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Students attend an accounting class at the career-focused Bronx School of Law and Finance in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx.
Vocational Is Old School! They Are Now Called ‘Career Schools’
Eyeing a scrolling stock ticker flashing the latest prices, a 16-year-old high school junior, Raymond Rodriguez, said the other day: “That’s like my morning coffee.”
Wendys International was down; Intel was down; Allied Waste was down, and then another announcement rolled across the ticker:
Graduation is June 5. It was 10:30 a.m. at the Bronx School of Law and Finance, a small high school on the eighth floor of the gigantic John F. Kennedy campus in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx where students choose between two majors — law or finance — and then rack up a laundry list of practical skills, from how to wear a suit to how to trade stocks. (Mr. Rodriguez, a finance major, has invested about $100,000 in virtual dollars in Coca-Cola, Kellogg, and Xerox.)
This is the new face of vocational education, updated for the 21 st century, where securities class replaces shop and, rather than heading to factories, students serve summer internships at places such as McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, and Citi.
“Vocational — that word is out. They’re now career schools,” the school’s principal, Evan Schwartz, said.
Having posted among the most remarkable results in the city — Regents scores and graduation rates are well above the citywide average — the new schools, known by the name career and technical education, could also become the new face of New York City’s public schools. In his State of the City address this year, Mayor Bloomberg named expanding CTE schools a main priority, announcing that three CTE “demonstration” schools would be opened by 2009.
“Traditionally, such career and technical education has been seen as an educational dead-end,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We’re going to change that.”
Although not technically accredited as a CTE school (that requires going through a Byzantine process the state Board of Regents is looking to revamp), Law and Finance is part of the National Academy Foundation, a national umbrella group for CTE, and it receives federal vocational education grants.
It has also caught the attention of CTE’s chief proponent at City Hall, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, who dropped in unannounced for a visit last month.
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