Superintendent: CAM program provided good career exposure

While a number of Oregon educators understand and support the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), fewer grasp or feel any affinity for the sister Certificate of Advanced Mastery (CAM). One of those is the superintendent of Sisters schools, Ted Thonstad.

Thonstad is not happy that State Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo said recently she believes it’s time to give up on CIM and CAM. Thonstad calls her stated reasons “excuses, political excuses.”

Even Sisters Middle School Principal Lora Nordquist, a strong defender of CIM (see related story, page 3), says of the CAM, “In my own heart I never did understand how it was going to be implemented.” She also thinks best parts of the program have by now been incorporated into graduation requirements, which should minimize any loss resulting from its abandonment.

But Thonstad holds the state to blame for continuously postponing the CAM’s statewide implementation. He says the basic value of the program is that “it provides career exposure. It combines both academic and real-life experience so that what you learn in the classroom becomes meaningful because you’re doing something practical with it.”

He is proud of the culinary arts program in Sisters schools for providing the kind of learning a CAM would encourage:

“You learn in the classroom and then you get to practice it in a restaurant where you’re actually producing a product.”

He says Redmond, where he once ran a business and served on the school board, has a good health services CAM program in which “kids are actually out in the medical field getting exposure to what goes on.”

Several schools around the state have established good CAM programs despite the lack of a state requirement. Thonstad once visited David Douglas School District in the Portland area, which is one of the leaders in career-related education. It serves a predominantly blue-collar population.

“Only about 45 percent of their kids were going on to college. I think they have 8 CAM strands now and they have over 90 percent (of their graduates) going on to education or training beyond the high school. They attribute it to the CAM program.”

Some critics argue that CAM attempts to force students to choose a career far too early in their lives. But Thonstad says that’s not the program’s purpose. The basic purpose is simply “exploratory.” In fact, he adds, one of the main values of CAM and similar programs is that through practical experience young people discover what they don’t want to do, even if they previously thought they would like a given line of work.

Will career-related education survive even if the state kills off CAM?

“I would think so,” Thonstad says. “It’s good education. I really think she (Castillo) just wants to get rid of the name and call it something else, because if you read what she says she wants to do (as an alternative), that’s what CAM does.” He points to the new student-operated radio station at Sisters High School as another example of good education of this type.

Thonstad agrees with Nordquist about the value of the CIM program.

“The CIM has done good things in education,” he said. “Now, if the fact that it’s called CIM bugs you, fine. If you don’t like the name, change the name. But let’s not get rid of the content.”

But he places even stronger emphasis on the need to retain good career-related education, whether by a CAM or other means: “The two need to be tied together — what you learn in the classroom and how you apply that in the real world…That’s what CAM attempted to make happen. We can’t quit doing that.”