Macari Agapito, Georgieann Ramsudh, Eileen Prunty, Bruce Karhoff                                             

EDL 702: Ethics in School Leadership

3 December 2012

Dyad/Triad Oral Presentations—One Page Summary of Group Presentation

High School for Career Exploration

is committed to providing our scholars with a supportive and engaging school community that encourages personal, academic and social growth. Our scholars design their own future through career exploration, an academically rigorous curriculum, and personalized relations through advisory.  Students at Career Exploration are taught by dedicated educators whose work ethic and life outlook represent the core values of the school: contextual and differentiated instruction; project-based academic work, inquiry-based learning, reflection on one’s learning and goal-setting, personal relationships fostered through small advisories, and an investigation of future options through career exploration and internships.

This mission statement of the High School for Career Exploration (HSCE) encapsulates the core values of the school.  HSCE seeks to empower students to make informed decisions about their future by engaging them in a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum that goes beyond meeting the minimum state standards for high school graduation and by giving them the structure to explore career options.  HSCE is an open enrollment school, and as such, students likely to attend HSCE are from demographic groups that have traditionally been underserved in both New York City and in the United States in general.  Students from these demographic groups are the most vulnerable to being excluded from the political, social, and economic processes that shape daily life.  The skills gained through engagement in these processes are those that are critical for both college and career success.  As a public school in a democratic society, HSCE has an ethic imperative—as do all schools—to impart the social and academic skills to all students so that they can have greater access to the benefits of our society and engage more fully in civic life.

As we point out in the introduction of our presentation, HSCE seeks to better prepare students to succeed beyond high school by avoiding what we see as two major pitfalls once they reach college.   First, many NYC public high school graduates—the majority even—have not gained the academic skills that they need to succeed in a college classroom.  Even though they have met all the requirements set by the state to earn a high school diploma, many students still require remedial courses in math and ELA in college.  The curriculum at HSCE seeks to instill the critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, and teamwork skills—those higher level academic skills needed in college—through project- and inquiry-based work in all courses.  The culminating assessment for each course will challenge students to think and work collaboratively, and to creatively apply their skills to solve a contextualized problem.  Students will present their work to peers, teachers, and the larger HSCE community to further develop their communication and critical thinking skills.

A second pitfall we see is that college students lack a clear direction after accepted into college, and therefore spend valuable resources—their time and limited financial aid—exploring different majors.  This is one of the reasons (one of many factors, of course) that at Lehman College, for instance, only 14% of students graduate with a Bachelors degree in four years, and only 28% of students enrolling in CUNY’s community colleges earn an associate’s degree in six years.  This equity issue is one of the most challenging ethical issues our society faces.  HSCE seeks to give our graduates a much better idea of their career interests and a clearer idea of the path to those careers before they enter college—and begin paying for the privilege of career exploration.  This career exploration is built into the fabric of the school, through the advisory curriculum, which helps students build habits of reflection and goal setting, through the 9^th and 10^th grade Career Exploration courses, in which students will begin with career interest surveys and then conduct research on the work and education requirements of various careers, and finally in several internships during their third and fourth years of high school.  Many of the students HSCE will serve probably would have limited access to information about many professional career paths, thus we wish to give students greater efficacy in “designing” their own futures.

The challenges that public schools, and the students those public schools serve, face are daunting; Many of these challenges are ethical: issues of social and economic equity, and issues of democratic participation in civil society.  While one public high school will not change society, HSCE does recognize and seeks to confront head-on these issues.