VPerspective
CTE is city schools’ best-kept secret
Mar 29, 2007 12:00 PM
The success of students in Career-Technical Education [CTE] programs is one of the unheralded stories of New York City public schools. While CTE programs take in more than their share of students at risk for academic failure, those same students graduate at a rate 10 to 15 percentage points better than the average graduation rate of New York City public high schools, depending upon one’s calculations.
Since CTE long preceded Joel Klein’s Children First, making it difficult for him to take credit for its accomplishments, and since it does not conform to his favored privatization models of education, the Department of Education pays little attention.
There is a great deal of lip service from the bowels of Tweed on the need to make educational policy decisions based on actual evidence, but when it comes to high school graduation and CTE, this principle is honored mostly in the breach.
Yet as a recent Columbia University study showed, if we cut our national dropout rate in half, the United States would save $127,000 over the lifetime of every additional high school graduate, in a combination of additional tax revenues and reduced public health and criminal justice costs. That is certainly a feasible goal.
Just think of it: The U.S. would save $45 billion annually, and just imagine what that would mean in New York City, given our unacceptably low graduation rate, and what a boon it would be to our local economy. Investment in public education, this study shows, pays for itself several times over.
Tweed’s blindness to the success of CTE students is unfortunate because there are important lessons to be learned from our graduation rate. What distinguishes CTE education is its practical, hands-on orientation, which runs completely against the grain of the current obsession with standardized exams, from No Child Left Behind to Klein’s proposed six-week cycles of testing.
CTE was, in fact, the first form of what educators now call performance-based assessment: We were country before country was cool.
Consider the nature of CTE: Whether the subject being taught is nursing or aviation mechanics, students must know how to use the skills of the respective crafts. It simply will not do to make a young person a Practical Nurse in a hospital or an aviation mechanic in an airport based on their ability to answer multiple-choice tests. They must demonstrate their knowledge and their skill in practical situations.
This type of assessment drives instruction. Students must be actively engaged in their learning if they are going to be able to employ actual skills and use knowledge in a practical way. The student becomes an apprentice, and the teacher a master of the craft.
When students become dynamic participants in their own education in this way, learning becomes a much more meaningful exercise. And meaningful learning is much more likely to lead to the successful completion of one’s education.
It’s not a complex educational truth, but it is a lesson lost on the non-educators at Tweed.
