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Learn about an innovative approach to vocational education designed to boost the IT labor force
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Jean-Claude Brizard remembers his first day as a physics teacher at George Westinghouse High School in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y. "I walked into the building and--I’ll never forget it--there were kids all over the first floor hanging out," he says. The stairwells smelled of marijuana; several fights broke out that day. Still a rookie science teacher, the Haitian-born chemist had applied in 1990 to work there after associating its name with the Westinghouse Talent Search, famous for identifying top high school science and math students.
Instead of finding budding Nobel laureates, Brizard discovered a vocational school better known for its former students who went on to become rappers, recording industry stars like Lil’ Kim, Jay-Z and the late Biggie Smalls. Students were not meeting state academic requirements; enrollment was dwindling; crime was rampant; teacher morale was in the dumps. George Westinghouse High School was on the state’s radar for possible closure. Its curriculum, which trained students in fields such as jewelry repair and carpentry, failed to prepare them for today’s labor market. Students faced few academic requirements and whiled away their days in so-called shop classes, making nameplates, menorahs. "Boy Scout projects," Brizard calls them, leaving students with "nothing
you could take into the real world to get a good job. I hate to use the words dumping ground, but that’s how many people regard vocational high schools." For the vast majority, Westinghouse was a dead end.
Looking around that first day at unruly students--some wearing skull-tight bandannas called "do-rags" and other insignia of the Bloods and Crips street gangs--and at dark, dingy hallways and graffiti-scrawled walls, Brizard saw weariness and fear on teachers’ faces and wondered, "What the hell am I getting myself into?"
A decade later, Brizard, 37, has taken charge as principal to lead a daring experiment to reinvent George Westinghouse as the nation’s first IT high school, where eventually all 1,100 students in grades nine through 12 will study computer programming or computer-aided design in addition to academic courses. In New York City, where, as Brizard puts it, "Every cab driver has a Cisco book on his seat," Westinghouse’s mission is unique: to train high school students for IT careers. The goal is to produce students who can go on to college or straight into jobs as certified technicians and programmers, a partial answer to the ongoing shortage of skilled IT workers. If Brooklyn’s "IT High" succeeds, it could serve as a model for the overhaul of outdated vocational high schools, most of which are scrambling to keep pace with a changing economy and rising academic expectations. Early signs at the school--students’ enthusiasm, a renewed commitment from faculty (after some staff turnover) and parents who have rallied support after some early resistance--say that it will.
