FCCLA program challenges students to stay fit

Recently, the students at River View High School in Finley, WA, were featured on NBC affiliate KNDU 25. At the beginning of the school year the high school Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) chapter received a grant from fueluptoplay60.com and the Dairy Farmers of Washington to host “fitness challenges,” including this “Heart Smart Dance Challenge.”

Students at the high school could “go online every day to record 60 minutes of exercise and their food intake” in an effort to promote healthy living throughout life. Take a look at the video to learn how it went.

We’re always looking for new and innovative ways to promote and grow our programs. If you have a great idea, write us and let us know. If you know of a great grant opportunity, drop us a line and we’ll help spread the word.

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Manufacturing, Jobs and the State of the Union

We find again that the best content we can recommend comes from James Stone and his team at the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education. Below is their latest, a summary of the excellent article in The Atlantic by Adam Davidson of NPR.

Tuesday night during his State of the Union speech, President Obama emphasized the need to provide workers with the right skills to fill growing job opportunities in manufacturing, science and technology. He specifically mentioned manufacturing and the role that community colleges can play with specific references to Central Piedmont Community College in North Carolina as well as community colleges in Louisville and Orlando.

Adam Davidson, from Planet Money (an NPR program) recently offered a cogent discussion of the promise and the challenges facing the United States in thinking about our reliance on manufacturing as a focus for job growth. He does this by discussing two manufacturing workers. One, relatively low skilled, the other much smarter:

Is there a crisis in manufacturing in America? Looking just at the dollar value of manufacturing output, the answer seems to be an emphatic no. Domestic manufacturers make and sell more goods than ever before. Their success has been grounded in incredible increases in productivity, which is a positive way of saying that factories produce more with fewer workers… In theory, productivity growth should help nearly everyone in a society.

For a long time this was the case.

Throughout much of the 20th century, simultaneous technological improvements in both agriculture and industry happened to create conditions that were favorable for people with less skill…Typically, these workers made more money than they ever had on the farm, and eventually, some of their children were able to get enough education to find less-dreary work. Newcomers with no training could start out working the simplest and then gradually learn others. Eventually, with that on-the-job training, some workers could become higher-paid supervisors, overseeing the entire operation. This kind of knowledge could be acquired only on the job; few people went to school to learn how to work in a factory. In that period of dramatic change, it was the highly skilled craftsperson who was more likely to suffer a permanent loss of wealth. Economists speak of the middle part of the 20th century as the “Great Compression,” the time when the income of the unskilled came closest to the income of the skilled…

 But as the author points out, that productivity as the great leveler is no longer the case. The author concludes that: “The double shock we’re experiencing now-globalization and computer-aided industrial productivity-happens to have the opposite impact: income inequality is growing, as the rewards for being skilled grow and the opportunities for unskilled Americans diminish.” 

This is a very useful introduction to the complexity this nation confronts as we try to understand how best to prepare young people for the great unknown after high school. To read more, go to:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/

Spoiler alert: The author offers no simplistic solutions but does note that: “To solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces: a broken educational system, teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination, a fractured political culture.”

While Western WA is snowed in, read about the Programs of Study Institute

Via the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education’s Center Point newsletter:

NRCCTE Launches First National Programs of Study Institute

To assist states in addressing barriers to the implementation of federally mandated Programs of Study (POS), the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education (NRCCTE) at the University of Louisville is launching its first National POS Institute, a six-month program of research-based technical assistance intended to support states in improving the quality of CTE instruction provided to secondary and postsecondary students.

Up to five states selected through a competitive process will participate in the technical assistance, which will commence with a two-day meeting on February 6-7, 2012, to be held at the NRCCTE’s headquarters in Louisville. Later national-level convenings of the National POS Institute will be held at the 2012 ACTE National Policy Seminar, March 5-7, and the 2012 Career Clusters Institute, June 18-20, held by the NRCCTE’s partner organization, the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc).

At the Louisville meeting, the NRCCTE will bring together evidence-based resources, including researchers from its portfolio of research studies on POS and other experts, to address the implementation barriers identified by states. The NRCCTE’s goal is to help states apply the results of research to the improvement of their programs. Over the remainder of the project, state teams will receive additional assistance from a national NRCCTE facilitator and an in-state facilitator.

“POS are a hallmark of the current Perkins legislation. Although the language about them is new to Perkins IV, the essential concepts have been part of CTE improvement efforts for decades. They contain elements of Tech Prep, School-to-Work, Career Education, and other efforts. Despite this, states continue to be challenged by their implementation,” said James R. Stone, III, Ed.D., Director of the NRCCTE.

The Institute follows in the footsteps of the NRCCTE’s evidence-based Math-in-CTE curriculum integration model, which began as a research study and launched nationally as a program of technical assistance and professional development in 2006. Nearly 30 states and large districts have since implemented the model.

Since 2007, the NRCCTE has sponsored five research studies of POS, including three ongoing longitudinal projects, with the goal of informing the field about how and under what conditions POS impact student engagement, achievement, and transition to postsecondary education and employment. The January 2012 issue of Techniques magazine, dedicated to POS, includes five articles by NRCCTE-affiliated researchers that feature some of the latest findings and updates from these studies. The NRCCTE’s POS studies include:

• Programs of Study as a State Policy Mandate:A Longitudinal Study of the South Carolina Personal Pathways to Success Initiative: Researchers at Clemson University are studying the impact of South Carolina’s Education and Economic Development Act (EEDA), which aims to improve student achievement and preparation for postsecondary education and work through career exploration and career pathways. Researchers are studying those components of EEDA that are most relevant to high schools and investigating their influence on students over a five-year period in eight high schools.
• Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study: This longitudinal study was designed to estimate the impact of POS on high school students’ academic and technical achievement outcomes through the completion of high school. For the past four years, NRCCTE researchers have followed two cohorts of students from the Class of 2012 in two large, urban school districts that offer POS. Researchers are annually collecting student outcome data and making site visits at treatment and control or comparison schools.
• Mature Programs of Study: A Postsecondary Perspective:Conducted by researchers at the National Institute for Workforce and Learning at FHI 360, the goal of this study is to examine “mature” POS-like sites around the country to learn how they were developed and how they work. Three sites were chosen that showed evidence of strong secondary-postsecondary partnerships. Over the last three years, researchers have conducted site visits to each of the sites to interview secondary and postsecondary administrators and faculty, advisory committee members from the business community, and CTE students.
• Programs of Study – A Cross-Study Examination of Programs in Three States: This evaluative study, now concluded, was designed to examine selected programs and sites from each of the NRCCTE’s three field-based, longitudinal studies of POS that had the most mature, well-established programs relative to other study sites as a means of identifying common elements or attributes that led to the successful implementation of POS. The goal was to compare common elements across the schools to uncover key components that could be shared with those involved in developing more effective POS.
• Six Stories About Six States: Programs of Study: This project, also now concluded, focused on how POS were developed in six states, and especially on how technical assistance was provided to strengthen and improve them. The project’s case study report focuses on how states’ technical assistance systems evolved and what successes and challenges existed. Researchers at the University of Minnesota identified those elements that states had in common and those that were unique to each state.

To learn more about the NRCCTE’s research and technical assistance related to Programs of Study, visit the NRCCTE website at http://www.nrccte.org/.

New year, new legislative session, new chance for CTE to shine

The new year is a week old, the State Supreme Court ruling confirming the requirement for the state to fully fund basic education was handed down last Thursday, and the 2012 session of the Legislature starts today. Class is now in session. It is a busy time for education in Washington.

What will you do to promote your program, your school and the power of CTE? Along with other New Year’s resolutions, consider the following:

• Encourage ten new students to join a career and technical student organization (CTSO) and compete.
• Sign up to attend a professional organization conference – look ahead at our calendar for some of what’s coming up.
• Or sign up for one of the education committee Listservs and follow what’s going on this year in state government. Let your voice be heard.

Next month, February, is CTE Month.  Get involved.

The Value of High School CTE

Courtesy of the researchers at the National Research Center for Career & Technical Education, via their e-newsletter.

As most of you know, the value of high school CTE in moving youth into a productive adulthood has been on-going since at least the 1980s with the rise of “college for all” as the presumed goal for high school. The most recent perspective on this is offered by the National Bureau of Economic Research (more about them may be found here: http://www.nber.org/info.html).

In this report, the NBER concludes that that young people who receive vocational education (in 18 different countries) have a higher employment rate than those who receive general education. But, the researchers conclude, those advantages erode over time, as vocationally educated workers can’t adapt nearly as well to structural changes in the economy and labor market. This seemingly makes the case for “college for all.”

A brief summary is presented here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/are-vocational-degrees-a-better-path-to-employment-in-the-short-run/2011/12/05/gIQAifaDWO_blog.html.

This conclusion is not without its critics (follow the comment trail for some of the critiques).

The full paper may be found here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17504.pdf. See what you think.

NRCCTE releases new report on successful programs of study

The National Research Center for Career and Technical Education released a new report today regarding programs of study, identifying factors supporting the successful development of POS, drawing from three studies being conducted in the field. Below is the summary of the study, as published in NRCCTE’s Center Point newsletter.

Programs of Study: A Cross-Study Examination of Programs in Three States

This project was designed to examine selected programs and sites from each of the Center’s three field-based, longitudinal studies of POS that had the most mature, well-established programs relative to other study sites as a means of identifying common elements or attributes that led to the successful implementation of POS. A team of researchers led by Rob Shumer of the University of Minnesota, Sam Stringfield and Natalie Stipanovic of the University of Louisville, and Nora Murphy of the University of Minnesota conducted visits to three sites over the course of the 2010-2011 school year. During these visits, the study team reviewed each site’s strengths, identified the contributing factors to their development of POS, and examined their implementation of the 10 supporting elements of POS identified by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education. After describing the sites, the report identifies six major themes derived from the data gathered at these sites:

• Engagement: POS had the power to engage students in learning, primarily by connecting academic learning to meaningful, work-based learning.
• Strong focus on student learning: POS were established to ensure that learning, both academic and skills-based, was the primary activity of students.
• Certification of knowledge and skills: As mandated, POS led to a variety of certifications from business and industry. But academic knowledge also had to meet levels of certification or generate outcomes that could be measured against standards.
• POS connected secondary and postsecondary systems with the goal of making CTE a seamless system that starts early in students’ educational careers and focuses on both academic and skills-based learning.
• POS raised the understanding of and respect for CTE among stakeholders.
• High-quality teachers made a difference in the delivery of programs.

This study of three sites selected from the NRCCTE’s field-based longitudinal research projects offers important knowledge about how POS work and what needs to be done to continue positive trends in program outcomes and operations. It has also captured many of the strengths of the programs that contribute to engagement, learning, collaboration, and cooperation. As the renewal of the Carl D. Perkins legislation approaches, the findings from this study may help inform future efforts in the expansion of POS and the creation of an integrated, seamless system of learning that will engage students in training for work, college, and life.

To learn more about the team’s findings and recommendations for the future of programs of study, download the full report:

Shumer, R., Stringfield, S., Stipanovic, N., & Murphy, N. (2011, November). Programs of study: A cross-study examination of programs in three states. Louisville, KY: National Research Center for Career and Technical Education, University of Louisville. (PDF document)

Companion Podcast:

Related to the report, authors Sam Stringfield and Rob Shumer recently joined Catherine Imperatore of ACTE to talk about the study’s design, process, and outcomes. Their conversation, recorded as a podcast, dwelt particularly on the six major themes that emerged from the team’s rich pool of transcript data, as well as the study team’s recommendations regarding the future of POS.

Programs of Study: A Cross-Study Examination of Programs in Three States – A Podcast with Sam Stringfield and Robert Shumer.

To subscribe to this newsletter, contact the editor. Contact info available at http://www.nrccte.org/.

New CTE: Learning that works for America™ video unveiled at Fall Meeting

Courtesy of the National Association of State Directors of Career and Technical Education Consortium.

CTE is working across the nation to enable students of all ages to excel in their schools and colleges, and secure high-demand jobs. This video represents the rich and diverse brand of CTE. It highlights students of a range of talents, backgrounds and ages, and in a mix of industries in which CTE helps student succeed. The 1 minute 30 second video was developed to embody the spirit of our new CTE: Learning that works for America ™ initiative.