobe Creative Suite by the end of the senior year? Why not include the option for certification in Microsoft Excel in teaching economics or statistics?
Wouldn’t that create better prepared college students, for those who choose that path, and ultimately more versatile employees?
The Career Pathways partnership among the area’s education and business leaders is a good start. Santa Rosa Superintendent Tim Wyrosdick’s idea for Innovation High School is another model worth considering.
Which means we need to engage kids
Both of those efforts to me raised an interesting notion: That “high school” really may need to start in what we now call middle school.
It used to be that making sure you see the practical application of the academic skills you acquire was for high school.
But consider this: Students who struggle in school do so when they begin to lose hope. Jim Clifton has written about this in The Coming Jobs War. Students who become disengaged in school do so when they don’t see the connection between school and their options for the future.
Michael Tidwell, the new chief of corrections for Escambia County, who has spent more than two decades in the corrections business, says in urban communities there is a segment of kids who begin to drop out mentally around fifth grade.
The real thing – and the social and economic perils that accompany it – for many is not far behind.
When that happens, the chances that they will meet law enforcement types like Tidwell or his colleagues in a professional sense are greater.
Keeping those kids – and all kids for that matter – engaged in their education is critical, not only to their success but to our community’s.
Doing that means valuing the kids in career education tracks as highly as we value those bound for four-year liberal arts degrees.
Our future depends upon breaking down the wall that exists around career education, a wall that parents, students and educators have built over time. And have been too slow to tear down.
To engage kids, we need to engage parents
Be it in middle school or prekindergarten, parent involvement is “secret sauce” of a good school.
But many parents don’t have the ingredients for that recipe.
They may have had bad school experiences of their own.
They may only hear from the teacher or the school when there is a problem.
They may have a job that doesn’t have flexible hours to allow them to attend a 9 a.m. parent-teacher conference or a 4 p.m. workshop on parent involvement.
They may have two jobs. Or two kids – or more. They may not be able to afford to have broadband Internet access – or a computer – at home.
They may need help and not know where to go to find it.
Information is power; and we need to share the power.
There are efforts to bridge that gap, but locally they are small, under the radar or subject to the whims of state funding.
But across the nation and across the Panhandle there are resources and research that show ways to help parents fulfill their most important role – a child’s first teacher.
Those efforts need to be taken seriously. Dr. Dana Suskind is the founder of the Thirty Million Words Initiative, an outreach program grounded in research, that helps Head Start parents on the South Side of Chicago learn simple strategies to be better first teachers.
The puzzle of how to make sure children are prepared for school is no mystery to her.
“I think we need to stop studying what the problems are because we know what the problem is,” Suskind says. “We need to help the parents.”
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of PensacolaToday.com, a news and commentary website in Pensacola. Follow her on Twitter @snickinson.com. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
