States around the country are working hard to gain back huge K-12 learning losses due to the pandemic. One approach that is experiencing renewed focus to help with that sweeping national effort is a resurgence in what is known as career and technical education, or CTE.
CTE is an umbrella term for education that combines academic and technical skills needed to succeed in today’s labor market. CTE done right allows students to graduate high school as career ready in certain fields.
Before the pandemic, educators touted the overall educational value in CTE for a wide range of students. And now that states are reeling from learning losses, the U.S. Department of Education is promoting CTE as a viable pathway for localities to consider as they look for ways to get students back to grade-level performance.
“High-quality CTE programs can boost school engagement and on-time graduation and enhance academic learning, critical parts of strategies to help address the impact of lost instructional time,” the Department of Education said earlier this year. It does this “by giving students hands-on opportunities to apply knowledge and skills that they learned in a classroom setting, while at the same time addressing labor market needs.”
The data underscore that CTE is a far cry from the era of wood shop and home economics. In fact, high-quality CTE curricula can be viable pathways for staying in high school, excelling in high school and enrolling in post-secondary education. One study that looked at students in Nebraska and South Dakota found that those who completed a sequence of CTE classes were 10 percentage points more likely to enroll in postsecondary education after graduation. Researchers noted similar results in North Carolina and New York.
Alaska is a leader in CTE programs. Brad Billings, the top administrator for the state’s career and technical education program, says that successful CTE programs require strong partnerships with local employers and industries.
“CTE is all about partnerships,” he told me recently on the Route K-12 podcast, which focuses on education recovery across the country. “It’s about a school district getting out of the classroom and talking to local industry, local business, the local employers, talking to the regional mine, whoever it is.”
The Last Frontier state is using a sizeable hunk of federal recovery dollars to further bolster its CTE programs around the state and get students back on track, a template that might work well for other states. Efforts include: the development of a resource clearinghouse serving industry representatives, schools, university systems and others; the funding of skills camps for K-12 students; and, encouraging both urban and the state’s many rural schools to participate in CTE.
In one example, the state has a program underway with the Alaska Works Partnership, an organization that provides students introductory training courses in the construction trades. They have weeklong skills camps in Anchorage in partnership with the Anchorage school district. The state is also working to make the courses available to rural students who travel to the city.
Another example is CTE focused on the healthcare industry. The state has a partnership with Alaska’s Area Health Education Centers Program, which has developed curricula geared to middle and high school students.
Billings also pointed to the state’s short-term residency program model developed over the last several years into a successful outreach effort to rural K-12 students. In this program, rural students travel to a regional hub or city for a week to concentrate on developing technical skills that can help get them employed.
“It’s taking students out of a rural community where they may not have as many economic opportunities,” Billings says. The CTE program is “bringing them into a Nome or an Anchorage, or a place like that just for a week and there’s a dormitory attached. So, we have probably a dozen of these organizations around the state.”
In a variation on this theme, some rural school districts are working with universities in an urban center to develop skills camps at those universities that focus on in-demand jobs.
Education recovery is the major focus of my organization, an education non-profit that is serving as a clearinghouse of programs that are working at the local level. In that all-important goal to get the nation’s students back up to grade level, Alaska’s CTE programs are showing great promise that can benefit other states.
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