Hearing of House Subcommittee on Education Reform: H.R. 366, the Vocational and Technical Education for the Future Act

HEARING OF HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION REFORM: H.R. 366, THE VOCATIONAL AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE ACT

February 15, 2005

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Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Kister, you said something about stopping off points. I assume that means kind of reaching a dead-end in a program. In light of the fact that jobs in the future will be jobs in the information and technology area and in light of the fact that people, young people, would be expected to change jobs five or seven times during their career and in light of the fact that some students just wake up and do more than they thought they could do, can you say a word about the importance of emphasizing basic education in the vocational education program and not having stopping off points where they kind of reach that dead-end?

Dr. Kister. Yes, Mr. Scott. My remarks were in relation to in some States that have created a distinction between tech prep and career tech, and it is a distinction at the expense of career tech. I strongly believe that tech prep is the model that we should follow in preparing students for a seamless transition from secondary to post secondary education. The principles of tech prep are right on.

The problem is when you define some students as tech prep and other students as not. You are predicting the stopping off points and saying, you know, we are not going to prepare you to go on to post secondary. That was my point.

Mr. Scott. And obviously that is not a good idea, relegating them to what is obviously a barrier to getting a college education if they happen to wake up later and find out they want to do that?

Dr. Kister. Right. And I should say that not all States perhaps have created that much of a distinction, but the fact that we have to track tech prep students means that there is a distinction that has to be created.

Mr. Scott. Thank you.

Dr. Ainsworth, can you give us some examples of some of the programs and say how do you decide which programs you are going to have? Ms. Simons obviously figured out that Allied Health was a good area to go into. How do you know that you are not having to set up programs for careers that don't offer a lot of potential and that you are training people for jobs that exist somewhere in the community?

Dr. Ainsworth. The way we are set up in California is that those decisions are made locally. Local school districts, regional occupation programs and others are required to have business advisory committees locally. Those business advisory committees are designed to keep those programs fresh to make sure that they are meeting the needs of the local economy.

At the State level, our State plan and our State policies really focus investment and incentives on those new and emerging technologies in high demand areas. Our new career tech ed standards are designed in 15 industry sectors that have been studied as the areas that will grow over the next 20 years. So everything we do looks at that point.

We do not want to create a whole new group of people that know how to repair Atari machines, you know. Those days are long gone. Those programs don't need to exist. What we need now are people with very flexible skills in information technology and healthcare, those sorts of areas that can move and change with that evolving economy. So that is how we do it.

Mr. Scott. Is that process required under law, or you do that but others don't?

Dr. Ainsworth. Frankly, I don't know about the others. I know that we do it because it is the right thing to do, and in California that has certainly been the focus of our policy. Within the former Perkins Act, it asks us to look at those sorts of programs that were emerging and met some sort of labor demand.

Mr. Scott. Thank you. Dr. Atkinson, I think you mentioned that vocational education students in fact do better than regular education students. Could you say a little bit more about that and why that is so?

Dr. Atkinson. Excuse me. The Delaware student testing program is the program that we are using, we use as our benchmark within Delaware, to assure that students are meeting our academic standards. What we have been able to do is to tease out the career and technical students and be able to compare their ability to meet our standards against all other students. In every case that we have teased them out, and that is in reading and in math and in science, they have done as well or better than the general population. When we talk about the general population, that doesn't include these students. They have been pulled out. So we are comparing this separate group of students with these.

So it gets back to what we were talking about earlier, and that is these schools own their own academic programs. So that building principle is responsible for the academic rigor of those courses. Once you put the responsibilities there, you are going to get results.

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Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just had one additional question, in light of the President's proposal. I am not sure any of the witnesses would have an answer to either of them. But if we eliminated the Perkins program for high school students and melded it into the No Child Left Behind, what effect would that have on economically disadvantaged students and what would it do to figuring out what a qualified teacher is?

Dr. Ainsworth. You know, there is a lot of pressure in this high stakes accountability world upon school districts to meet the numbers. Certainly that has resulted in the closure of career technical education programs. There is no doubt about it.

If you are facing a situation where you have got a high cost program and you have a number of students that aren't proficient in English or testing at a low level, school districts have been forced to make tough choices. Shifting this money over there really intensifies that issue, because right now this money does provide that balance. It does provide us a resource to develop new ways of getting to academic proficiency.

Shifting it over essentially says career technical ed has no value in improving academic achievement. In fact, we are finding that it does have quite a bit of value, and you have heard from this panel that it is central to the way we improve schools.

So at this point we think we need to do work on both sides of the house and moving it over just doesn't make a bit of sense to us.

Dr. Atkinson. And let me follow up on that, if I may, that we just spoke a few minutes ago on holding power and what is it that helps to keep students in school, what is it that helps to reduce the dropout rate. And while at first blush, putting more money into high schools to do remediation in math and science makes a certain amount of sense, because what schools are telling us is we don't have enough funding to do double doses of math and those kinds of things. Well, does it? At first blush it would be interesting to trace and see just what it will do to our dropout rate when what we are doing is putting all of our money into math and all of our money in science and English language arts and no money into a balanced program in a school day and no money into programs that provide a context for those academic areas. I sound like a broken record, but it is a context that for a lot of our students makes math come alive.

I don't know how many people have looked to me and said, do you remember your algebra course, and their eyes just get this big. Because it was disconnected. It had no meaning to them. You just simply went through the math. Not being able to connect that math to a context, we lose a great deal when we do that.

Dr. Kister. I would like to speak to the economically disadvantaged that you spoke to. A high risk student, according to a national research study fairly recently, a high risk student with no career tech courses was about four times as likely to drop out as a high risk student with three career tech courses. So my first answer to you is they would drop out.

A couple other issues would be that if you eliminate career technical education you would eliminate dual credit articulation agreements, therefore making going to college much more difficult. Also, it provides a lot of career development and career expectation opportunities for students. We know that students with a career focus and a career maturity are much more likely to succeed.

Ms. Simons. This program provides opportunity for all levels of socioeconomic status. It does not discriminate between your family's income or if your family doesn't have an income. Without this it would discourage the less fortunate from school and ultimately discourage their own explorations because they feel intimidated by the monetary values or monetary figures of post secondary education.

Mr. Moore. If I may, I referenced already the academic performance on a standardized test of economically disadvantaged students at our particular school with that CTE focus. Some other data that is so relevant, one of the nicest things we can do is ask our students, and their parents, what they think, what they think about their school and their experience in a CTE-based program. We did that last year with a national assessment, and we found that if you compared the students who attended our program versus their peers who did not the satisfaction level with their high school experience on our side was 25 percent greater.

Now, I know you are all running for office. If you won a campaign by 25 percent, you would think you had done very well. The parents' satisfaction is even more impressive. Ninety-four percent of the parents of our students said this school gets an A or a B in my book.

We are very pleased to get that kind of feedback. To me it speaks to the relevance of the content of what they are learning. It is more focused on what they want for a career path development.

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