“Low esteem, little clout” was the shorthand way Jeannie Oaks and her colleagues characterized high school vocational education in their 1992 groundbreaking report Educational Matchmaking. It describes in painstaking detail vocational education’s “failure to deliver either effective or equitable education.”
This year’s National Career and Technical Education (CTE) Month is a time to raise awareness of how vocational education under the banner of today’s CTE has changed since then and how it’s now preparing many different young people for good jobs and career success. Many Americans, including young people, want schools to offer more education and training options like CTE. I have come to call this approach to creating many pathways to careers and opportunity in addition to the college degree opportunity pluralism.
