I have been wading through the Blueprint document, and will continue as there is a lot to unpack and to decipher. I find it has many of the same tropes that were expressed in the Kerwin report My current take away is that the Blueprint is nothing by old wine in new skins. A repackaging of current curriculum and desired outcomes but reorganized in a new document with much jargon, buzz words, and charts to support its end goals.

I freely admit I have a pro career-vocational bias. Even so, I am not against students perusing college, and wish those who take on a technical career would carry on, later in life, by taking some college courses. I just do not see our economy can function on a primarily college educated workforce, and see fist hand how the past 35 years of the killing off technical programs has left too many people unable to secure work, and has made many of our professions, like engineering, to be devoid of any actual hands-on knowledge about the world which they are helping to build.

Here are some of my take-away from the Blueprint document. I hope some of my skepticism will be corrected by more reading of its content.

- The college-focused liberal arts curriculum continues much as it has for the past 35 years. Students are locked into a prescribed one size fits all coursework, which is mostly aimed at a college trajectory.

-They over use the phrase College & Career readiness but their advice has nothing about career development, but is used, I think, to dismiss an evolving skepticism that an all college workforce is not good for the economy.

- Middle Schools philosophy has finally been killed off. Its curriculum no longer is focused on human growth, development, and exploring future school paths with careers training. For many counties, the original middle school plan never was established and what is labeled a middle school is only a jr high for 6-8 grade students. The Blueprint, takes it back even to an earlier time when these grades were part of the Elementary school.

- Even though 9th grade is conducted in the high school, its curriculum is fixed as with the lower grades, and no longer are student able to start to split off into early career focused programs.

- Career focused programs are seen at the 11th & 12th grades. No evidence of introductory or exploratory courses which help develop skills needed for many technical careers are to be offered.

I have yet to find evidence that the suggested "core" subjects will be different for the career focused student vs the college prep student. The heavy emphasis on life science through out the K-12, is an example of this, as is the generic math course load. Students who are to be successful in many technical careers need math and science courses which can be directly applied to their career path. In past decades there were well designed math textbooks & classes which focused on shop related & applied math skills. The current math curriculum is at least in part a mental exercise and less on practical skills.

There is no indication that the writers of the Blueprint have an understanding the many career skill sets which require early training, just as it is commonly known that the most successful athletes and musicians have had solid training and experience in those areas during their pre and early adolescent years. It is fully acknowledged that a child who is exposed to a foreign language before adolescence learns it quicker and more fully than one can in late adolescence. So too is it needed that experiences in technical education will greatly help students in later programs and job skills.