Friday, August 24, 2012

They Work Very Well With Open Source Developers, Too

Larry Cuban:

Business leaders brought Junior Achievement programs into high schools annually. Local firms contracted with the district’s center for adult education to train and hire non-English speaking and low-income residents. Each of our three comprehensive high schools had vocational education programs that sent hundreds of students into local firms to work a few hours a day. The district’s Career Center enrolled 10th through 12th graders in over a dozen different programs that blended classroom and workplace training in construction, hospitals, motels, television studios, auto body shops, and beauty salons. A network of business-school contacts existed throughout Arlington that produced two-way traffic between classroom and workplace. The district celebrated local and national companies’ involvement with schools each June at luncheons at which I awarded prizes to top students while praising cooperating business firms.

SchoolTool has a wildly successful ongoing collaboration with the Arlington Career Center mostly because administrators simply saw open source development as a logical extension of a long tradition, not some kind of crazy experimental innovation.

There'll be more here on what we've been up to this summer with Arlington and Virginia CTE once we get it all successfully deployed...

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