Secretary of Labor talks CTE with the Federal Issues Council
CSBA group also meets with manufacturers, other groups
Published: June 1, 2009
Arriving in Washington less than 100 days after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, CSBA’s 2009 Federal Issues Council found change pervading the nation’s capital. Funding for rural schools, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act—all targeted for elimination in previous years—was secure, and billions more in federal aid to education were on the way.
“I feel much less defensive. I feel much less afraid of the federal government hurting the districts in my state,” CSBA President Paula S. Campbell told Jim Shelton, an assistant deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, in one of nearly two dozen meetings on the FIC agenda. While many questions about administration policy remain, FIC members enjoyed a friendly reception in three days of meetings with government and private-sector representatives working in the interest of public schools.
None was more receptive than U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a familiar face to Californians from her days representing parts of the Los Angeles area in the state Assembly, state Senate and House of Representatives for 16 years. Solis spoke warmly of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s East Los Angeles Skills Center as a model for work-force investment programs that can partner with jobs providers and other community leaders to provide innovative career and technical education geared toward emerging job sectors. She said such ventures can help prepare students for jobs in health care and “green” technologies that can sustain the environment along with the economy.
“Think creatively is what I want to say to you,” Solis told the FIC delegation she met with shortly after leaving the first meeting of the Obama Cabinet. She and aide Cindy Chen indicated that the Department of Labor would do the same, working to promote public schools’ interests in preparing students for both careers and higher education through programs and partnerships.
They urged certified and standardized CTE programs. More than 1.3 million secondary students in California are enrolled in CTE courses, and 400,000 adult students are enrolled in Regional Occupational Programs or adult education CTE courses, according to briefing papers that FIC members delivered to Solis. Eighty-five percent of CTE students take a sequence of courses leading to certification either through employment or higher education.
CSBA Vice President Martha Fluor pointed out that California’s budget crisis threatens CTE in general and especially ROPs, which receive state funding through categorical grants that can now be shifted to other programs by cash-strapped school districts and county offices of education.
“ROPs and career technical education are suffering,” Fluor said. “Federal funding through Perkins is now—more than ever—needed.”
Fluor and Lynne Craig, president of the California County Boards of Education and a member of CSBA’s Board of Directors, explained that the state’s schools are working with community colleges and higher education as well as the private sector on an integrated system that, in Craig’s words, can take students “right to the job market.”
FIC members also found such collaboration and partnerships are being pursued in the Department of Education’s Office of Vocational and Adult Education.
“They’re looking at these collaborative pathways that move kids from secondary to postsecondary” education, reported CSBA President-elect Frank Pugh, a faculty member and counselor who chairs the Department of Electronic Technology at Santa Rosa Junior College. “It was very nice to have a meeting with these folks and not have them talking about trying to zero out the Perkins program.”
Other education groups in D.C.
Pugh also led an FIC meeting with the Manufacturing Institute, the research and education arm of the National Association of Manufacturers, one of several nongovernmental organizations FIC members met with in Washington.
Pointing to a new NAM-endorsed Manufacturing Skills Certification System, Pugh said it’s clear that the organization understands the need to forge partnerships between education and industry; he was invited to become a member of NAM’s Education Council.
Other Washington-based groups that FIC met with included the Council of Great City Schools, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Campaign for High School Equity, the National Assessment Governing Board and the Economic Policy Institute. Members were especially enthusiastic about the “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a project coordinated by EPI to build a grassroots effort to move the federal education discussion beyond the No Child Left Behind Act.
“Schools … cannot, by themselves, close the entire gap between students from different backgrounds in a substantial, consistent and sustainable manner on the full range of academic and non-academic measures by which we judge student success,” a statement of the project’s purpose says.
“While continuing to press for school improvement, our proposed Broader, Bolder Approach also promotes high-quality early-childhood programs and preschool, after-school and summer opportunities. Along with improving test scores it also emphasizes physical health, character, social development and non-academic skills.”
Related link:
More information about the Broader, Bolder Approach is available @ www.BoldApproach.org