There are a lot of teachers who have had previous business and industry experience - in fact, in Texas, it's a requirement for a teacher to have that experience in order to teach Career and Technology (CATE) classes in the state. In our high school, almost all of the CATE teachers have 10 or more years of experience prior to beginning their teaching experience - for example, I had been a paramedic for 22 years when I began teaching Health Science Technology courses. We're the largest department in the school - yeah, we're outnumbered by the Social Studies and Language Arts teachers, but not by a whole lot. So, yes - there are a lot of teachers in high school that have real-life work experience in their field.MechAg94 wrote:There is a bit of truth to that in that most kids have little idea what trades or jobs exist except in a very general way. That doesn't even count opportunities to be self employed. I know I didn't and that was years ago. I have met other people who have said the same thing and these are people who graduated in the 80's and 90's.
I am not really sure you can lay all that on schools. Parents need to find ways to expose their kids to hobbies and business/industry in general. I am not sure schools can really do a good job of that if they tried. These days teachers went to college and became teachers. What job information do they really have? Teachers who retired from other careers are rare from what I hear.
The problem is that schools must pick and choose what programs they offer. We (our department) looked in to adding an auto-mechanics / body shop lab to the school. Since we didn't have one now, either a retrofit of the building would have to occur or, more likely, a new building would be constructed. To add two lifts, classrooms, various lab rooms, body and paint shop to a new building would have run about 3 million dollars in capital outlay, plus a large expense annually for supplies and maintenance. Our district didn't have the numbers of parents wanting the program to justify putting out that kind of money, so we don't have an auto shop in our district.
What you WILL find districts doing today are specializing an industry area at Special Interests schools/academies. We've got five of those in our district - our school houses the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) academy and the Media Arts (video and digital graphics) programs, another high school has the Medical (EMT, Nursing Assistant & Pharmacology Technology) program and the Culinary Arts program. A third much smaller high school has the Cosmetology academy.
Smart districts survey the parents and industry to find out what everyone thinks is going to be needed in the near future and programs for that. But, I don't know of any district that can have everything there possibly could be run. A lot of that slack is taken up by the junior colleges in the areas that run programs in conjunction with industry. We used to run an aircraft mechanic/A&P program with our local junior college that way until interest dropped so much we dropped the program.
Oh, forgot to mention - one of our popular classes in the CATE program is the entrepreneurship class - letting folks get some info/experience on running their own businesses. It's not a full-blow four year program, but again, the numbers of kids wanting the classes don't justify that. But we're keeping at least two sections of classes running again this year.
Bottom line - if your school district isn't doing something similar, it's up to the people paying taxes in the district and the parents of the district to let them know what's needed.