Education Week - May 8, 2019 - 7

Career-Tech Ed Drawing Higher Achievers, College Goers
Will new mix dispel
old 'voc ed' stigma?
By Catherine Gewertz
A new breed of students has
flooded into career-technical education, and they're transforming a
slice of the K-12 world that's long
suffered from stigma and disrespect.
These students are focusing on
professions like engineering and
health care instead of traditional
trades like manufacturing and agriculture. They have higher grades
and test scores, and more positive attitudes toward school. They
come from better-educated families and are more likely to attend
four-year colleges than their peers
in old-school career-tech education
or what was once known as "vocational education."
Take Tony Peeler, for instance. The
18-year-old attends a career-tech
program at Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center in Dallas. The program
blends old and new: Students can
dive into fields like automotive or
dental assisting, or study fields like
law or engineering that aren't traditionally associated with vocational
education.
Peeler comes from a professional
family: Both his parents have bachelor's degrees in accounting. He's got
his own plan mapped out: He's immersing himself in law and criminal
justice studies now, and he'll shift to
biomedical engineering next fall,
when he starts George Washington
University in Washington D.C. Then
it's on to law school, so he can become a patent attorney.
With aspirations like his, Peeler
says he fends off a good deal of confusion when he tells people he's in a
career-tech program.
"Some people know it's more than
the traditional stuff like automotive
and carpentry. But some of them,
they say, isn't that a way to have a
career right out of high school? They
don't know," he said.
The expansion of the career-tech
tent, which appears to have taken
shape in the last 10 to 15 years,
marks a sea change in the world of
students who choose career-oriented
studies. And it carries the potential
to ease the stigma that's long dogged
career-technical education.
Since the 1920s, when federal law
first provided funding to states for
programs in agriculture and the
trades, students in vocational education have typically downplayed
hefty academics-and college-in
favor of hands-on job preparation.
But a new report makes the first
data-based case that this could be
changing as schools reshape their
career-tech programs and build
their academic muscle. As a new
breed of more academically inclined
students flows into career-tech
education, they could drive deep
changes in those programs, and
help erase the low-wage, blue-collar
stigma that's trailed them.
There's risk in the new dynamics,
too. The report notes that careertech ed is "bifurcating" into dis-

tinctly different groups of students.
That shift risks concealing, rather
than solving, one of career-tech education's key challenges: ensuring
that students in traditional fields of
study, like construction, are getting
as good an education as their peers
in white-collar CTE fields like computer science.
"If one of the real purposes of
vocational education is to serve
students who aren't very academically inclined, and less likely to go
to college, then an increasing share"
of the new kind of career-tech student "could take the focus off the
kids who need it the most," said Nat
Malkus, a resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, and
the author of the new report.
James Rosenbaum, who has long
studied career-technical education
as a professor of sociology and education at Northwestern University,
said the changes outlined in the AEI
study remind him of the dynamics
he's seen in racially integrated high
schools.
"You have this integrated school,
but the lunch tables are almost always segregated," he said. "With
CTE, you've got all these kids falling
under the career-tech category, but
they're falling into two very separate kinds of occupational fields.
The question is how to serve both of
those groups well."

The 'New Era' Student
Malkus analyzed student transcripts and several sets of federal
data to document changes in the
career-tech student population and
the courses they take, between 1982
and 2013.
He examined students who "concentrate," meaning they take three
courses in one career field. He created two categories to describe
the distinct student types that
emerged: "traditional vocational"
and "new era."
Traditional CTE students most
often took courses in fields such as
business, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture, while new-era
students more often chose engineering, computer science, public service,
communications, and health care.
The two groups' family backgrounds and academic orientations show stark differences. Traditional vocational students' math
scores hovered around the 38th
percentile in 2013, while newera students were averaging in
the 51st percentile. Getting good
grades was far more important
to new-era students: 63 percent
"strongly agreed" that this is important, compared to 46 percent of
traditional CTE students.
Only one-quarter of traditional vocational-education students' parents
held bachelor's degrees, compared to
4 in 10 of the new-era CTE students.
Three years after high school graduation, nearly half of the new-era
students were in four-year colleges;
only one-quarter of the traditional
CTE students were.
As the profile of the new careertech student has changed, so have
the courses they've chosen. A 75 per-

A NEW BREED OF CAREER-TECH STUDENT
Different kinds of students are
flocking to career and technical
education, according to a new
analysis. These "new era"
career-tech students are choosing
different fields of study, and are
more likely to have higher grades
and test scores, and college
aspirations. They also have more
positive attitudes toward school,
and are more likely than traditional
vocational-education students to
have college-educated parents.

"Traditional Vocational
Ed" students:

Manufacturing,
agriculture

Engineering,
health care

Popular fields
of study

38th

Average

percentile math score

2.4

"New Era"
students:

51st

percentile

Grade-point average

2.7

39% Positive sense of belonging at school

49%

46% Strongly agree that getting good grades is important

63%

25% Parents have a bachelor's degree 39%
Enrolled in a four-year college

26% three years after high school graduation 46%
42% 9th graders who expect to earn a bachelor's degree 77%

SOURCE: American Enterprise Institute

cent drop in the volume of old-style
business courses since 1982 reflects
shifts in technology; few students
take typing and office-procedure
classes anymore.
But other course-taking shifts reflect changes in the job market and
students' priorities. Courses in the
other popular CTE fields-manufacturing, human services, transportation, construction, and agriculture-fell in popularity by one-third
between 1982 and 2013. The mostchosen new-era courses-public service, engineering, computer science,
communications, health care, and
hospitality-more than doubled.

Forces Reshaping the Old 'Voc Ed'
A convergence of forces has produced these changes. The labor
market's demand for new skills has
trickled into career-tech programs.
The CTE field itself, too, has
been working for years to shed its
image as a route to low-paying jobs
that require nothing more than a
high school diploma. For decades,
teachers and counselors funneled
students they perceived as "not
college material"-disproportionately low-income and minority stu-

IMAGES: Getty

dents-into voc-ed tracks.
But the rebranding of career-tech
education appears to have worked,
the AEI study says: New kinds of
students are opting for career-teched concentrations.
Rosenbaum noted that the Carl
D. Perkins Vocational and Technical
Education Act, the main federal law
for career-tech education, drove that
rebranding. In the past 15 years or
so, Congress has rewritten Perkins
to attract more academically inclined students, and better serve the
labor market, he said. By outlining
new career-tech fields such as information technology, Perkins offered
a roadmap that shaped schools' programs, Rosenbaum said.
Because the new-era career-teched students will "disproportionately
define CTE's average characteristics," the AEI report says, policymakers could be tempted to conclude that career-tech-ed programs
are improving. But that would
"mask" an important truth, Malkus
writes.
The "improvements" are likely the
result of adding more "academically
oriented and otherwise college-going
students to the CTE tent," rather
than of broad improvements in the

programs themselves, the study says.
Perkins now demands that schools
conduct a much finer-grained analysis of how their CTE programs
and students are doing, said Kate
Kreamer, the deputy executive director of the group AdvanceCTE,
which advocates for high-quality
career-tech programs. That data,
which states must begin reporting
in 2021, will help make the case for
which programs are serving students well, and which ones aren't,
she said.
The "big and important" questions
raised by the AEI report can spark
valuable conversations as states
and districts examine their programs, Kreamer said.
But she cautioned against using
Malkus' two student groups-one
with higher academic achievements
and aspirations than the other-to
oversimplify career-tech ed.
"We run the risk of re-stigmatizing the more traditional CTE, and
creating two new tracks, with 'These
are the programs we put these kids
in, and these are the programs we
put those kids in,' " Kreamer said.
"We need to think about CTE as one
system and figure out how to serve
everyone well."

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Education Week - May 8, 2019

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