General News
CTE ‘demonstration sites’ to serve as models for system
Oct 1, 2009 12:51 PM
Sterling Roberson, new UFT vice president for Career and Technical Education high schools, speaks to the press.
Work spearheaded by the UFT two years ago culmunated with the creation of four new “demonstration site” schools that aim to model innovative practices in career and technical education.
Three of the schools — City Polytechnic HS of Engineering, Architecture and Technology, in Brooklyn; the Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, in Manhattan; and Quest to Learn, in Manhattan — are startups that opened this fall. A fourth, Grace Dodge Career and Technical HS in the Bronx, has trained skilled workers since 1925.
Creating the demonstration sites was the key recommendation of a mayoral task force, whose members included UFT President Michael Mulgrew, formerly UFT vice president for CTE high schools and a longtime advocate for ensuring that CTE schools offer students a pathway to postgraduate success in skilled jobs, something area businesses require.
“Career and technical education is a win for everyone,” Mulgrew said. “Students get hands-on, real-world experience and do better in school. Additionally, CTE helps create the 21st century workforce the city needs to move our economy forward.”
Speaking at the task force press conference on Sept. 21 at George Westinghouse Career and Technical HS in downtown Brooklyn, Sterling Roberson, who later that day was elected the union’s new vice president for CTE high schools, said that teacher training was key to making the innovative program a success. “And we’re going to make sure it spreads to all our CTE schools,” he said.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew is interviewed by NY1 after the conference.
Of the start-ups, City Poly is New York’s first grades 9-through-14 school, where students will earn both an academic high school diploma and an associate’s degree — all in a five-year accelerated program and courtesy of CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, with which it shares a campus.
The Urban Assembly school, a four-year high school, is housed in a “green” building, built not only to be maximally energy-efficient, but to emphasize green technology in its curricula. Instead of grouping students by grades, students will be divided by specialization into three learning labs: the clean and renewable energy lab, the green design lab, and the urban environment and landscape lab.
Quest to Learn, a 6-12 school, is a joint venture of the nonprofit Institute of Play and New Visions for Public Schools, where teachers function as facilitators encouraging problem-based learning.
Grace Dodge CTE HS, which serves a low-income population, was selected to show that its four schools within a school — Health Sciences; Business and Technology; Professional Beauty Care; and Legal and Criminal Studies — can break new ground with their students and serve as a template for other large CTE schools.
Another innovation of Grace Dodge: its staff of some 100 teachers will be linked by new technology, which the task force hopes will facilitate greater collaboration within a large school.
