InsideSources

Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., has made Career and Technical Education, or CTE, one of his top issues during a nearly ten-year tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives. The law that regulates key federal CTE programs was last updated before Thompson came to Washington, back in 2006, and has been awaiting reauthorization for five years.

Thompson’s bill to update the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act passed through committee unanimously on Wednesday and is expected to get through the full House of Representatives with bipartisan support. A similar measure, also introduced by Thompson, made it to the Senate last year before withering on the vine in the wake of a heated campaign season. Thompson predicts this year’s push will be successful, in part, because the political maelstrom enveloping Washington has Congress and the White House hungry for a legislative success.

“The American people are ready for a win, and you can’t get a better win than providing greater access to job training,” said Thompson during an interview with InsideSources in his Capitol Hill office. “You lift people out of poverty. You get people off of welfare that feel like they are stuck there.”

CTE programs around the country prepare teenagers in K-12 schools, post-secondary students, and even adult learners with the applied skills necessary to quickly find work. Rather than traditional academic subjects, which focus on broadly applicable subjects like math, science, or reading, local CTE programs are often tailored to an area’s economic needs. In Thompson’s district, in rural northern and western Pennsylvania, that might mean training engineers capable of operating sophisticated machinery used for fracking natural gas, while in Silicon Valley, it could mean high-tech “boot camps” to train coders.

Nationally, there are millions of high-paying job openings that companies cannot fill because the labor force lacks the necessary skills. This “skills gap” hurts the economy and wastes the valuable human capital of unemployed or underemployed Americans that could fill the positions, according to CTE proponents like Thompson.

“I view Career and Technical Education as incredibly important rungs on the ladder of opportunity—and we’ve had some of those rungs that have been removed,” he said.

Curiously, the ample economic opportunity available in skilled blue-collar professions has not been enough, on its own, to entice a sufficient number of workers to forgo traditional four-year degrees. Thompson said that this has to do with longstanding cultural stigmas and prejudices against CTE that go back decades, and are partially a result of misguided messaging from power-centers like Washington.

“Government has had this mantra—in a misleading way—that said the only way to be successful in life is that everyone goes to a four-year-plus college and gets a degree. That’s just not true today,” said Thompson echoing remarks made by Education and Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday. Thompson also noted that the rising cost of getting a traditional diploma is helping students come to that realization on their own.

“How do you launch into a successful life as a young person after earning your degree when you literally have a student debt that is probably the size of my first mortgage?” he asked. Thompson said he has met people who have gone into debt to earn a bachelor’s degree only to then re-enroll in a CTE pathway for lack of job opportunities.

While the messaging problems surrounding vocational career paths are difficult to solve legislatively, Thompson’s bill does make some tweaks to the structure of how federal aid to local CTE programs is managed. According to Thompson, his proposal lessens the planning burdens put on states as they craft plans for how their Perkins money will be used while also giving them and localities more decision-making power. Increasing local control will hopefully make CTE programs more nimble so educators can better forge partnerships with area businesses or otherwise adapt their offerings to the job market in their area, said Thompson.

One of the only points of contention in his proposal, which sank the legislation’s chances in the Senate last year according to some, are the constraints put on the secretary of education’s power to intervene or shape state CTE plans. Thompson says he would be “shocked” if that were an issue this time around, arguing that the proposal should be non-controversial.

Other bipartisan legislation like the far-larger Every Student Succeeds Act that passed in 2015, devolved power along similar parameters, he said. Some of the good-will in the congressional education committees built up during ESSA’s passage has since burned up, however, over bitter party-line votes during the DeVos nomination and during successful efforts to repeal Obama-era accountability and teacher preparation regulations.

Nevertheless, Thompson believes the pro-jobs message attached to his bill, and bipartisan praise in the House’s education committee, will ultimately lead to its passage.

“We’re going to change lives with this piece of legislation, and quite frankly Congress is ready for a win, the President is ready for a win—something we can all do together—so I’m hoping and trusting in the Senate,” he said.

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You don’t need a four-year degree from a prestigious university to be successful, said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the chairwoman of the House of Representative’s Education and the Workforce Committee, at an event in Washington, D.C. Tuesday. Foxx’s comments came the day before her committee is expected to pass a bill that would reauthorize a federal grant program that disburses over one billion dollars in support for Career and Technical Education, or CTE, programs.

The event was hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank. AEI education fellow Andy Smarick, who is also the president of the Maryland State Board of Education, introduced the chairwoman and then moderated a discussion with Foxx.

A bill to tweak the Perkins Act, the main CTE legislation on the books in Washington, passed through Congress’ lower chamber with broad-based bipartisan support last year before languishing in the Senate. This year’s bill, which is similar in substance to last year’s, has also earned praise from both sides of the aisle in the House of Representatives.

“We have to get away from the notion that a bachelor’s degree equates with success and with accomplishment,” said Foxx during her prepared remarks. She noted that many Americans go on to have successful careers with only a high school diploma or a two-year post-secondary credential, while stories of bachelor-degree graduates who struggle to find fruitful employment abound.

Backers of stronger supports for CTE say that the American educational system has become too preoccupied with shuttling every student through a traditional four-year college. They argue that a sustained effort to improve vocational education offerings, which are typically quicker and cheaper to complete, would benefit both students and an economy with millions of job openings for skilled workers.

A major hurdle to overcome in attracting students to CTE pathways is not about promising them high paying jobs, (the opportunities are there, say business leaders), but about reducing the stigma associated with a career in what are traditionally labeled “blue collar” professions. One change that educators should think about, said Foxx, is to stop referring to CTE programs as “training.”

She repeated a quote from one of her graduate school professors: “You train animals and you educate people.”

Curiously, Foxx conceded that the existence of a federal program to support CTE offerings runs counter to her constitutionally-conservative ideology. If she had her druthers, the issue would be left entirely to the states and the federal government would have no role in education whatsoever, she said. However, Foxx recognized that with the otherwise noncontroversial program already in place, it makes sense to enact reforms that ensure transparency and accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent.

Among the adjustments she highlighted in the legislation she is supporting are efforts to better align CTE programs with local job offerings, and better mechanisms to allow parents and students to weigh in on a CTE program’s effectiveness. Foxx also said the bill rolls back some of the secretary of education’s authority in shaping state plans in order to allow for more local control. That last provision, cutting back the federal education department’s role, was a sticking point for Senate Democrats during the last push for Perkins reauthorization, according to some experts.

When asked whether she expects the Senate to adopt the bill, Foxx chuckled and said, “I don’t have a crystal ball.” The upper chamber, whose internal rules grant more power to the minority party, is also consumed with other big-ticket legislative items such as confirming the president’s sub-cabinet appointments and a major health care overhaul. Foxx said that the bill’s backers are still looking for a “champion” to shepherd the proposal through the Senate.

Nevertheless, optimism abounds among the Education and Workforce members who have CTE as a priority. Freshman Rep. Jason Lewis, R-Minn., for example, has made CTE a major focus of his. Among the first pieces of legislation the congressman introduced was a juvenile justice reform package that included expanded CTE offerings for young people in the criminal justice system.

On Wednesday, the committee is expected to vote on an amendment put forward by Lewis that would require states to include information in their state plans about dual enrollment opportunities for high school students pursuing CTE credentials. The amendment would also push colleges to recognize CTE credits earned through dual and concurrent enrollment programs.

In a statement released to InsideSources, Lewis expressed his support for the Perkins reauthorization legislation and added, “Encouraging dual and concurrent enrollment, especially with technical colleges, puts our kids on a pathway to graduating with the skills they need to succeed and move into a good paying job.”

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Legislation to update a billion dollar federal grant program that goes to supporting Career and Technical Education offerings is slated for markup in the House of Representatives’ Education and Workforce Committee next week. A similar version of the reauthorization of the law passed through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support last year before stalling out in the Senate.

Career and Technical Education, or CTE, sometimes called “vocational education” refers to educational programs that provide students the marketable skills to prepare them for a specific industry. CTE is typically contrasted with core subjects like math, English, or the humanities, in which students are taught general knowledge alongside more widely applicable skills. Students are most likely to take CTE courses, like home economics, auto mechanics, nursing, or computer engineering, in middle school, high school, or post-secondary school. Of students pursuing a post-secondary degree or credential in a CTE field, most are enrolled in public or for-profit two-year institutions, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., introduced the legislation reauthorizing the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act last week along with six additional original co-sponsors—three Democrats and three Republicans. The current authorization of the law, which was last passed in 2006, expired in 2012. The programs governed by the law have been funded through continuing resolutions in the intervening years. Last year’s reauthorization attempt, which was also introduced by Thompson, passed the House in September by a 405 to 5 vote.

Alisha Hyslop is the director of public policy for the Association for Career and Technical Education, the largest nonprofit organization active in the field. Aside from a technical concern over the stringency with which CTE students are counted for accountability purposes, Hyslop said in a telephone interview with InsideSources that the current bill before the House’s education committee is a “good proposal.”

Almost all of the 1.1 billion dollars authorized each year through the Perkins Act gets split up among the states according to a population-weighted funding formula. From there, states are required to set aside most of the funds for local grant recipients, which typically include organizations like higher education institutions or local school districts. States are also permitted to set aside some of the federal funds for professional development, targeted innovation initiatives, and other overhead or administrative costs. All told, Hyslop estimates that the federal government contributes only about 5 to 10 percent of total state and local CTE outlays nationally.

The big change on the table for reauthorization, according to Hyslop, is a new mechanism that allows local grant recipients to better focus their use of federal CTE dollars. She said that educators and business leaders had come to her organization in recent years complaining that the law, as currently written, had become “unwieldy”—there were too many things grant recipients were required to invest in with not enough guidance on what to prioritize. Under the new proposal, local programs will be responsible for compiling “needs assessments” to justify more focused and impactful investments, said Hyslop. (She also pointed out that many of the better CTE programs nationally already do these kinds of forward-looking studies).

Overall, Hyslop said the current bill does a good job of streamlining provisions throughout the act. There are also elements of the Perkins reauthorization proposal that unify CTE policy with changes made to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2015. She indicated that she would expect the federal government’s CTE program to operate more smoothly if the House proposal were to be enacted.

With top House education committee members from both parties on the record supporting the reauthorization proposal, the biggest looming potential obstacle to reauthorization remains the Senate. Hyslop said that the big sticking point last year was over how much power the secretary of education and the U.S. Department of Education should be allowed to wield over how CTE dollars are spent.

Predictably, Democrats want to keep the door open for a muscular education department that can reject or punish states that submit inadequate plans. Republicans are more inclined to limit the federal agency’s role in the area, and defer to the judgment of state policy-makers. Nonetheless, the issue’s relatively low profile, and a general consensus over many of the reauthorization proposal’s main provisions, are working in favor of passage.

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