The New Foundation of Education: Transforming, Reimagining, Repositioning, Restoring, Liberating Lives Through Career Technical Education

• In Event: The Last Brick Shall Be the Cornerstone: Re-Mattering Black Educational Lives After the Neoliberal Wrecking Ball

Abstract

The state takeover of the Inkster school district ravaged the community. The devastation will impact generations unless new, creative thinking is poured into this community. Despite the devastation, there is an opportunity for a completely new approach to education that stems from a framework that has existed since public education was initially formed. This paper will demonstrate the efficacy of a career and technical education curriculum as a framework for reimagining, rebuilding, and transforming the closed Inkster school district.
This paper will examine the efficacy of career and technical education as a foundational curriculum through a combination of two frameworks. The first will be built on the ideals of Dewey and his "Child and the Curriculum" writings. He suggested education with a specific purpose benefits the child and society. Dewey presented project-based learning as a means for teaching skills and knowledge immediately applicable to students. Providing education with immediate application rewarded students, creating a more significant opportunity for engagement. The second framework is built on the writings from "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," which presents education through a framework of liberation and as a means of anti-oppression.

This work will be demonstrated through the observation and comparison of existing actionable models in middle and secondary schools, reflecting a demographic very similar to that of the population of Inkster. A substantial amount of comparison data and interviews will come from the Thomas Edison School in Jamaica Queens, New York. Data will be mined from existing research surrounding the success of CTE programs for students and specific works centered on the Thomas Edison school.
This theory will be built upon established data through past research that supports CTE completers who graduate at a higher rate than non-CTE students from secondary programs. The data further supports those CTE completers enrolling at higher rates and completing post- secondary programs at higher rates than their non-CTE colleagues. Using the Thomas Edison school as the main point of observation and experimentation and all past data collected from the school's current implementation of their programming, this paper postulates that similar programming and use of CTE as a framework for learning and the additional components that make up a strong CTE programming used as the building blocks for a nonexistent district will present a significant opportunity for hope and choice for the community of Inkster. The specific

significance of the study demonstrates the impact career technical education can have when infused from the earliest possible point in a pre-K through 12-grade educational system, thus providing direction, skill application, and the opportunity currently not afforded the marginalized students of color residing in Inkster's defunct school district.

Author

• Donald Walker, Wayne State University