Ghidotti Early College High School a huge success
If I had to rank all of my hundreds of votes as a Sierra College Trustee, my vote to create the Ghidotti Early College High School, in partnership with the Nevada Union High School District, is bound to be in the top five.
The Union did a great job reporting on the success of the school’s first four years, and talking to a few members of its first graduating class of seniors – 9 of whom graduated from high school with a college degree!
The seniors at Ghidotti Early College High School readily admit that, as 14-year-olds on a community college campus, they acted, well, 14.
There was some horseplay; there was the occasional plunge into the ornamental pond at the center of campus.
But four years after the start of the educational experiment — in which students take college and high school courses simultaneously — seniors say they’re older, wiser and well-positioned for their next steps in higher education.
“It makes you more mature,” said senior Tiffany Craddick. …
Some seniors say they felt like guinea pigs, as school administrators worked out the kinks in the unconventional program.
They wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Small and tight-knit, Ghidotti is “like a family.”
“When I first went to high school, it felt exactly like middle school,” said senior Matthew Ames, who started out at the much larger Bear River High School. “There was one class after the other.”
Then, a friend told him about Ghidotti, which this year reached its maximum enrollment of about 160 students.
“I was very impressed,” Ames said. “You get to know each other well. It’s like a family environment.”
Ghidotti is one of about 15 early college programs in California and among 200 nationwide. Funded by a start-up grant of $400,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, early college programs are an effort to blur the line between high school and college, where students tend to fall between the cracks.
After Ghidotti, “college is a lot less daunting,” said Anders.
The free program is not limited to high achievers: Ghidotti accepts students of all academic backgrounds, as long as they commit to working hard.
The philosophy behind early college is that even underachieving students can succeed when they’re challenged by rigorous courses and supported in a small, personal environment.
For the past three years, Ghidotti has posted higher scores in the California Academic Performance Index than Nevada Union or Bear River high schools.
Students start the day by checking in with a teacher and taking a study skills course called AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination).
In other high schools, AVID targets a small group of disadvantaged students. At Ghidotti, everyone participates. The program supports students as they transition from middle school to college, and helps them plan out a schedule combining core high school subjects and college courses.
School days look more like college. Rather than seven back-to-back periods, students have open blocks during the day.
“There’s more responsibility,” said Craddick. “There are all these open periods, so we have to discipline ourselves.”
The moral of this story? You can take kids (many of whom are the first in their family to attend college courses), expect great things and they will respond to the challenge.
I know resources are tight, but we need to do more of this all over California and America.
Photo Credit: The Union / John Hart
What if Your Child’s Future Was Up To a Lottery?
The average black or Latino 12th grader reads at the same level as the average white 8th grader.
Look at that statement for a moment and ask yourself: why is that?
It’s not something inherent to the student. It’s not physiological differences in the minuscule percentage of DNA that differs between races. It’s not because of culture.
It’s because of opportunity…to learn, to develop and to thrive.
To quote former New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, “the problem is a system that protects academic failure.”
The Lottery is a documentary film following the stories of four children and their families as they vie for a coveted place at Harlem Success Academy. I haven’t seen the film – it is apparently on a very limited theatrical run.
Yet the trailer is powerful and I can’t wait until it’s available on DVD. Take a look.
(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: the embedded video is above.)
Thanks to my friend Ben for sending this my way!
Revitalizing Educational Programs
There are two key and equally important pillars of the community college system. One is general education: topics like English, history, science and mathematics. The other is career and technical education: the vocational programs that teach specific job skills that, at least in theory, lead directly to gainful employment.
As you might imagine, the needs of the job market change like the speed of light. Jobs change, old industries fade away, and new ones bloom. One of the biggest challenges our career and technical education programs face is keeping the education relevant to the job markets they serve.
Sierra College has 24 career and technical programs. You can see most of the list here, although that site is missing the relatively new Solar Energy Technician, Virtual Office Professional and Mechatronics programs.
(By the way, the photo above is Dan Lee, one of the student leaders in our Automotive Technology program. I’ve enjoyed getting to know him and a number of our other students over the years.)
How do we judge the health of these programs? That’s a tough question to answer, but here are a few suggestions I’ve heard:
- How long it takes for a student to get a job after graduating
- Availability of jobs and/or need for new workers in the targeted industry
- Enrollment growth in the program
- Sufficiency of a program’s facilities or equipment
- Opinions of private sector employers in the industry the program serves
The only objective and easily available data we have is enrollment in these programs – the rest of the data is either impossible to collect, or somewhat subjective and/or anecdotal.
Suffice it to say, determining when programs need to be revitalized is a challenge, but falling enrollment is a key indicator. (As an aside, falling enrollment doesn’t necessarily mean classes aren’t “full” – click here for a more in-depth look at what declining enrollment means.)
That’s how it came to be that our automotive, construction technology and agriculture programs were recommended for reduction in the 2010-11 package of spending cuts that the college’s Strategic Council and executive team sent to the board.
The board didn’t feel able to approve that specific reduction, largely because the criteria for the recommendation wasn’t clear. That had a lot to do with the college’s Academic Senate and the fact that a policy for program revitalization and/or discontinuance had stalled in the approval process (state law requires the Academic Senate to play a key role in approving that policy).
The Academic Senate recently put forth a draft policy, and the Board asked for a much more specific policy. Suffice it to say, I think we’re looking for a set of criteria for a program to enter the revitalization process, a brief description of how the process should work, and a framework to generate a program recommendation at the end of the process. I’m hoping we’ll see that soon.
In the mean time, the three programs in question are continuing to operate in a scaled-down fashion for the 2010-11 school year, and have entered a revitalization process that will result in a recommendation to the Board in October or November. Vice President of Instruction Rachel Rosenthal updated the Board on that process in March, and I thought you’d be interested in seeing her slide deck:
(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded slide show above.)
As we wait to see the state budget take shape, we know that the likelihood is that we’ll have to return to developing new solutions for our budget by this fall. Our imperative is to continue to innovate our career and technical programs to keep up with the rebounding job market, while living within our means and acting in a fiscally sustainable manner with the resources we have.
It promises to stay interesting!
Photo Credit: Sac Bee
Sierra College wins $150K grant from the National Science Foundation
Continuing to build our partnerships with middle and high schools centered on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Sierra College just secured a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
The funds will expand our Tech-Explorer program, to develop and test the impact of integrating match curriculum into the building of a catapult.
Getting mathematics credit for building a catapult? I can’t imagine a middle school kid can think of something more awesomely cool than that.
We Need More of This
Take a close look at those seven in the photo above: left to right, Laura Sartori, Kyrie Davenport, Jasmine West, Michael Stock, Austin Fields, Bryce Morgan and Maddie Gilliland. Do they look like your typical college graduates?
They’re not.
Last Thursday, I had the privilege to participate in the commencement exercises at Sierra College’s Nevada County Campus, where they earned their AA degrees, along with 45 other students. The Union did a great job covering it this morning.
But those seven will earn another academic honor in just a couple of weeks: their high school diplomas.
Four years ago, Sierra College partnered with Nevada Union High School District to form the Ghidotti Early College High School. These kids all came to our college campus each day, attended high school classes in the morning and college classes in the afternoon. Many of them will graduate with a lot of college credit, but these seven actually completed full degrees during their four years of high school.
It’s an amazing accomplishment. It just proves that when you challenge kids, they step up and meet the challenge.
We need more of this kind of innovation in education.
Photo Credit: The Union / John Hart
Rebuilding Career and Tech at High School
I’ve written here and here before about Sierra College’s efforts to partner with area high schools to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That initiative is called the STEM Community Collaborative and it’s an exciting effort.
Funded by a grant from the community college chancellor’s office, Sierra College now counts Colfax, Granite Bay, Lincoln, Nevada Union, Oakmont, Placer, North Tahoe and Truckee high schools as “partner schools” and is helping them rebuild their career and technical education programs.
Whether it’s Big Business or Big Government, Stifling Competition is Bad
There are far too many examples these days of the big trying to stamp out the small through the use of government regulation.
Whether it’s UPS lobbyists inserting language into transportation bills to try to make life harder for FedEx, or lobbyists who manage to make buying their company’s product a requirement by federal law, there are untold examples of stifling innovation and competition through government regulation.
The same applies to big government, as well.
The latest effort is here in California, where the public education lobby is trying to stamp out their chief source of competition, charter schools, by passing a hard cap on the number of charter schools that can be opened. The bill is AB 1982, and it will be heard in the Education Committee next week – you can make your voice heard on this issue by clicking here.
Never mind that charter schools provide parents with alternative choices for educating their kids. Never mind that many public schools are now performing much better, spurred on by the innovative ideas and competition that charter schools have delivered. Never mind the unsightly scene of government trying to stifle its own competition through the force of government.
At Sierra College, we have plenty of competition: not just four year schools, but also trade and technical schools like Heald and ITT. We provide superior value and higher quality education. Competition has driven us to be better and to develop innovative career and technical programs (a good example is the only Mechatronics training program west of the Mississippi river).
Public education is at its best when it has to compete. Stifling competition and innovation is wrong, whether it’s at the hand of big business or big government.
Netflix Founder Acquires Dreambox
I blogged before about Dreambox, a tech startup that makes interactive games to teach math to kids. They were acquired this past week by Charter School Growth Fund, and the acquisition was funded by Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings.
Mr. Hastings said that he thinks netbooks will be ubiquitous in schools in a few years, creating huge opportunities for online learning software.
“I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” he said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.”
DreamBox was started last year — I wrote about it at the time — and creates personalized lesson plans, hidden in games, based on which concepts children understand or need to work on.
“What makes their product so impressive is it adapts to each student’s learning, and that’s the Holy Grail of this field,” Mr. Hastings said.
There is major innovation on the horizon for public education. This is one of those quiet, early signals.
Government Getting in the Way of Opportunity
I think most common sense people, either to the right or left of center, are in favor of the same ends, for the most part. But what puts me to the right of center is constantly watching the government try to “protect” us from something, and kill the goose that was laying our golden eggs in the process.
The New York Times just ran a story on federal and state regulators who are losing sleep because they are worried that job-creating businesses may be getting free labor from interns, in exchange for giving those interns the important job skills and references they need to become employable.
Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide. …
Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.
One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.
Oh the horrors! Can you imagine how many nails that poor Ivy Leaguer must have broken doing a real job in the real world?
Here’s what I want to know: was she kidnapped and forced to work for this apparel company? Or did she graduate from her Ivy League university with no recognizable job skills, and this internship was her path to gaining them?
Either way, fining the company for giving her a chance to become an employable, productive citizen seems like the wrong approach.
You’ll recall that I blogged about Internships.com a few weeks ago. Their CEO, Robin D. Richards, just sent out an open letter making the point: paid vs. unpaid is not the question.
Access to opportunity is for some almost an entitlement, but for the vast majority of Americans access to opportunity results from hard work and ingenuity.
The harder you work, the more ingenious you are, the luckier you get. The view that the government needs to regulate and protect our college students from the possibility of corporations seeking to take unfair advantage, I believe, is based on good intentions. However, in this case these intentions may be misplaced.
The American college student is sufficiently sophisticated, strategic and ambitious. Upward mobility is a uniquely American ideal. Anything is possible with education, preparation, hard work, ambition and access.
This issue of paid vs. unpaid is not an issue of fairness as some want you to believe, it is an issue of choice and free will. Statistics from 2007/20081 show that two out of three students who secure internships are offered full-time employment from the very company that gave them the internship. The marketplace has always been the great equalizer. If a company posts an internship that is unpaid and another posts one that is paid, the student will vote with their application. Our students are very capable of making a free will choice. If they believe an unpaid internship will result in a better path toward their chosen profession, then America’s best and America’s most ambitious will have a chance to craft and execute their competitive strategy towards getting a full time job after college.
The way many of the students from the 3,900+ colleges and universities not considered elite compete with students from the elite institutions is not on paper but in the actual working environment. They show their value live. We as a country do not need to constrain ingenuity and hard work and free choice with legal roadblocks. The approach of reducing options and choice will hurt the very group this well intended position is trying to protect.
At the end of the day, choice is the foundation to both our economy and our great democracy. Students today are well equipped to make this choice without our collective intervention.
Robin D. Richards
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Internships.com1 National Association of Colleges and Employers 2009 Experiential Education Survey
Robin is right on.
What’s your take? Should unpaid internships be a legal opportunity for students to gain job skills, or are they being exploited? Use the comments below to share your thoughts.
Sierra College Student featured in “Take America to College”
The Sacramento Bee’s Ed Fletcher has a great story profiling Shane Burrows, a very typical hard working Sierra College student who works full time while chipping away at his college degree. Now, he’s headed to Washington DC as a part of the “Take America to College” program to help policymakers understand what it takes for middle class students to finish college.
Shane Burrows is no expert on education. Nevertheless, the Sierra College student will have the ear of Washington insiders in a matter of weeks.
Burrows will be joined by a police officer, a single mother and two military veterans who all will advocate for education and impress upon policymakers the rough road nontraditional students endure on their way toward a college degree.
"There are a lot of students like me," he said. "Hopefully, what we do in Washington will help a lot of students."
Burrows, 24, works full time in sales while squeezing in community college classes after a five-year break. …
Burrows started college right out of high school but took a break after a few semesters to make some money and work enough hours to earn health insurance. The break turned into five years.
"Once I was in that routine, it was easy not to go back," Burrows said.
Along the way, he’s made his share of financial missteps. Charges of $100 here and there turned into $10,000 in debt in addition to rent, car costs and community college expenses.
Burrows speaks matter of factly about his situation – without a hint of woe, blame or anger.
His mother died when he was 7. His father "had money to support us but didn’t have money to send us to university," Burrows explained. By 18 he was pretty much on his own.
His five-year hiatus from education didn’t worry his maternal grandmother, Peggy Mart. "I never have worried about him doing the wrong thing or getting mixed up with the wrong people," she said.
Photo Credit: Sac Bee
