Vocational and Technical Education

Current Trends
The trend in contemporary K–12 vocational education is away from the use of the word vocational to label
these programs. Most states have selected a broader term, although a few use vocational technical
education. A number of states have followed the lead of the national vocational education organizations and
adopted the term career and technical education. Others use variations, such as career and technology
education and professional-technical education, and several states include the word workforce in describing
these programs. The changes in terminology reflect a changing economy, in which technical careers have
become the mainstay.

When the term career education first became popular in the 1970s, it was distinguished from vocational
education by its emphasis on general employability and adaptability skills applicable to all occupations, while
vocational education was primarily concerned with occupational skill training for specific occupations. That
basic definition of career education remains appropriate today.

The purpose of career and technical education is to provide a foundation of skills that enable high school
students to be gainfully employed after graduation–either full-time or while continuing their education or
training. Nearly two-thirds of all graduates of career and technical programs enter some form of
postsecondary program.

Across the United States, career and technical education programs are offered in about 11,000 comprehensive
high schools, several hundred vocational-technical high schools, and about 1,400 area vocational-technical
centers. Public middle schools typically offer some career and technical education courses, such as family
and consumer sciences and technology education. About 9,400 postsecondary institutions offer technical
programs, including community colleges, technical institutes, skill centers, and other public and private two-
and four-year colleges. In 2001 there were 11 million secondary and postsecondary career and technical
education students in the United States, according to the U.S. Office of Educational Research and
Improvement.

The subject areas most commonly associated with career and technical education are: business (office
administration, entrepreneurship); trade and industrial (e.g., automotive technician, carpenter, computer
numerical control technician); health occupations (nursing, dental, and medical technicians); agriculture
(food and fiber production, agribusiness); family and consumer sciences (culinary arts, family management
and life skills); marketing (merchandising, retail); and technology (computer-based careers).

Career and technical education programs usually are offered as a sequence of courses supplemented by work-
based experiences, such as internships or apprenticeships. These work experiences remain a hallmark of
career and technical education.

Rethinking the Mission

For the last two decades of the twentieth century, business led the charge for school reform in order to have
better prepared students for the workplace. Yet career and technical education programs, which have the
mission of readying young people for employment, continue to be pushed aside by courses designed to
prepare students for high-stakes academic assessments. All states have testing requirements for high school
students in mathematics, science, English language arts, and sometimes social studies. One result of the
emphasis on academic testing is a continuing decline in the number of students enrolled in career and
technical education.

To reverse declining enrollments, career and technical education faces a twofold challenge: to restructure its
programs and to rebuild its image. Traditional vocational programs provided students with job-specific skills
that many parents viewed as too narrow for their children.

The trend is for career and technical education programs to rethink their mission by asking how they can
prepare students with high-level academic skills and the broad-based transferable skills and technical skills
required for participation in the "new economy," where adaptability is key. Programs adopt this dual
approach in an effort to make career and technical education a realistic option for large numbers of students
to achieve academic success, which will translate into employment for them.

These programs teach broad skills that are applicable to many occupations. This preparation for the world of
work is anchored in strong academic skills, which students learn how to apply to real-world situations. These
academic skills include the competencies needed in the contemporary workplace as well as the knowledge
and skills valued by academic education and measured by state examinations.

The reality is that the academic skills needed for the workplace are often more rigorous than the academic
skills required for college. The multidisciplinary approach of most work tasks and the amount of technology
and information in the workplace contribute to the heightened expectations of all workers, including entry-
level.

For career and technical education programs to flourish in the early twentieth century's test-driven school
environment, they must: (1) find ways to continue to prepare students with the skills and knowledge needed
in the increasingly sophisticated workplace; (2) embed, develop, and reinforce the academic
standards/benchmarks that are tested on the state-mandated assessments; and (3) teach the essential skills that
all students need for success in life.

Organizing Programs Around Career Clusters

The workplace requires three sets of skills of most workers:

 Strong academics, especially in English language arts, mathematics, and science, as well as computer
skills;
 Career specific skills for a chosen career cluster;
 Virtues such as honesty, responsibility, and integrity.
The U.S. Department of Education Office of Vocational and Adult Education has identified sixteen broad
career clusters that reflect a new direction for education. The clusters were created to assist educators in
preparing students for a changing workplace. The intent is for secondary and postsecondary educators,
employers, and industry group representatives to work together to formulate cluster standards. The careers in
each cluster range from entry level through professional/technical management in a broad industry field.
Each cluster includes both the academic and technical skills and knowledge needed for careers and
postsecondary education. These clusters provide a way for schools to organize course offerings so students
can learn about the whole cluster of occupations in a career field. It is an excellent tool to assist students in
identifying their interests and goals for the future. The sixteen career clusters are:

 Agriculture and Natural Resources

 Architecture and Construction
 Arts, Audiovisual Technology, and Communications
 Business and Administration
 Education and Training
 Finance
 Government and Public Administration
 Health Science
 Hospitality and Tourism
 Human Services
 Information Technology
 Law and Public Safety
 Manufacturing
 Retail/Wholesale Sales and Services
 Scientific Research/Engineering
 Transportation, Distribution, and Logistics
The preparation of students in the career clusters must include (1) academic skills, (2) cluster-specific
standards, and (3) broad transferable skills. All of these aspects of the curriculum must be organized in a
continuum. As students grow and develop through this continuum, they will prepare themselves for broader
and higher-level opportunities.

The Academic Issues

The 1983 publication of a government report, A Nation at Risk, sounded an alarm about the competitiveness
of U.S. students in comparison to their international counterparts. Education systems responded by raising
standards in mathematics, science, English language arts, and, in some states, other disciplines such as social
studies as well. States have passed legislation and implemented regulations in hopes of solving the problem.

Because the business community was directly involved in the school reform process, business concepts were
applied in schools in the 1980s and 1990s. Examples included Total Quality Management, continuous
improvement, and the strategic planning techniques used by senior management to change business
organizations.

Many schools also spent a great deal of energy creating vision, mission, and goal statements in their quest for
higher student achievement. By the early 1990s, however, it was clear that these endeavors and others, such
as site-based management, while well intended, had not improved student performance. Too often, the
institutional issues took precedence over the needs of the students.

Schools then made a more aggressive effort to focus instruction on raising achievement, in what became
referred to as the "standards movement." Again, this concept was taken directly from business, but industry
standards for products and services were not easily transferable to the intellectual development of children.
Furthermore, the rules of engagement in education are fundamentally different from the rules of engagement
in the business sector. In business, everyone is expendable, whereas in education, nearly everyone is
protected. Moreover, education is committed to equity as well as excellence.

Although the standards movement was intended to bring focus and direction to the curriculum, it led instead
to a proliferation of content to be taught in the curriculum. This can be seen in research by Dr. Robert
Marzano and colleagues in What Americans Believe Students Should Know: A Survey of U.S. Adults (1999).
The authors examined standards across all subjects and grade levels and identified 200 distinct standards with
3,093 related benchmarks. From teachers' estimates of how long it would take to teach each benchmark
adequately, the researchers calculated that it would require 15,465 hours to cover all of them. Yet, students
have only 9,042 hours of instructional time over the course of their K–12 careers.

The International Center for Leadership in Education conducted a survey in 1999 to identify the skills and
knowledge graduates need for success in the world beyond school. The survey, reported in The Overcrowded
Curriculum (1999), asked respondents to identify the top thirty-five standards–in terms of what a high school
senior should know and be able to do–from a list of content topics commonly found in states' exit standards.
The top-rated skills in mathematics, science, and English language arts bear a striking resemblance to skills
typically covered in career and technical education programs. Many of the lowest-rated topics remain a
central focus of instruction in these disciplines.

More School Reform

When the standards movement did not translate into graduates with the skills that corporate America deemed
necessary, business leaders pressed elected officials to instill more rigor into the system and to prove that
students were mastering what was taught. In response, states initiated or upgraded mandatory statewide
testing programs to find out what students know.

Although these testing programs have served some useful purposes, they do not measure a broad scope of
knowledge. Schools do not have enough time to teach all the standards, benchmarks, performance objectives,
goals, and other subcategories of standards, so states cannot test students on all of them.

While raising academic standards was a central concern of K–12 education for two decades, issues raised by
business about students' inability to apply their skills and knowledge on the job did not receive widespread
attention. Vocational education was the only area uniformly to embrace the necessity for students to learn
how to apply their knowledge in the real world.

The New Workplace

At the conclusion of World War II, the adults in the United States, many of whom grew up during the Great
Depression, wanted their children to have a better standard of living than they did. They saw higher education
as the ticket to that better life. Meanwhile, Europe and Asia focused more on rebuilding their war-torn
countries than on education, thus allowing American colleges and universities to have the highest academic
standards in the world for the next several decades.

America's reversal of educational prominence happened at the time when technology began to reshape the
workplace. By the early 1990s the academic skills needed in the workplace often surpassed the academic
skills required for entry into college. Like the United States, other countries experienced the call for school
reform, but they did not need to be convinced of the link between education and work. The United States,
with a different value system, retreated to the old ways: raise standards and define excellence through testing.
But the reality is that the tests do not measure the skills that underpin the workplace, and U.S. graduates
continue to be at a disadvantage in the global and domestic marketplaces.

Another significant event that occurred in the late 1980s was the shift from big business to small business.
Companies across the America began to downsize. In small companies, broad skills and the ability to handle
multiple tasks are of paramount importance. Even entry-level workers are expected to be jacks-of-all-trades.

The contemporary workplace is dynamic and entrepreneurial. Approximately one-third of jobs is in flux
every year, meaning that they have just been added or will be eliminated. The job security once enjoyed in
big companies is no sure bet anymore. Employees must continuously reinvent themselves by seeking out the
additional training and new skills that will keep them marketable. Skills and adaptability have become the
new job security.

The new economy requires that employees be able to apply mathematics, science, and technical reading and
writings skills in a variety of job tasks. The trend in career and technical education is to teach transferable
skills via the various occupational clusters. These clusters are industry-specific enough to enable students to
develop employment skills without being so limited as to track students into narrowly defined or dead-end
jobs. To accomplish this, the programs provide a strong academic foundation and teach students the
processes of applying this knowledge.

The work environment is always in transition, with changing equipment, tasks, and responsibilities.
Technology is progressing too rapidly to train students on the latest equipment, so the trend in career and
technical education is to focus on teaching the skills, concepts, and systems that underpin technology rather
than how to operate a particular piece of technology.

Use Research about Learning

A growing body of education research supports the efficacy of the methodology used in career and technical
education programs. Research documents that the capacity to apply knowledge to practical situations is not
only an important ability for students to have, but also an effective way to improve their academic
performance. Research also shows that students learn more when they are motivated to do so. In career and
technical education, motivation stems from the realization that what they are learning has a practical
application to the world of work.

Arnold Packer, Chairman of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) 2000
Center at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies, has found that "solving realistic problems motivates
students to work on their academics. They have their own answer to the oft-asked question: "Why do I have
to learn this?" This blend of academic, career, and computer learning helps them acquire the skills needed for
successful careers while they achieve to meet state standards."

The National Research Council has found that when instruction is based on students' interests and aptitudes
and is appropriate to their learning styles, students are more motivated to learn. Academic performance
generally improves, for example, when students attend magnet schools and theme academies.

The research suggests that the ability to apply knowledge requires experience in using that knowledge in a
variety of ways over a period of time, drawing on the same knowledge base. Career and technical education
does a good job in this regard. Skill and knowledge are taught and reinforced through hands-on activities and
real-world applications.

The National Research Council's comprehensive 1999 report, How People Learn: Bridging Research and
Practice, shared key findings of the research literature on human learning, curriculum design, and the
learning environment. One of those findings concerned metacognition. Metacognition occurs when a learner
takes a new piece of information, debates its validity in relation to what else he or she knows about the
subject, and then considers how it expands his or her understanding of the topic. Most career and technical
education programs employ more metacognition activities than traditional programs, in which many students
spend the school day listening to teachers disseminate knowledge. Learning by doing is the standard
approach in their courses, as students use skills and knowledge to create products and model solutions to
problems.

Research shows that students will try to rise to the level of expectation established for them. For career and
technical education, this means having as high expectations for students' academic performance as for their
performance of job-related skills.

In the technological, information-based economy, workers must be able to apply high-level, integrated
academic skills on the job. As career and technical education programs redesign curriculum to embed
academic standards, their students have an advantage over other students because career and technical
education students also learn how to apply these skills.