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Written by Ozaukee Press
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Wednesday, 30 January 2013 18:58 |
With expanded technical education offerings, the Port-Saukville School District is putting a 21st century spin on the concept of a comprehensive high school
The concept of a comprehensive high school education that prepares students for diverse roles in society, once the norm in America, has fallen out of favor in some school districts. Secondary schools in these places, usually economically upscale areas, have shaped curriculums to exclusively serve the needs of students bound for college.
Residents of the Port Washington-Saukville School District can be thankful that their high school never abandoned the comprehensive model, for it is now poised to take vocational education on a leap forward to prepare some of its students for jobs in a high-tech world.
Plans call for Port High to expand its technology education department with an additional teacher and new courses, but that understates the importance of what’s going on. A better indicator is this: Some of the courses will be part of a biomedical engineering program; high school vocational classes will introduce to students to the science of combining engineering principles with biology and medicine to advance health care. In other words, not your grandfather’s shop classes.
The Port High program is a response to need. Even with millions of people looking for jobs, many employers can’t fill positions because applicants don’t have the requisite skills. College educations aren’t the answer. A paper published by Harvard University projects that only a third of the 47 million jobs expected to be created by 2018 will require a bachelor’s degree.
This is not news to employers, which is why local businesses are expected to step up to help pay for the technical education initiative. The district is hoping that the purchase of $161,000 in equipment for the program will be financed by industries.
The prospects of that happening are excellent, judging from the success of Project Lead the Way. That program, in place for four years at Thomas Jefferson Middle School and started at the high school a year later, is aimed at preparing students for careers in engineering, math and science and is supported by area businesses. Students have responded to it in such numbers that demand for the elective classes cannot be met.
The goals of expanded technical education start with getting students interested in studies that serve the advance of technology and then to prepare some for jobs right out of high school and others for further education in technical schools or colleges.
The incentives for students are the careers available in technical fields that are expected to provide solid middle class earnings. As those opportunities proliferate, the importance of the new iteration of high school vocational education will only increase.
There is a caveat, however: A four-year college education remains a significant marker of achievement in the United States. The liberal educations provided at universities and colleges impart broad knowledge of a world much wider than that of the narrowly focused technical disciplines. Education in literature, history, political science, economics and the arts is intended to prepare graduates to be well-rounded contributors to the vitality of society.
College preparation, including ensuring that students understand the value of higher education, remains a primary responsibility for high schools, even as they improve vocational offerings. That, after all, fits the comprehensive high school ideal.
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Written by Ozaukee Press
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Wednesday, 23 January 2013 17:46 |
America loves college sports, but a new study shows that this entertainment comes at a high price to education
With uncanny timing, the University of Wisconsin announced a lavish new pay schedule for football coaches two days after publication of a study finding that major universities are spending more on sports than they are on education.
The study, by the Delta Cost Project of the American Institutes for Research, found that the Big Ten, in which UW competes, is among the conferences whose schools spend at least six times more on each athlete than they spend on educating each student.
It’s not news that NCAA Division 1 athletic programs are hugely expensive enterprises, but the study’s findings documenting the financial excesses of big-time college sports are eye-opening and troubling at a time when fast-rising tuition costs and other expenses are threatening to put college educations out of reach of many families.
Athletic spending in the so-called power conferences exceeded $100,000 per athlete in 2010, compared to less than $15,000 in academic spending for each full-time student, according to the Delta report.
The study confirmed that students help pay for the bloated athletic programs through the fees they pay. On average, students pay 7.6% of the cost of football programs, while another 10% comes from states and institutions. Televisions contracts and ticket sales provide the revenue to cover the remainder of the costs.
As if to validate the findings, the UW Board of Regents last week approved contracts that will pay the defensive and offensive coordinators of the UW football team $480,000 a year each. That’s for assistant coaches. The new head coach will get a contract paying him $10 million over the next five years.
Not that the Wisconsin students and their families and taxpayers who contribute to those salaries should feel fortunate, but it could be worse. Wisconsin’s former head coach, Bret Bielema, was paid $2.6 million at Madison last year and is reported to be getting $3.2 million in his new job this year as coach of the University of Arkansas football team.
Bielema said one of the reasons he quit Wisconsin was that the school did not pay his assistant coaches enough. Judging from the new assistants’ paychecks that will be nearly double last year’s, the regents took that to heart.
If the report is not provoking outrage it’s because college football and basketball are a tremendously popular. The games are terrific entertainment that capture national audiences. Defenders of major-league college sports point out that these programs enhance the reputations of schools, instill pride in student bodies and generate many millions of dollars in TV and ticket revenue.
All true, yet this comes at a cost that erodes the educational mission of colleges. As Donna Desrochers, author of the college sports spending report put it, “Public institutions with Division 1 athletic programs have continued to invest significant resources in athletics, even as academic budgets were under strain during the recent recession.”
Budgets have indeed been strained, and students have been asked to help relieve the strain by paying higher tuition. A bachelor’s degree today can easily cost a UW-Madison student more than $60,000. Which means that some worthy students don’t get to attend this world-renowned (more so for its educational prowess than for its sports success) university and that many who can attend leave with burdensome debt.
That puts paying assistant coaches half a million dollars a year into a stark perspective.
A spokesman for the American Council on Education called the Delta report evidence that college athletic spending has become a “financial arms race” that will ultimately be unsustainable.
Unsustainable might be a good thing. It would give college presidents cover to rebalance spending and devote more resources to their institutions’ reason for existence, which is not to entertain football fans.
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Written by Ozaukee Press
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Wednesday, 16 January 2013 17:27 |
In a new ranking of the health of people under 50, the U.S. is at the bottom of a list of 17 countries
The flu is almost as scary as the fiscal cliff. Television news seems to be giving as much time to reporting this year’s reputed health disaster as it gave to the recently dodged financial disaster. Hypercaffeinated TV talkers are reporting from hospital emergency departments instead of the floor of the House of Representatives, but their messages are similar—cataclysm is at hand.
Not quite. This winter’s flu outbreak is not the worst in recent years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the other hand, it’s bad enough, especially for those who are unlucky enough to catch the virus. Some of those who are avoiding the flu are not lucky but smart—smart enough to get a flu shot.
They are a minority. Less than a third of the people in the country get flu shots. Many of the vaccination avoiders seem to fear the shot more than the flu. A frequently heard canard is that flu shots actually cause one to get the flu.
The flu is America’s health problem du jour, but in the scheme of the nation’s health challenges it hardly rates a notice. The problem that deserves much more notice than it’s getting is that Americans are among the least healthy people in the developed world.
A study by a panel of experts assembled by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council released last week presented an awful picture of the health of Americans under 50, showing it to be worse than that of their peers in all of the 16 other countries studied.
American men ranked last in life expectancy. American women ranked second from the bottom. This in a country that spends by far more on health care than every country in the study, which included most European nations as well as Australia and Japan.
Among other dismal findings, the U.S. has: the second highest death rate from heart attacks and lung disease; the highest rate of infant mortality; the highest rate of death by violence, with gun homicides at least 20 times higher than other countries in the study; the highest rate of women dying from complications of pregnancy and childbirth; the lowest probability of living to age 50.
Americans pride themselves on being exceptional. The most nationalistic among us sometimes use the term “American exceptionalism” to extoll our culture as superior. The country that is the world’s longest surviving representative democracy and has the world’s largest economy and the most powerful military certainly has some bragging rights.
But the study illuminating the negative American exceptionalism in health confers no bragging rights, of course. Rather, it comes with an imperative to wake up and face the fact that in caring for the well being of our citizens we are not the best—we are the worst.
The panel recommended some general and obvious solutions, including universal health insurance, more efforts to encourage healthy behavior, a more effective safety net for the poor, better gun control.
It is telling that all of those recommendations, which are widely embraced by healthier countries, are controversial here, a clue, perhaps, to the source of the problem.
The panel chairman observed that the fact that the American culture “wants to limit the intrusion of government into our personal lives” may hamper efforts to improve the health of the citizenry.
If that’s rugged individualism, it’s coming at the price of shortened lives.
When those TV reporters hanging out in emergency rooms get over their flu fixation, maybe they will discover America’s far more dangerous health problem—falling behind the rest of industrialized world in taking care of its citizens’ health.
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