California’s public schools should be doing much more to prepare students who don’t go to college to enter the workforce, according to registered voters who responded to a Berkeley IGS/EdSource poll. But they are divided in their assessment of how well schools are doing in providing that preparation.
They also expressed strong support for community colleges and other institutions to offer more vocationally oriented apprenticeship programs that may not lead to a college degree but prepare students for specific jobs.
A major goal of reforms in California schools, including the Common Core standards and the Local Control Funding Formula, is to prepare students for both college and the workplace. But in the face of compelling research that shows that young people’s long-term economic prospects are far better if they graduate from college, the emphasis in public schools in recent decades has been on preparing students for success in college, at the expense of more vocationally oriented courses or pathways.
Yet in the survey of 1,000 registered voters in late August and early September, 69 percent of voters “believe is it very important for the state’s public schools to put greater emphasis on preparing high school students who may not end up going to college to be successful in the workforce.” Just 3 percent said it was not important.
When voters were given a number of indicators that could be used to evaluate the performance of public schools, almost exactly the same proportion ranked “preparing student to enter the workforce directly after high school” as being of high importance (62 percent), as did those who similarly ranked “preparing students for college” (61 percent).
“The poll results indicate that the California public recognizes the importance of providing options for students who may not go to college when they graduate from high school, or may delay going there,” said EdSource executive director Louis Freedberg.
However, respondents felt that schools could be doing a far better job when it comes to workplace preparation. When asked to rate how well schools are doing in preparing students for the job market, just 28 percent said schools near them “are doing an excellent or good job in this area.” Parents of school age children were more generous in their appraisal, with 46 percent saying their local public schools are doing an excellent or good job in preparing non-college bound students to enter the workforce.
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