U.S. Education Chief Advocates for More Workforce Development Programs in High Schools

Miguel Cardona and Gov. Jared Polis headlined a workforce summit at the Community College of Aurora, where educators and employers explored how to better prepare students for in-demand jobs by Erica Breunlin, The Colorado Sun High schools as they are designed today haven’t changed in more than 150 years, or as U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona calculates it, over the course of two pandemics.

Schools, he insisted, must change the ways they educate kids. That’s a big part of why the country’s top education official visited Colorado on Thursday, when he announced a new federal $25 million grant program that will give school districts and community and technical colleges funding to restructure the last two years of high school so that students are transitioning into higher education more quickly and developing skills that will matter in the workforce.

Cardona, who is in the middle of a four-part workforce development summit called the Unlocking Pathways Summit, spoke at the Community College of Aurora about the urgent need to create more seamless transitions and collaborations among schools, colleges and universities, and industry leaders — particularly as they sit on opposite sides of the same goal to connect students with meaningful careers.

“For too long, we’ve treated the walls between our K-12 systems, our college systems and our workforce systems like they’re set in stone,” Cardona said to a room of leaders in K-12 and higher education, policymakers and industry executives from multiple states. “We’ve maintained in this country a ‘four-year college or bust’ mentality, and that leaves too many students behind.”

Before interviewing Gov. Jared Polis about steps Colorado has taken to direct students to in-demand jobs, Cardona raised concerns about what he sees as a sense of complacency trailing the height of the pandemic, particularly with too few students of color and women pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“We’ve normalized that,” Cardona said. “We’ve allowed thousands of high schoolers to graduate without pathways to rewarding careers.”

“It’s time to raise the bar, and that starts with a total reimagining of high schools in this country,” he added, noting that college will be “one but not the only pathway to a bright future.”

He hit on the need for schools to hire career advisors who understand regional workforce opportunities, expand paid on-the-job learning experiences and internships beginning in high school, enable students to get a jumpstart on learning the trades in fields like welding and coding, and pushing students to earn at least a dozen college credits in college-level courses before graduating high school.

Those efforts mirror some of Colorado’s priorities in training students for jobs and filling critical workforce gaps, Polis said during the conversation with Cardona.

“I believe that every high school student should at least graduate with some exposure (to) what might come next,” Polis said.

Polis and lawmakers in the past year have committed to investing millions of dollars into helping students prepare for careers in in-demand fields — from their first years in school. That has included earmarking $26 million to help students improve their understanding of foundational math skills at a time less than a third of elementary and middle school students are meeting or exceeding grade level standards in math, according to an analysis of standardized test results by the nonpartisan Keystone Policy Center.

An additional $25 million is supporting scholarships for high schoolers entering higher education and pursuing jobs in industries facing significant workforce shortages, giving them money to cover expenses for books, fees and tuition. And a separate $5 million is flowing to short-term nursing programs at community colleges to help build up nursing workforces at local hospitals.

The state has also worked to dramatically reduce upfront higher education costs that often weigh down students with debt by paying tuition and covering fees, books and supplies for those starting training in a variety of industries that desperately need more workers — including early childhood education, nursing, construction, firefighting, law enforcement and forest management.

Polis highlighted the need to build a more robust workforce in Colorado’s energy sector as the state aims to be a national leader.

“That’s one of the areas that we seek to shine because when we’re meeting with major companies, and we’ve had several that have made commitments to grow in Colorado, their number one issue … is workforce,” Polis said.

The new grant program developed by the federal government will give schools and colleges another resource to expand the number of courses that award high schoolers college credit, invest in industry equipment while training students and pay for exams students have to take to secure credentials they need to jump into the workforce, Cardona said.

The federal support falls as more jobs that pay a living wage require more than a high school diploma, said Luke Rhine, deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education within the U.S. Department of Education.

“There are many paths to a good job, but a high school diploma is no longer sufficient for students to access the majority of jobs in their community,” Rhine said, “particularly good jobs.”

The grant program, which districts and colleges must apply for by the end of September, will position individual students for jobs that will come with stability and help communities adapt to the evolving needs of local employers, Rhine added.

“In many communities, high schools are a reflection of that community,” he said. “As we build up the capacity of high schools to respond to changing economic conditions, we are also in essence building the capacities of communities to do that exact same thing.”

Armstrong: Jared Polis’ Libertarian Side Needs Work

By Ari Armstrong, Complete Colorado Page 2

Did you hear the one about how Jared Polis is a libertarian? I heard that, again, right after I struggled to get my groceries home because of the bag fees that Polis signed into law, and right before I paid the Polis-approved “retail delivery fee” on an online order. The Coloradans harmed by Polis’s taxes, fees, and controls are not laughing.

My paper last year, “The Tax and Regulate Reality Behind Governor Polis’s Libertarian Image,” detailed many of Polis’ anti-liberty policies to that point. This year, Polis supported the deceptive Proposition HH, which promises to cut property taxes but actually allows huge net increases in property taxes while also costing us TABOR refunds. He forced some people to subsidize others’ abortions through insurance premiums. He imposed waiting periods and age restrictions on gun buyers in clear violation of Colorado’s Constitutional protections. He imposed new controls on property owners in the rental market. This is just a taste.

Nevertheless, Nick Gillespie from the libertarian Reason magazine previously said that “Polis might be the most libertarian governor in America.” I concede he’s one of the more liberty-oriented governors. Yet, as I wrote in my paper, “Saying Polis is the most libertarian governor in America is a bit like saying he’s the most sober person at a Grateful Dead concert. It’s not like he faces much competition.”

Stossel gushes over Polis

John Stossel is the latest libertarian-friendly commentator to gush about Polis. He begins his new video, “Is there a Democratic governor who actually stands up for economic freedom? Yes!” (See also Stossel’s related article.)

Stossel rightly praises Polis for his entrepreneurial past, something that surely gives Polis some respect for productive business leaders and for free markets. When Stossel describes how hard government often makes it to do something as simple as open a lemonade stand, Polis concedes, “Government in general does a lot of things that aren’t necessary.” Stossel mentions a CPR article about the Polis-signed 2019 Senate Bill 103, which, as CPR summarizes, “prohibits local government or any agency of local government from requiring a minor to have a license or permit to run a small and occasional business.”

“You hate the income tax,” Stossel says to Polis. But, as I explained in an article a couple years ago, Polis doesn’t have any realistic proposal to eliminate that tax. Instead, the Independence Institute (which publishes Complete Colorado) and others took the lead in reducing tax rates. As usual, Polis attempts to take the credit, telling Stossel, “We’ve reduced the income tax twice in Colorado since I’ve been there.”

Polis wants freer immigration and freer global trade, Stossel points out. True! However, these federal issues are not relevant to Polis’s work as governor. (Polis did sign a bill restricting police cooperation with federal immigration officers.) Polis does use his “bully pulpit” to publicly advocate for freer immigration, and I appreciate that. We have the opportunity in America to benefit from bringing in more of the smartest, hardest-working people in the world to kick our economic engine into overdrive, but our national leaders foolishly severely limit our ability to do so.

Polis says, “Tariffs in particular penalize trade. I think trade’s a good thing. If two people, willing partners, both have something, and they both want what the other has, and they make an exchange, they’re both better off. We should not penalize trade.” Preach it, brother.

Yes, Polis shut down businesses during the pandemic, Stossel grants. And, I’ll add, he did so in a way that showed extraordinary political favoritism. Yet, Stossel rightly points out, Polis lifted Colorado’s restrictions relatively quickly.

Ambiguously ‘libertarian’

Stossel also points out that Colorado now has legal marijuana and psychedelics. This is another issue where conservatives complain but libertarians cheer. Yet again, these were citizen-led ballot issues, not ones initiated by Polis. Yet Polis voices the standard libertarian line on such matters, telling Stossel: “I think it’s ultimately a matter of personal responsibility. If you want to use marijuana, if you want to drink, if you want to smoke, that’s your prerogative. The government shouldn’t be deciding that for you.” Obviously we need to take seriously things like age restrictions and protection of public spaces for public use.

An issue that Stossel neglects, but that is very important for (actual) libertarians (as opposed to libertarian poseurs who don’t understand property rights), is the liberation of the housing market. Generally, within some broad guardrails, people should be free to develop their property as they see fit. As Jerusalem Demsas points out for the Atlantic, “Homelessness is primarily a function of the broader housingunaffordability crisis, which in turn is primarily a function of how difficult local governments have made building new housing in the places that need it the most.” Although Polis’s major reform bill failed this year, he helped set the stage for future reforms.

In his short August 1 video, Stossel promises to be more critical of Polis in their longer interview. One issue is Polis’s actions to restrict Colorado’s oil-and-gas industry. Of course that issue is complicated by the problem of “externalities” of carbon dioxide emissions driving global warming. Polis takes the stance that such problems require government intervention.

So is Polis a libertarian? These days, many people who claim to be libertarians aren’t even libertarian, and the term always has been ambiguous. I wouldn’t call myself a libertarian without tightly qualifying the meaning. If we mean roughly someone who advocates personal and economic liberty, then I’m a libertarian, and so is Polis— sometimes. We should evaluate Polis’ policies on a case-by-case basis.

Polis certainly cares more about liberty than do most American politicians, and he’s probably as libertarian as someone can be and still be elected to statewide office in Colorado. We could do far worse in picking a governor. And, sadly, we probably will.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com

You’ll find some big differences between traditional and speculative investments — and knowing these differences can matter a great deal when you’re trying to reach your financial goals.

To begin with, let’s look at the basic types of traditional and speculative investments. Traditional investments are those with which you’re probably already familiar: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, government securities, certificates of deposit (CDs) and so on. Speculative investments include cryptocurrencies, foreign currencies and precious metals such as gold, silver and copper.

Now, consider these three components of investing and how they differ between traditional and speculative investments:

The first issue to consider is risk. When you own stocks or stock-based mutual funds, the value of your investments will fluctuate. And bond prices will also move up and down, largely in response to changing interest rates. However, owning