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"We treated you like a kid until you walk across the stage and we're like, 'see ya.' That doesn't work," said Canton City Schools Superintendent Jeff Talbert during a roundtable discussion on transforming Ohio high school education.
He's right, but what do we do about it? How do we prepare young people to move into a job market that looks nothing like it did ten years ago, let alone the structure of a public high school education was solidified generations ago.
According to a report by WCMH, XQ Institute and Battelle Education gathered education experts and state leaders to try to tackle that problem last week.
"We live in the age of artificial intelligence, self-driving taxis and blockchain," XQ Institute said on its website, according to WCMH. "But our classrooms remain bound to a time-based system designed to deliver learning in 45-minute increments, to prepare students for jobs that no longer exist."
Among the ideas pitched were ways to get high school students more involved in the workplace before they graduate. Challenges include transportation, age and experience, safety, and curriculum priorities that are only recently shifting to looking at career readiness as early as middle school.
While it is encouraging then, to know educators and other stakeholders are having these discussions, they must do so in a way that figures out how to get the timing right for Ohio students AND does not create a burden for Ohio taxpayers.