The NASDCTEc fall meeting has come to a close, and was a great success!

MEETING EVALUATION…If you have not had a chance to submit an evaluation for the fall meeting, please do so now. Your input is taken very seriously and helps us to shape future meetings – based upon your suggestions and ideas.

VISION JOURNEYS…Last week we asked State Directors to share their implementation stories on the vision for career technical education (CTE), lending their own voices, with the intent that by sharing with other State Directors and Leaders, everyone can use these ideas to develop strategies that will prove useful in their own states.

Here is our first submission, by Kathy Shibley of Ohio: 

“I found the “S” curve discussion by Langdon Morris of InnovationLabs to be very interesting, especially as it relates to Ohio’s approach to the CTE vision. We consider Ohio’s Perkins IV Plan to be quite bold for secondary schools: Tech Prep for all – all programs and all students. To us this meant that all programs would adopt our most rigorous content standards and highest quality program standards. It also meant that the “best of the best” approach to programming would not be reserved for only students selected into the secondary programs. It would be for all students and it would be up to us to build in more supports to help students to be successful in rigorous programs.

 In the beginning, the response from some secondary schools to this goal in our Perkins Plan was skeptical at best, if not resistive. But more quickly than I would have predicted, they have accepted the vision and readily put it forth as Ohio’s objective, although they are also quick to describe their fears and uncertainty about how to ensure student success.

 Now that we are at the mid-point of Perkins IV and the difficulty of the task is well-known,  I have been concerned that schools will give up on it, lose some of their enthusiasm and motivation to meet the challenge and start looking for a “next flavor of the month.” What I think is happening instead in Ohio is that the CTE vision is becoming the jumping-off point for us. As our Perkins Plan goals are reaching their peak as an innovative and exciting endeavor and are becoming just old-fashioned hard work, the national CTE vision provides a new side-by-side, congruent  “S” curve that we can jump off to and start a new upward cycle. By promoting the CTE vision as a detailed articulation of what CTE is about and having it be so clearly aligned with our Perkins Plan objectives, it has given our schools additional rationale for work we have already started as well as an emotional boost knowing they are part of a national vision for CTE.” 

Kathy Shibley can be reached at [email protected]. Thank you for your contribution!

We eagerly await other states’ submissions. They can be sent to Ramona Schescke at [email protected].

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