Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Educating Tomorrow's Workforce Act of 2014. This is a bipartisan bill with Senator Portman, who will follow me on the floor today. Senator Portman and I are working together as cochairs of the Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus.

Let me first explain why career and technical education is important to me.

I grew up in a household in Kansas City where my dad ran a union-organized ironworking shop. He was the owner. Ironworkers and welders--in a good year, eight employees; in a bad year, five employees. My mother and my brothers and I worked in my dad's shop, and I came to appreciate working in that ironworking shop, the tremendous craftsmanship and skill that went into being an ironworker. That lesson has stuck with me for the rest of my life, and I really credit my dad with my work ethic. In a manufacturing welding shop, you get up and you go to work early because you want to get the work done before it gets too hot in the middle of the day.

I then had the experience in 1980 to take a year off from Harvard Law School and go to Honduras, where I was the principal of the Instituto Tecnico Loyola, which was a school that taught kids to be welders and carpenters. I was able to use the trades I had learned in my dad's shop, and what I saw in Honduras was the same thing: that the acquisition of skills--whether it be welding or carpentry or other skills--is a great path to life's success.

But one thing I noticed about the education system in my country--even as I was working in my dad's shop, even as I was a principal of the school in Honduras--was in the United States we sort of downgrade career and technical education. When I was a kid, it was called vocational education. Often, in high schools especially, students who were thought to be kind of problems or not college material would kind of get trapped into vocational education curricula, and that would usually not be a good sign.

In fact, a friend of mine, who is a middle school teacher in southwest Virginia, told me that she would often see her students after they had gone to the high school and ask, ``Hey, tell me what you are up to.'' And when a student said ``I am in the vocational education program,'' the student would almost slump their shoulders, like ``I know you are going to be disappointed to hear this: I am in the vocational education program.''

Career and technical education is a very important pathway for life's success, and there should be no stigma surrounding career and technical education programs. But whether it is in our K-12 schools or in the higher ed world or in the mindset of parents or guidance counselors or even in the military--in the military today, our military members can get tuition assistance benefits, but they can only be used for college courses. You can get up to $4,500 a year in the military as a tuition assistance benefit, but you cannot use even $500 of it to take the certification exam from the American Welding Society to get your welding certificate. We still have a stigma against career and technical education, and we should not.

CTE integrates numerous aspects of liberal arts degrees for practical and applied purposes. CTE prepares students with industry-recognized credentials, professional certificates, occasionally college credits, and, most importantly, training for careers as varied as nursing, physician assistant, business administration, manufacturing, oil and natural gas exploration, automotive maintenance, agriculture, welding, software programming, culinary arts, and many other careers.

CTE happens in interesting places. CTE happens in K-12 school systems. It happens on community college campuses. It happens in 4-year colleges. It happens in stand-alone institutions such as the Newport News Shipbuilding apprenticeship program, where people learn to manufacturer the largest items on planet Earth: nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines in Newport News, VA. It happens online. It happens anywhere where there is somebody who wants to attain a skill and there is a qualified teacher or program that can convey and educate a student in that skill so they can get a good job.

CTE programs are proven solutions for creating jobs, for retraining workers, older workers who need to find new skills so they can be successful and fill open jobs in the market, and ensure that students of all ages and walks of life are ready for a successful career.

When I was Governor, I worked on a number of educational issues, but one I was very proud of was starting Governor's Career and Technical Academies. We had 17 in Virginia--Governor's schools--that were college prep, academic, regional, magnet public high schools. It started in the 1970s. But when I was running for Governor, I realized, wow, we do not have a single school in the State that is a career and technical education program that we have deemed fit to hang the Governor's label: This is a Governor's career and technical academy. I said this has to be just as important as college prep. So when I was Governor, we started Governor's Career and Technical Academies. By the end of my one term--and that is all you get in Virginia--we had nine. The Republican Governor who followed me liked the idea. By the end of his term, we had 22. The Democratic Governor who has followed him is continuing to expand it, and we now have academies around the Commonwealth, developed at partnerships among schools, employers, business organizations, and postsecondary institutions looking for these skills.

Last week, during our break week, I traveled in Virginia, and I heard the same message from employers and educators: Education has to be job relevant. It has to start at earlier grades. Completion rates need to be maximized. We need to make sure all of our students have the skills they will need to be able to build successful careers throughout their lives.

One entrepreneur even said to me: I am so glad I ended up going to the Valley Career and Technical Education Program in the Shenandoah Valley and went into CTE because it has enabled me to be my own boss.

I said: What do you mean by that?

He said: If I had gone to college, I would have gotten a good job offer from a good company and would have taken it, and I probably would still be there. I would have been having a good career, but somebody else would have been by boss. But by going to a career and technical program and learning a skill, it also encouraged me to be entrepreneurial. So I did not join somebody else's company; I started my own company. CTE promotes entrepreneurial activity.

It is essential for the United States to invest in creating a world-class system of education across the spectrum to ensure the technically skilled and well-trained workforce we need. That is why we are introducing this bill--Senator Portman and I--the Educating Tomorrow's Workforce Act.

Here is what the legislation does.

It takes the existing Carl D. Perkins career and technical education program, which is the major source for Federal funding for programs that connect education to real-world careers, and it amends it by doing a couple of things.

First, it ensures that students have access to high-quality CTE programs in their schools so they can prepare to be college and career ready. Second, it defines what a rigorous program of study for CTE students is that links secondary and postsecondary education, to culminate in a degree or a credit or a credential or a license or an apprenticeship or a postsecondary certificate.

It emphasizes the opportunities for secondary students to earn college or postsecondary credits while they are in high school. I was able to graduate from college in 3 years because of credits I earned in high school. That was at a time when it was critically important financially for my family that I was able to get through college in 3 years.

This dual enrollment piece of our bill is a piece that Senator Portman worked very hard to make sure was included. The legislation allows the Perkins funding to be used by States that want to establish CTE academies as we did in Virginia and ensures that the academies are of a high quality.

Finally, the bill promotes the kinds of partnerships we need between businesses, industries, postsecondary and other community stakeholders. Partnerships are important to connect people to the workforce. The Southern Regional Education Board cites that students with highly integrated CTE programs, where the CTE programs and the academic programs are integrated together, that those schools have significantly higher achievement rates in reading, mathematics, and sciences than students at schools that do not have integrated programs.

In closing, and then I defer to my colleague from Ohio, I noticed something when I was mayor of Richmond and Governor that was a change in the kind of economic development world. As mayor, I was often trying to get a business to come to Richmond. I was competing against Savannah or against the county next door. What I found was in these competitions, the closing factor was always the incentive package: Mr. Mayor, how much money can you put on the table? What kind of tax incentives can you put on the table?

Oh, you either beat the other guy or you don't. But by the time I--5, 6, 7 years later I was Governor, the last issue now was not the incentive package anymore. The deciding issue for companies that were choosing whether to come to Virginia or South Carolina or Singapore was not the tax incentives, it was the workforce.

Tell me, Governor, that we will have the kind of people we need when we open the door tomorrow. Give me confidence that we will have the kind of people we need 20 years from now. Long after the ribbon has been cut and the photos have been taken, are we still going to have the kinds of people we need to do to the kind of work that has to be done?

In today's world, talent is the most precious asset--more than oil, more than water, more than rare Earth minerals. It is talent and human capital that is precious. Recently we did something good in this body, Democrats and Republicans together. We passed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. It was passed in the House yesterday.

This looks at the Nation's workforce programs and makes them stronger. Now we have to make the policy changes that go into our education programs and match what we did in the WIOA reauthorization to prepare our students for a 21st century workforce. I very much hope the Senate moves forward on the Carl D. Perkins Act this year. I look forward to promoting this bill as part of that reauthorization. I am honored to have Senator Portman, my cochair on the CTE caucus, as the cosponsor of this legislation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source