Educator Sense-Making and Implementation of Career and Technical Education in Comprehensive High Schools

• In Event: Equitably Preparing Youth for Careers in the Changing World of Work

Abstract

Nationwide, support for Career and Technical Education (CTE) is growing as educators and policymakers seek to expand postsecondary opportunities for youth and meet the human capital needs of a technologically advancing labor market. A growing body of evidence suggests that high school CTE can improve high school attendance and early employment outcomes. At the same time, CTE seems to have null or negative effects on four-year degree attainment (Brunner et al., 2019; Cowan et al., 2019; Dougherty, 2018; Giani, 2019). These findings have raised concerns about the consequences of CTE for the social mobility of disadvantaged students (Hodge et al., 2020). Presently, little is known about how educators implementing CTE balance the tensions between preparing students for in-demand technical occupations and competitive academic credentials. As CTE receives increasing support, it will be important to understand how comprehensive high school administrators and counselors make sense of the goals of CTE and how this shapes their enactment of CTE programming, partnerships with local industry, and advising of diverse students to prepare them for careers and college.

This study helps fill this gap through interviews and observations with 54 administrators, school counselors, employers, and workforce development organization representatives in a manufacturing region of Pennsylvania as they partnered to develop and enact CTE programs. I found that, through collaborative sense-making practices, educational stakeholders came to think of CTE to be an important means of providing students with alternatives to the risky pursuit of four-year college degrees. They perceived the opportunity structure of higher education as no longer providing a ticket to upward mobility, especially for economically disadvantaged students who faced high net tuition and low graduation rates at the public state colleges local students were most likely to attend. The educational stakeholders considered vocational learning to be a way to prepare students for financially low-risk forms of postsecondary training, including occupational certificates and applied associate degrees, that met the needs of local employers through well-paying middle-skill jobs. They advised students to pursue career training that would allow them to attain the skills needed for their careers of interest at the lowest cost, starting with high school CTE.

By endorsing this strategy for student achievement in response to a shifting opportunity landscape, the educators helped to bring about an educational structure that distributed resources to students at low levels of academic achievement through revamped CTE facilities and coursework. The reallocation of school funds, along with employer investments in vocational programs, was expected to reduce college dropout rates and create a pipeline of local workers with needed middle-skill human capital. At the same time, by categorizing CTE as preparation for sub-baccalaureate educational options, the educational stakeholders created the conditions to reify de facto tracking between vocational and college-bound students. Student advising had little emphasis on competing for admission to selective universities that provide the highest rates of social mobility for low-income students (Chetty et al., 2017). I discuss implications for the role of education stakeholders’ locally situated sense-making practices in the equitable implementation of CTE.

Author

• Sarah Elizabeth Cashdollar, University of Chicago