Too many traditional schools lie dormant during the summer months. One way our traditional K-12 system could appear to be interested in moving to more of a anytime, anywhere model of learning was if they committed to more activities for kids while involving adult learning leaders.
This week EducationWeek posted an article titled “Summer Jobs for Teens Are Now Scarce. Some Schools Are Trying to Change That”:
“Watch any teen movie from the 1980s and it’s likely to include scenes with high school kids working summer jobs: at pizza parlors, mall kiosks, or movie theaters. Today, not so much. The imagery simply wouldn’t resonate with many teens today.”
“That’s because not nearly as many teens work summer jobs as they did decades ago. This May, 35.4% of the nation’s 16- to 19-year-olds were working or looking for jobs, down from 37.4% a year earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a far cry from July 1979, when the teen employment rate peaked at 59.9%.”
“Several factors are getting in the way of summer jobs for teens, say experts. Teens face competition from recent college graduates, who are also confronting a tough labor market; automation, which diminishes the need for some entry-level workers; and broad economic uncertainty, which keep employers from hiring. Also, some teens feel pressure to pad their college applications with activities other than a paying job, like non-paying internships, volunteer gigs, and extracurriculars, according to teachers.”
“But teens miss out when they don’t work in the summer, say educators.”
“’A summer job teaches students invaluable life skills,’ said Tony Cattani, the principal of Lenape High School in Medford, N.J. ‘It helps them learn responsibility, time management, and the importance of showing up and following through. These are skills that will serve them not just in future jobs, but in college, relationships, and adult life. It also gives students a taste of financial independence.”
Cattani, and his Lenape High School, along with other schools across the country, host annual job fairs in the summer for their students. Other schools partner with local organizations who need extra help throughout the summer.
Still other schools, like DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, employ teachers during the summer to coordinate employment for nearly 200 rising 11th and 12th graders in the New York City area.
But here’s a problem with everything reported above. Although kids are getting paid for their work, there are very few traditional schools that give their students any time of learning credit while being employed over the summer. Here’s another example of school world not recognizing the importance of real-world experiences.
Yesterday, The 74 reported on a summer internship program located in Kansas City that emphasizes the soft skills necessary in the workplace:
“Izsie Robinson looked out at the rows of high school students in the cafeteria of a Kansas City school and started listing expectations for their upcoming summer internships.”
“’This isn’t school,’ Robinson, a business owner, told the teenagers at the early June launch of the ProX internship program. ‘This is a summer internship. You all have employers.’”
“You can’t just skip a day or come in late, said Robinson. If something happens that gets in the way, you need to call you employer. You can’t be on your phones all day. Each employer will have a cell phone policy to learn, along with dress codes. And work hours must be entered online.”
“It’s a lot for some of the 660 new interns from across the Kansas City area, some as young as 15 and whose internships are their first job ever. Many have never had a boss or a work schedule before, so working alongside adults can be intimidating, said Robinson and program head Solissa Franco-McKay.”
“ProX, short for ‘professional experience,’ has created one of the strongest and most structured support systems for interns in the country hoping to solve a challenge that regularly scares away employers and trips up high school interns anywhere – student and business expectations not matching up.”
“Each student has a coach hired by the program they meet weekly, as well as a mentor who is an employee at the business. ProX also sets aside every Monday of the internship as ‘professional development’ to work on so-called ‘soft skills,’ such as punctuality, teamwork and communication, which many teens lack and employers want.”
Sounds like a great program, but again, why aren’t traditional schools more involved in the summer internship process, beyond providing the connection with groups like ProX? It’s yet another example of school world not playing well with the real world, of school world giving learners credit for achievements between August and May, but not during the summer months.
If traditional schools aren’t interested in joining the “anytime, anywhere” learning movement, then they should step aside and allow young learners to receive learning credit from non-profit groups like Kansas City’s ProX.
Or what if ProX and other groups like them across America expanded their services beyond summer internships and began developing young learner reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development skills? What if work-focused organizations took on the challenge of making young learners smarter and stronger beyond work skills?
One must believe it would make for a more interesting, and competitive, world when it came to learning.
I came across a book awhile back titled “F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers.” The book is somewhat dated (published in 2011), but some of the answers are pretty funny.
For example, from the field of chemistry – What is a nitrate? It is much cheaper than a day rate.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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