Career And Technical Education Deserves A Resurgence. Let’s Not Mess It Up.
Amidst all his slashing of the education budget, Donald Trump has proposed an enormous spending increase for one area—career and technical education.
The Trump budget includes an increase of $900 million in spending on CTE. Of that, $680 million would be directed through the Carl D. Perkins program, the main conduit for moving federal money into high school and post-high school CTE programs, the kinds of programs that produce workers to fill the skilled labor jobs that keep a country functioning. The program is long overdue for a boost; the last twenty years of education reform have emphasized college preparedness over blue-collar work. This may be the rare Trumpian budget item that survives Congress.
CTE has been allowed to languish in some school systems, but the district in which I taught is part of a consortium that has run a seven-district vocational-technical school (the old-fashioned name for CTE) for decades. It has been a vibrant and valuable part of the education system, an important choice within the system that has served many of students well. I taught those students for most of my career; I cannot overstate the value of a good CTE program.
But as with all educational ideas, it is possible to do CTE badly. As folks rush to grab up new CTE money, here are some of the basic CONTINUE READING: Career And Technical Education Deserves A Resurgence. Let’s Not Mess It Up.