Tim Cook, CEO of Apple was recently asked why his company moved its production to China. “It’s skill”, said Cook in response to Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes. “The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills” he said. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” Okay, so the CEO of the most profitable company in the world moved production out of the U.S. because American workers don’t have enough vocational skills. Surely, that makes alleged “pro-business” legislators stand up and take notice, right? You would think, but this is Arizona.
In our state, the public high school districts charged with offering these tuition-free “vocational kind of skills” or Career and Technical Education (CTE) are Joint Technical Education Districts (JTED.) These JTED offer a variety of programs in fields such as business, computers and media, health science; and industrial technologies just to name a few. Students in JTED programs earn high school credit, and in some cases, may earn college credit, industry certifications, and/or a state license through combination of hands-on training and classroom instruction.
As the Pinal County Chair for the Arizona School Boards Association, I toured the Central Arizona Valley Institute of Technology (CAVIT) in Coolidge this year. This district has a partnership with eleven area high schools and offers aesthetics, cosmetology, dental assistant, fire science, law enforcement, massage therapy, medical assistant, nursing assistant, and veterinary assistant training programs. I was very impressed with what I saw at CAVIT. Engaged students were learning not only valuable trades skills that will earn them certificates and jobs when they graduate from high school, but also how to be valued employees. I left CAVIT thinking “this is exactly what we need in Arizona.”
