OPINION: ASD’s fatally flawed freshman career exploration plan

On June 4, the Anchorage School Board is scheduled to vote on an “Academies of Anchorage Master Plan” that is fatally flawed. A better plan would be to collaborate with the Alaska Commissioners of Education and Labor in support of a statewide initiative to recruit highly effective industry-experienced career and technology subject matter expert instructors and expand courses at King Tech Career Center.

The proposed Career Academy Master Plan (CAMP) transfers social studies teachers from existing history courses that include the study of the origins of democracy and civics at our eight comprehensive high schools to cover a never before implemented, mandatory freshman “career exploration” class.

The mandatory freshman “career exploration” class takes a whole semester out of every freshman’s schedule that could have otherwise been devoted to their college preparation courses as well as highly effective language and music course progressions that have historically enabled on the order of 40% of Anchorage’s students to compete for limited slots at competitive colleges and universities.

In order to promote the false pretense that the district isn’t diminishing college prep sequences with its new Career Academy Master Plan, the district plans to expand the high school schedule from six to eight periods per day, shrinking the number of hours of instruction for each course by roughly 22% or 17 hours per semester and significantly reducing the prospects for students to cover their material in the depth or breadth that would help enable them to succeed on college prep and college assessment tests, e.g., AP, ACT, SAT.

Finally, the district does not have the financial resources to sustain its new expensive career academy initiative. It only has federal grant funds to sustain its experiment for about three years, and that is only if it robs resources from existing courses and existing teachers with the same school day. After the federal grant runs out, the program would cost $6.4 million more per year than the district receives for the career academy, aggravating its already deep projected budget shortfalls. It is time to stop digging a deeper financial hole and find more cost-effective ways to expand career and technical education offerings and career onramps that are sustainable.

If local businesses and non-profits want to increase their supply of qualified job applicants, they should pay a competitive living wage with benefits. Enlisting the local public schools to require all freshmen to enroll in a semester-long career exploration course amounts to a forced busing program to provide local businesses with an opportunity to pitch local children for summer, temporary and entry-level jobs those businesses cannot otherwise fill. While that might make sense for some parents and their children, it’s hard to see how this massive diversion benefits the children who have proven to be fast academic learners who have already benefited from highly effective eighth-grade career exploration programs, and who are ready to start the ninth grade in highly demanding language, music and college preparation courses.

If you would like to sustain ASD’s promise of providing the fast learners, including gifted and highly gifted students, optional and charter school students, Advanced Placement, language immersion and International Baccalaureate students with a robust college and career preparation program that prepares them for success in life, please join me in emailing the Anchorage School Board (schoolboard@asdk12.org) and providing public testimony (asdk12.org/page/1443) on Tuesday night, June 4. Encourage school board members to:

• Allow students and parents to opt out of being held hostage for a full semester in a mandatory freshman career exploration class that is slated to bus students around town to get pitched by local businesses seeking a fresh supply of young entry-level applicants.

• Resist the urge to pretend that “more choice” in an expanded eight-period schedule will benefit students in college prep courses when there remains a limited number of short school days in the school year. Encourage the School Board to explicitly support the already bare minimum number of course hours per semester for increasingly challenging college preparation courses to help sustain student success.

• Increase investment in the highly effective industry-experienced subject matter expert career and technology instructors and expand courses at King Tech Career Center in collaboration with the Alaska Department of Education and Department of Labor and federal program funding opportunities, rather than spending exorbitant sums on district staff travel to visit Lower 48 school districts and paying more to Outside consultants who have pitched and sold an unproven “new transformational model” that looks poised to severely over-promise and under-deliver for Anchorage students.

Mark Foster is a former chief financial officer for the Anchorage School District, as well as a former School Board member.

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