Senate Staff Briefed on CTE Trends, Strategies

On Wednesday, October 21, CNA Education, a nonprofit research organization, hosted a Senate briefing for congressional staff and stakeholders from the education and business community titled “The CTE Equation.” The briefing provided an opportunity for CNA researchers to outline their recent work conducted in Florida and Tennessee on CTE programs and their effectiveness in preparing students for college and careers, as well as to examine the implications of their findings for Perkins reauthorization.

The report maps information on the labor market projections for careers in Tennessee and Florida, and identifies fields that offer high-growth and high-wage careers and examines the number of CTE programs aligned to career pathways in these fields. Their research showed that both CTE program offerings and available careers varied widely by locality within the state, and indicated the need for state and local officials to have access to and training in applying labor market information in designing effective CTE programs.

The analysts at CNA Education found that in Florida, the greatest number of new high-growth and high-wage jobs through 2022 will be in the Health Science Career Cluster, followed by Business Management and Administration. In Tennessee, high-growth and high-wage jobs will be found in the Business Management and Administration Career Cluster, followed by Health Science.

This knowledge is most useful when coupled with information about the supply side of the “CTE Equation.” Although the data about students concentrating in these high-wage, high-growth areas is limited for certain fields, the analysis found that more than half of Tennessee high schools had concentrators in the top two Career Clusters by workforce demand, Business Management and Administration and Health Science. In addition, Health Science is the most common Career Cluster in which Tennessee students have concentrated.  (The Florida analysis did not examine the supply side of the equation.)

Presenters, including former assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education Brenda Dann-Messier, concluded that their findings pointed to three concepts that should frame the ongoing discussions on Perkins reauthorization: alignment of CTE with local labor market information; collaboration among the education and business communities; and innovation of new evidence-based strategies for delivering CTE programs.

ACTE will continue to work with these and other stakeholder groups and researchers to identify promising trends in CTE, as well as to advocate for ACTE member priorities as Perkins reauthorization conversations continue. To learn more about ACTE’s research on high-quality CTE, click here, or click here to learn more about our priorities for the next Perkins reauthorization!

Comments

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