Seattle Schools Community Forum: Does Your Student Know about CTE?

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Does Your Student Know about CTE?:

Does Your Student Know about CTE?

That would be Career and Technical Education, what we used to call vocational education.  
Seattle Schools has really kicked this department into gear.  This follows a national reawakening (finally) that not every student is or wants to go to college.  

Here's how the district describes it:

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is a planned program of courses and learning experiences that begins with exploration of career options, supports academic and life skills, and enables achievement of high academic standards, leadership, and preparation for career and college.

Cross-crediting is where a Career and Technical Education course provides high school students with core credit towards graduation and college and university admissions. It blends academic and career & technical studies. This is an alternative way for students to meet graduation requirements, and supports pursuit of preparatory Career and Technical Education course sequences.

Transition services are services above and beyond conventional high school classes that provide extra support for students who need assistance in preparing for college, in obtaining and sustaining employment, in independent living skills, and in other areas necessary to independent and successful adult life. These services are mandated for students with disabilities, but there are many more students who need and will benefit from them.

From The Atlantic (bold mine):

Why should students have to go to college to find ways to be good at what they love? And why should what they love not sync in authentic, empowering ways with what they do in high school?

In Kentucky and other states around the U.S., dual-credit programs and community-college initiatives receive quite a bit of attention, and although I am not suggesting that these programs are unnecessary, I do believe it is important to be intentional in the creation and execution of such initiatives to avoid perpetuating biases and tracking students onto paths that do not empower them to capitalize on their strengths. 

 Although it is easy to proclaim to students coming of age that “you will make more money if you get a degree,” it is much more difficult to shed light on the intricacies of such a claim. I believe students should hear the whole story and more than one traditional path should be laid out before them.

From The Bellingham Herald, a story not directly about CTE but about the same kind of support for adults.

A new, federally funded apprenticeship program aimed at diversifying the tech workforce in Washington has drawn interest from more than 1,000 applicants in just a few months.
And two of its earliest participants have already started yearlong, paid apprenticeships.

The program, called Apprenti, is being run by an industry trade association, the Washington Technology Industry Association Seattle Schools Community Forum: Does Your Student Know about CTE?: