School-to-Work Plan Needs Guarantees

Should we seek federal funds to develop a regional school-to-work system in our public schools?

I believe that job readiness is a byproduct of good education, but we must be careful not to sacrifice good education on the altar of premature and/or preoccupying job training.

The interesting thing about the debate referred to in Regina Hong’s article “Proposal to Seek School-to-Work Funds Sparks Debate” (June 18) is both sides claim to want the same things: reform that ensures our children can read, write and compute; reform that provides rigorous academics, relevant vocational courses, and access to all for all, while requiring no compulsory school-to-career participation, no violation of parents’ rights and no discrimination in tracking.

Both also intend to protect local control so the people of Ventura County can hold their elected policymakers accountable.

However, those who oppose the new system contend that in tandem with Goals 2000, outcome-based learning and other education law, the opposite will be the case.

In fact they have read the grants, legislation and planning documents and find that public education faces a transformation of epic proportions. It will, they believe, affect the economy, health care, and the private lives of families as well as all schooling, kindergarten through college, private as well as public.

They warn of a comprehensive, experimental education system that is modeled after German and Soviet polytechnic training with all the psychosocial conditioning required to make its consequences palatable.

And as Rosemarie Avila, Santa Ana School Board trustee, says about the similar debate going on in Orange County, “Both sides agreed that if the opponents are right about their concerns, it would be very frightening.”

At the June 17 meeting, there was much denial on the part of proponents but no hard evidence that it was not as the opponents claim.

Those who are concerned about this “paradigm shift” hope that it will do all that its proponents promise. Who among us does not want education that works? We pay for it. Our children are subject to it.

But school-to-work system promoters must stop skirting public concerns. They must provide assurances in writing that it is not part of a national work force development scheme, an experimental scheme that will weave government care taking and scrutiny into every facet of our lives.

WENDY LARNER

Ojai