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On June 4, the Anchorage Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the fatally flawed “Anchorage Academy Master Plan.” A better plan would be to work with the Alaska State Board of Education and the Workforce Commission to support an effort to hire highly effective industry-experienced career and technology specialty instructors from across the state to expand courses at King Tech Career Center.
The proposed Career Academies Master Plan (CAMP) would move social studies teachers at eight comprehensive high schools out of existing history courses, including a study of the origins of democracy and civics, to teach a required freshman “career exploration” class, something that has never been offered before.
The required freshman “career exploration” class removes an entire semester from freshman schedules that would otherwise be devoted to college prep courses and the highly effective language and music course progression that have historically allowed roughly 40 percent of Anchorage students to compete for limited slots at competitive universities.
To push the false claim that it is not cutting college prep courses in its new Career Academy Master Plan, the district plans to expand high school instructional hours from six to eight hours per day, cutting instructional time for each course by approximately 22 percent, or 17 hours per semester, and drastically reducing students’ prospects of learning material with the depth or breadth that will help them succeed on college readiness and college assessment tests such as the AP, ACT and SAT.
Finally, the district does not have the financial resources to sustain this new, expensive Career Academy initiative. It only has a federal grant to sustain this experiment for about three years, and only if it takes resources away from existing courses and existing teachers for the same school day. When the federal grant expires, the program will cost the district $6.4 million per year more than it receives for the Career Academies, further deepening an already severe budget shortfall. It’s time to stop further deepening our fiscal woes and expand our sustainable career and technical education offerings and career onramps in a more cost-effective way.
If local businesses and nonprofits want to increase the supply of qualified job seekers, they should pay them a competitive minimum wage with benefits. Enlisting local public schools to require all incoming freshmen to take a semester-long career exploration course is tantamount to a forced busing program to give local businesses a chance to introduce local kids to jobs they otherwise can’t fill in summer, temporary, or entry-level jobs. While that may make sense for some parents and their kids, it’s hard to see how this wholesale shift benefits kids who have already benefited from highly effective eighth-grade career exploration programs, proven to be fast learners, and ready to start highly demanding language, music, and college prep courses in ninth grade.
If you want to keep ASD’s promise of providing our gifted and highly-able students, our option and charter school students, and our fast learners – Advanced Placement, Language Immersion, and International Baccalaureate students – with a robust college- and career-ready program to help them succeed in life, please join me in emailing the Anchorage Board of Education ( schoolboard@asdk12.org ) on the evening of Tuesday, June 4, and providing public testimony ( asdk12.org/page/1443 ). Encourage your School Board members to:
• It will allow students and parents to avoid being tied down for a semester in a required freshman career exploration class that will have students travelling around the city in buses making pitches to local businesses hoping to attract new young freshman applicants.
• When there are limited short instructional days during the school year, resist the urge to pretend that the “increased choice” of expanding the eight-hour schedule will benefit students in college-preparatory courses. Encourage school boards to explicitly support the already minimal number of instructional hours per semester in increasingly challenging college-preparatory courses in order to maintain student success.
• In coordination with Alaska Department of Education, Department of Labor, and federal program funding opportunities, increase investment in highly effective, industry-experienced, specialized career and technology instructors and expand King Tech Career Center courses, rather than spending exorbitant amounts of money on travel expenses for district officials to visit school districts in the Lower 48, or paying large amounts of money to outside consultants who propose and pitch unproven “new models of change” that may set inflated expectations for Anchorage students and then fail to meet those expectations.
Mark Foster He is a former chief financial officer for the Anchorage School District and a former school committee member.
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