OPINION:
Alfredo Ortiz is absolutely correct that job skills and a focus on trades and entrepreneurship are the best pathways to racial income equality (“The best way to close racial income gaps: Activism or entrepreneurship?” Web, Jan. 10). The fly in the ointment is the dominance of the college-for-all pathway in K-12 schools.
Almost all K-12 teaching resources are devoted to pre-college courses. The few career and technical education courses (CTE) available are taken by less than 20% of K-12 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and these students complete only three credits in CTE prior to graduation.
If we really want to reduce youth crime, poverty, addiction and misery and bring about racial income equality, we need to significantly reduce resources devoted to the pre-college pathway in order to increase resources devoted to CTE.
Community colleges are not the answer. They require too many nonvocational courses along with the vocational ones, the result being an insurmountable expense for most disadvantaged students.
RICHARD C. KREUTZBERG
Bethesda, Maryland
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