The Challenge for Business and Society by Stanley S. Litow

Author:Stanley S. Litow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119437482
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-05-03T10:00:00+00:00

Changing Federal Policy

Rapid expansion across the United States and in several countries requires more than state-by-state and country-by-country expansion. While creating 70 or even 100 schools would be noteworthy, true reform requires an infusion of steroids to significantly and dramatically accelerate the rate and nature of its expansion. In this effort we targeted an alteration in the federal funding source for career and technical education, and the creation of a federal model along with funding, to spread the P-TECH model much, much further.

While not as significant as the engine behind the creation of Social Security, the changes sought on the federal level for all career and technical education modeled after P-TECH were very important. Vocational education in America has traditionally been thought of as a second-class opportunity for students who do not have the ability to complete an academic high school program, let alone attend or complete college, whether a two- or four-year program. Students who attended vocational programs had the opportunity to learn skills to perform a specific job, but that basically was it. Support for vocational education came from local school districts and states, but the federal Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, first authorized in 1984, distributed funding across the states to provide the added resources for materials, supplies, and instruction. The last reauthorization of the act was over a decade ago, in 2006, with federal funding largely distributed across the states on a per capita basis, meaning that a state received funding based on its total pupil count, regardless of what specifically was done with the funding. Largely what was done was what had been done the year, or decades, before.

To replicate P-TECH across the United States beyond 100 or even 200 schools, which is the goal over the next three to four years, we determined we needed to energize a broad constituency to support a change in the federal law and the way in which funds are distributed. Most businesses lobby for federal, state, or local changes that directly benefit them in the short term. The change here would be something that would benefit business to be sure, by addressing the need for higher skill levels among America’s youth, but the benefit would be long-term, and those interested in supporting such changes would expand beyond business to include education groups, labor, civil rights organizations, and student groups. The core agenda addressed the fundamental elements of P-TECH but was done in a way that created a big and broad tent to accommodate different interests, both programmatic and geographic.

The agenda we settled upon would focus on preparation for careers linked directly to labor market data to ensure that preparation would be linked to high-demand and high-wage career opportunities, like information technology, health care, finance, and advanced manufacturing.

Second, there would need to be a focus on the link between high school and college. Ending school with only a high school diploma would continue to wall off that opportunity—an economic imperative in this twenty-first-century economy. Third, there

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