I've said it before -- we try to send too many folks to college. The result is that kids who would do well in a trade sort of tune out a high school curriculum that they don't see as relevant to them.

Why don't we have more places like this?

“How many of you guys got a hooptee, raise your hand?” Carlos Caraballo asked his senior auto shop at Automotive High School in Brooklyn.

A dozen boys, roughly half the class, raised their hands and began discussing their hooptees. The term is street slang for a cheap, functional car favored by city youths who often tinker tirelessly to make the car a speedster.

Hooptee repair prowess is not the guiding mission at Automotive High, in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, but it is a fringe benefit, said Mr. Caraballo, who teaches auto mechanics at the school, the largest auto trade school in the nation.

Besides training in repairing cars and other aspects of the industry, Automotive offers a regular high school education.

Why am I such a big fan of programs like the one at Automotive High? Maybe it has to do with seeing kids at my school light up when they talk about their co-op (our name for the vocational program) classes, and the skills they are learning there. Or maybe it is having seen the good such programs do during the years, after his retirement from the Navy, when my dad ran a Job Corps center on the West Coast. But either way, I know that we have too many students for whom college is either not an option or not their choice. Let's go back to the days when we had an educational program for them, one that got them both the basic skills they needed to be a literate, functional, educated member of society AND the skills they needed to function in the workplace.

Posted by: Greg at 10:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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