Retooling voc ed

Career technical education prepares students for life beyond high school

Looking back to your high school days, what comes to mind when you think about “voc ed”? Do you remember that metal ashtray you pounded out and gifted your father with? Perhaps you were a girl who liked to cook and sew, and you learned the basics in home ec. Or maybe you were into cars, and auto shop was your thing. But here is what was really cool: That shop class was all you needed before you graduated and got your first job as a mechanic.

Then again, what if your memories aren’t so positive? What if you were college-bound and didn’t know—and didn’t care about—how to create a soufflé? What if you and your friends felt sort of sorry for the voc ed kids? You know, they probably just weren’t smart enough to get into college, or their folks didn’t have the money to send them. But then your crowd and the voc ed kids had never been on the same track anyway.

“There were some good things about voc ed in the past,” says Patrick Ainsworth, director of career technical education for the California Department of Education. “On the other hand, it was too often seen as a place for ‘somebody else’s kids.’ Unfortunately, minorities were placed into those courses because of biases and attitudes. Some of those stereotypes still exist.”

Re-imagining an outmoded concept
Conventional thinking about vocational education has been undergoing a sea change, starting in Sacramento and encompassing schools statewide. For decades, categorizing a high school student as being on an academic (read: university-bound) track versus a vocational education (read: graduation-to-work) track has been the norm. But since the norm is crumbling and being replaced by fresh thinking and entirely new programs, nothing short of a name change will do, just for starters. Thus, few educators now use the phrase “vocational education.” The more descriptive—and politically correct—term is career technical education, or CTE.

“We decided about eight years ago that we needed to change attitudes about CTE and get it out of the back of the bus,” Ainsworth says. “We need quality programs, and the way you do that is by establishing standards, just like you have in English and math.

“If it’s worth teaching, it ought to have some gauge as to its quality. We established partnerships with business and industry. The state Board [of Education] adopted curriculum standards in 2005. They’re seen across the country as the benchmark for excellence. Without that gauge, it’s hard to argue that there’s been a change. The gauge has formed the basis for a lot of confidence in career technical education.”

Gary Hoachlander is president of ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career, a Berkeley-based organization founded—and funded—by the James Irvine Foundation. Hoachlander believes there’s plenty of room for improvement in education.

“I don’t know that high school ever served students very well,” Hoachlander says. “Some students were always able to learn when education was delivered in a fairly abstract way, and so were some of their peers … but it’s not that high school was working for the other 60-70 percent of students.

“[Today], high school does not work for a substantial number of young people. Opportunities have been reduced significantly. Economic conditions and requirements for further education and training beyond high school have changed dramatically. It’s no longer possible to ignore that large numbers of students are leaving high school [without graduating]. Nationally, somewhere between 25-35 percent of entering ninth-graders are leaving or not completing high school on time.”

Hoachlander—like state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and other education leaders—believes students need to be reengaged in education in a fundamental way. Key to this reengagement is relevance, with a capital “R”: Students simply perform better in school when they can see a direct connection between what they are learning and how it relates to their career plans. That relevance, along with the belief that almost all high school students stand to benefit from some degree of exposure to career technical education, forms the basis for the new CTE model.

The new paradigm
The state Department of Education under O’Connell’s leadership has played a big role in bringing school administrators and board members back around to career technical education. In the past several years, many high schools stopped offering CTE and other elective courses, focusing instead on requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act as well as California’s Academic Performance Index and the California High School Exit Exam. Indeed, Education Department data show a 32 percent decline in CTE course offerings from the 1987-88 school year to the present, leaving jobs in the automotive, building and construction trades, engineering and manufacturing industries and others going begging for qualified workers.

“There is a lot of pressure on schools to meet the requirements,” Ainsworth says. “A lot of students coming into high school are not ready for high school work. Then there are the a-g requirements [courses that must be completed for admission to the University of California and California State University systems] students must meet. Those forces, along with the teacher shortage, really led to a decline in career technical education. That’s why we’re looking at new ways of doing things throughout the state.”

The Education Department is working closely with both UC and CSU educators to make sure career technical education courses meet their a-g requirements. According to Ainsworth, 4,705 courses now meet those prerequisites, up from only 300 just five years ago.

“It’s a good tension,” meeting the a-g standards, he says. “We need to show the value of CTE in terms of technical rigor and academic rigor. And not just for a-g. Career technical education standards have been designed to be quite rigorous. We’ve made sure ours meet the highest level of scrutiny possible.”
O’Connell has been CTE’s most persistent proselytizer. In January, he announced that the state Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt a career technical education framework that would specify the procedures and skills that students in grades 7-12 would learn through 58 career pathways from 15 industries. “Career  technical education can make learning come alive for students by making what they learn at school relevant to the real world,” O’Connell said at the time, repeating his oft-stated “3 Rs” mandate: rigor, relevance and relationships.

Later that month, the schools chief announced he would co-sponsor Senate Bill 830 to increase from 290 to 500 the number of California Partnership Academies—“schools-within-schools” that combine rigorous academics with a career focus. The academies serve students in 10th through 12th grades in three-year programs designed to prepare them for the rapidly changing workplace they face upon graduation from high school.

In March, O’Connell teamed with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger—a vocal  proponent of CTE because of his positive personal experience as a youth with comparable programs in his native Austria—to host the state’s first career technical education summit. At press time, the governor’s proposed 2007-2008 budget includes $52 million to build and improve CTE programs. And in further funding news, voters last November approved Proposition 1D, a $10.4 billion statewide education bond measure that earmarks $500 million for career technical education facilities.

 As further evidence of his commitment to career education, O’Connell in March released the results of two studies on the subject. The first, “A Profile of the California Partnership Academies,” authored by ConnectEd, said that more than 33,000 California Partnership Academy students were outperforming students statewide in passing the CAHSEE, completing college prep courses and graduating from high school. The second study, the “California Regional Occupational Centers and Programs (ROCP) 2006 Longitudinal Study Technical Report,” produced by the University of California, Riverside, School Improvement Research Group, concluded that students participating in ROCP programs (a vital component of CTE) showed marked improvement in school and enjoyed greater success in both college and careers than did their non-ROCP peers.

Expanding opportunities
Despite the governor’s and O’Connell’s efforts, the positive studies and the improved financial picture, career technical education faces plenty of roadblocks. One of the biggest is a shortage of qualified teachers.

“The one thing we’re missing?” Ainsworth asks. “A really comprehensive and coherent professional development system. The state is recognizing that. We’ve had professional development around English and math standards. We need the same thing for CTE teachers and academic teachers in terms of how to incorporate real-world thinking into academics.”

Al Tweltridge, a former employee and now a consultant for CDE, agrees.

“There’s no [teacher] pipeline,” he observes. “We don’t pay enough. Plus, it’s hard to get teachers into career technical education. We tend to get them from industry, but they make a lot more money in industry.”

Another problem, he says, is that the CSU system—historically the primary provider of teacher training in the state—has “basically shut down their CTE-teacher training.” He can think of only a very few CSU campuses—Los Angeles and Fresno come to mind—that still offer such programs. In fact, Tweltridge says, “As the high school population has increased in the last decade, the number of college students training to become career technical education teachers has decreased. The point is, there is no capacity within the CSU system to produce anywhere near enough teachers.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge to its proponents, however, lies in convincing others—administrators, parents—of CTE’s promise and its value. Some educators and parents worry that it is just the latest version of the old tracking system that tagged students as university-bound or not; others fear that the increased emphasis on academic rigor will leave some students out in the cold. Some think schools are failing students by assuming they are all going to college.

ConnectEd’s Hoachlander understands the concerns.

“Voc ed was never as extreme as the stereotypical image many people have of it,” Hoachlander says. “But it was perceived that way by many parents and students—certainly by many parents of color. To this day, they remain very suspicious of efforts to promote career technical education and to promote it as an alternative to college.

“In a lot of policy discussions going on right now in Sacramento, a lot of people are talking about CTE as an alternative to college,” Hoachlander continues. “That’s the wrong way to look at it. College is a very loaded term; if it’s interpreted to mean only a four-year college, it can polarize the discussion.”
And in fact, high school CTE programs propel students into a variety of postsecondary education options in addition to a four-year university degree. Some head off to community colleges to study for two-year associate of arts or associate of science degrees or to enroll in certificate programs. Others enter apprenticeships; still others enter trade schools. The point is, Hoachlander says, that the shifting economy has made it very clear that the kinds of jobs that pay a living wage require a level of education above and beyond high school.

CDE’s Ainsworth agrees that students need to continue their studies after graduation.

“The modern economic world is pretty tough,” he says. “Our kids are competing with kids from around the world, and the rest of the world is teaching kids both academics and careers. The reality is, our students really need to be prepared in both. For most to advance in a career, they’ll need to take some postsecondary training after high school.

“When I talk to school board members and parents [about the subject], their attitudes begin to change,” Ainsworth says. “They need to shift from thinking about career technical education as a limiter to thinking about it as an expander of opportunities.”