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AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 1
WHERE WE STAND
Transforming Education
RANDI WEINGARTEN, AFT President
I
n his 2024 State of the Union address,
President Biden said one of his key eco-
nomic and educational priorities was
“Connecting businesses and high schools
so students get hands-on experience and a
path to a good-paying job whether or not
they go to college.”
It’s a watershed moment. A US president
talking not about standardized test scores,
but about the promise of career pathways—
taking career and technical education (CTE)
o the sidelines and making it a priority in
high schools. And involving businesses—
small and large—in students’ lives, not as
an afterthought, but as a means of giving
students internships and future choices.
e American public education system,
at least its educators, wants this. I see it in
schools I’ve visited across the country: CTE
is transformative—not only for students,
but for American education itself.
For decades, policymakers saw prepar-
ing all kids for college as the mission of
public schools—thus the obsession with
reading and math scores. What laws like
No Child Left Behind really left behind
was the true purpose of public education:
to prepare kids for everything—life, career,
college, civic engagement.
Then came two social upheavals: the
pandemic and AI. e pandemic conrmed
that relationships and problem solving,
not test prep and memorization, are criti-
cal for learning. e articial intelligence
challenge for students and educators is to
harness the good and prevent AI from exac-
erbating the harms of social media.
We have to meet this moment. Experi-
ential learning—project-based, hands-on
learning, of which CTE is a prime exam-
ple—gets kids engaged. It lifts attendance
and expands workforce training. It makes
public schools places where parents want
to send their children, educators want to
work, and students thrive. And it boosts
the economy. It’s truly a win-win-win for
individuals and for America.
ese days, CTE prepares students not
only for highly skilled trades, like carpen-
try and auto repair, but also for careers
in healthcare, transportation, culinary
and hospitality, graphic design, and now
advanced manufacturing. The Biden
administration’s historic investments
in American manufacturing and infra-
structure are creating high-paying, high-
demand jobs that don’t require a four-year
degree. (It’s part of Biden’s eort to grow
the economy and reshape it so that work-
ers, not just the wealthy, prosper.) But CTE
isn’t merely an alternative to college. Far
from it. CTE gives all kids
tools for success in life, like
working in teams, think-
ing critically, and meeting
deadlines. Of students
who concentrate in CTE,
94 percent graduate from
high school and 72 percent
go on to college.
CTE is a game-changer—that’s why we
devoted this whole issue to it. As you’ll see,
CTE today means:
• Trailblazing partnerships: I was honored
to be with President Biden in April as
he announced a multibillion-dollar
federal investment for Micron to build
microchip plants in Clay, New York,
and Boise, Idaho, creating 70,000 jobs.
The AFT and our New York affiliates
are working with Micron and New York
state to develop a curriculum frame-
work to prepare students for a variety of
good jobs in advanced manufacturing
(page 21).
• Career exploration and academics: At
Salem High School in Massachusetts
(page 31), CTE is integrated with aca-
demic standards; students engage in
advanced coursework and develop trans-
ferable skills while preparing for jobs,
apprenticeships, and college. Its 10 CTE
programs feature everything from restau-
rant-grade induction cooktops to virtual
dissection tables and are guided by advi-
sory boards of business leaders and union
and postsecondary representatives.
• A head start on healthcare professions:
Cleveland’s Lincoln-West School of Sci-
ence and Health partnered with Cleve-
land’s MetroHealth main hospital to
create a high school housed in a hospital
(page 26). Students learn rsthand about
hospital careers and work with health-
care-professional mentors. Our union is
helping seed more of these programs—
including the Northwell School of Health
Sciences in Queens, New York—by part-
nering with Bloomberg Philanthropies.
• An entree to maritime careers: At New
York City’s Harbor School, students have
eight pathways leading to good jobs in
marine science, technology, or policy
(page 37). Students learn to captain
boats, build submersible robots, partici-
pate in oyster restoration, and prepare
for careers protecting our waterways.
Keeping multiple pathways open, they
also study traditional academics.
This important work exemplifies what
the AFT is ghting for: real solutions to help
students thrive, by transforming education
and building a better life for all. CTE does
just that—and points the way to transforma-
tive change in American education. ☐
CTE exemplies what the AFT
is ghting for: real solutions
to help students thrive.
AFT
2 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
VOL. 48, NO. 1 | SPRING 2024
aft.org /ae
Where Passion Meets Purpose
4 From Margins to Mainstream
Bringing Career-Connected
Learning to Scale
By Robert Schwartz and
Kerry McKittrick
12 Signature Features of
High-Quality Career and
Technical Education
By James R. Stone III
17 Maximizing the Effectiveness
of Workplace Learning
Instructional Principles for
Career and Technical Education
By Paul A. Kirschner,
Mirjam Neelen, and Tim Surma
21 Advancing Tech Dreams
A Union-Driven Workforce
Development Partnership for
New York Students
Q&A with David Chizzonite,
Leo Gordon, and Robert Simmons
26 Creating a Healthy Community
How a High School in a
Hospital Launches Careers and
Enhances Well-Being
By Pamela Hummer
31 Empowering Futures
How Salem’s Comprehensive CTE
Programs Are Shaping Students’ Lives
By Mario Sousa
37 Skills for the Waterways
and Beyond
A Look Inside New York City’s
Harbor School
Q&A with Clarke Dennis,
Rick Lee, and Robert Markuske
41 Creating Career Pathways
How a Rural School District Is Meeting
Students’ and Businesses’ Needs
By Jenny Shiplett and
Erin Schumaker
42 An Insider’s Look at
Healthcare Careers
43 Pre-Apprenticeship
for a Go-Getter
44 Future Electricians Earn
While They Learn
45 Deeper Insights for a
Future Teacher
Download this issue for free at www.aft.org/ae.
Download this issue for free at aft.org/ae.
RANDI WEINGARTEN
President
FEDRICK C. INGRAM
Secretary-Treasurer
EVELYN DEJESUS
Executive Vice President
LISA HANSEL
Chief Publications Editor
LESLEY R. GONZALEZ
Assistant Editor
LUKE STEELE
Editorial Coordinator
SEAN LISHANSKY
Copyeditor
JENNIFER CHANG
Art Director
JENNIFER BERNEY
Graphic Designer
RACHEL ANDERSON
Junior Graphic Designer
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OUR MISSION
e AFT is a union of professionals
that champions fairness; democracy;
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46 Constructing Our Future
Working Together to Prepare
Students for Careers in the
Building Trades
By Tom Kriger and
Nicole Schwartz
64 Share My Lesson:
Sparking Career Exploration
Picturing Our Future
How to Engage Students and
Rebuild America
By Temple Grandin
go.aft.org/v6m
Also in this issue
49 Granite City
Building Partnerships Across the
Rural-Urban Divide
By Jackson Potter
55 How to Bring Antiracism to Life
in Teachers Unions and Beyond
56 Climate Justice for All
Pursuing a Just Transition in
the Education Sector
By Todd E. Vachon
49
56
4 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
From Margins to Mainstream
Bringing Career-Connected Learning to Scale
By Robert Schwartz and Kerry McKittrick
A
s recently as 30 years ago, vocational education in the
United States was generally regarded as “second class.”
It was a ne thing, as the saying went, for other people’s
children. In a world in which high school students were
tracked—with one track typically leading to college and another
to the skilled trades—vocational education was designed for the
students not deemed to be “college material.” Too often, students
from low-income families and students of color were funneled onto
this track and sent on pathways to low-paying, low-mobility careers.
Today’s career and technical education (CTE) bears little resem-
blance to this model. In our home state of Massachusetts, many of
the 28 regional vocational and technical high schools have long
waiting lists for admission. ese schools collectively have reading
and math scores and graduation rates similar to those of the com-
prehensive high schools in the state.
1
ey are signicant contribu-
tors to the consistently high performance of Massachusetts students
on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. e equity
problem is now reversed, with many civil rights leaders voicing
concerns about unequal access for students of color and students
from low-income families.
2
With far more applicants than seats,
there is growing scrutiny around school admissions policies and
pressure to move to a lottery-based admissions system.
In addition to the 28 regional vocational-technical schools,
Massachusetts has eight urban district-run vocational-technical
schools, one of which has attracted national acclaim: Worcester
Technical High School, which serves the second-largest city in
the state. Like the regional schools, it is structured into alternat-
ing weeks of academic instruction and hands-on lab or shop
work. It oers 23 technical programs ranging from biotech and
environmental tech, IT support, and programming and web
development to the trades (e.g., electrical, carpentry, HVAC,
plumbing), advanced manufacturing, and robotics and automa-
tion. e school features small class sizes, a student-run bank and
restaurant, and a veterinary clinic run in collaboration with the
veterinary program at Tufts University. In their senior year, nearly
all students have a substantial paid co-op experience in their eld
of study. Students also have access to advanced placement and
dual enrollment courses. With a total enrollment of more than
1,400 students, Worcester Tech has a 97 percent attendance rate, a
98 percent graduation rate, and a 66 percent college-going rate—
higher than the school district and state as a whole.
3
Programs at full-time CTE schools like Worcester Tech are
comparable in intensity and duration to high-quality CTE pro-
grams internationally. However, while roughly 9 percent of the
Robert Schwartz is a cofounder of and senior advisor for the Project on Work-
force at Harvard University. His previous roles include high school teacher
and principal, education advisor to the mayor of Boston and the governor
of Massachusetts, education director of the Pew Charitable Trusts, founding
president of Achieve, and Harvard education professor. He is also the author
or editor of numerous reports and books on career pathways, most recently
America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges Can Drive
Shared Prosperity, which he coedited with Rachel Lipson. Kerry McKittrick
is codirector of the Project on Workforce. Previously, she was a senior man-
ager at Jobs for the Future and a senior policy advisor on education, labor,
and workforce development issues for Congressman Jim Langevin.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY RACHEL SENDER
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 5
state’s high school students are CTE concentrators (i.e., students
who take three or more courses* in a particular career eld), full-
time CTE schools enroll just half of the state’s CTE concentra-
tors.
4
e other half is in comprehensive high schools, where CTE
programming is less intense. is raises an important question
for Massachusetts policymakers, one that is likely a concern for
other states as well: How can we expand access to high-quality,
high-intensity CTE programs like those at full-time schools to
more CTE concentrators?
A second, more challenging question emerged about a decade
ago when Massachusetts and many other states adopted the goal
of preparing all students for both college and career. Less than 20
percent of students
5
nationally are CTE concentrators, so how can
we ensure that all students have access to—and benet from—
career preparation opportunities? In response, a growing career
pathways movement has developed with CTE at the center but
with a broader focus and reach: to enable all students to graduate
high school “college and career ready.”
What Do We Mean by “College and Career Ready”?
Today, at least 37 state education plans include a unied deni-
tion of “college and career ready.”
6
“College ready” is a term that
most people understand, although they might have diering opin-
ions about what metrics to use in dening college readiness. In
our view, an important indicator of college readiness is successful
completion of a rigorous, well-structured early college program—
including attainment of a postsecondary credential. e growth
in dual enrollment, which we document below, suggests we are
not alone in this judgment.
What we mean by “career ready,” on the other hand, is not as
clear. In part, this is because we do not want or expect most students
to go directly to work after high school. e vast majority of high-
paying, high-mobility jobs today require some kind of credential
beyond a high school diploma but not necessarily a four-year
degree. Other valuable credentials include industry certications,
apprenticeship certications, one-year postsecondary occupa-
tional certificates, and associate degrees, preferably in a career
eld. To make the best decision about which pathway to pursue,
students need some knowledge of the careers available to them
and the foundational skills to pursue those careers. erefore, we
dene a career-ready graduate as a student who has (1) had enough
systematic exposure to the world of work and careers, including
through career-connected coursework, work-based learning, or
paid internships or summer jobs, to make an informed choice
about the best education or training pathway to take post–high
school; and (2) developed the foundational skills (also known as
employability skills or soft skills)—like communication, teamwork,
and problem-solving—needed to succeed in the world of work.
If we are to deliver on the promise that all students will leave high
school ready for careers as well as college, we can’t (and shouldn’t)
rely on our CTE systems alone. While we must improve the quality
and intensity of CTE programs for students who choose to con-
centrate, we must also nd a way to spread the benets of CTE to
the other 80 percent of high schoolers. We must build stronger,
more coherent, and transparent pathways from high school to
postsecondary education and training and then to careers for every
student. is insight led to the development of the career pathways
movement. Career pathways may incorporate CTE, but they are
aimed at the broader student population. ey integrate career-
focused and academic learning and increasingly span grades 11–14,
leveraging early college/dual enrollment models to help students
get started on both college and a career while in high school.
In this article, we use “career-connected learning” as an
umbrella term that includes both CTE and career pathways.
7
We
argue that, taken together, CTE and the broader career pathways
movement have the potential to become a new majority-serving
system that will improve academic and economic outcomes for
all students. To make that case, we will rst document the growth
and evidence base for both CTE and career pathways.
Growth and Modernization of CTE
Over the past century—from the 1917 enactment of the Smith-
Hughes Act to the 2006 passage and 2018 reauthorization of the
Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act—CTE has
evolved into a rigorous academic option for students preparing
for a variety of post–high school futures. At the state level, policy-
makers have embraced CTE, with several leaders embedding CTE
into their broader education plans. Today, 31 states have a college
and career readiness indicator that includes CTE coursework or
work-based learning in their assessments of school quality and
student success.
8
In 2022 alone, 37 states—led by both Democrats
and Republicans—enacted 123 policies focused on CTE.
9
Today’s CTE is characterized by several trends: (1) increased
industry involvement, paired with a focus on career exposure and
work-based learning opportunities (e.g., internships and appren-
ticeships); (2) focus on the integration in high school of postsecond-
ary education and credentials; and (3) inclusion of employability
skills alongside technical skills instruction. In high schools across
the country, CTE is high-tech and wide-ranging, spanning 16 career
clusters
†
with course sequences in in-demand elds from business
to health sciences. Among schools that oer CTE, 77 percent oer
work-based learning opportunities and 73 percent oer courses
that earn both high school and college credit.
10
In the 2021–22 school year, approximately 8.2 million high
school students took a CTE course, but drastically fewer chose
The vast majority of high-
mobility jobs today require
a credential beyond a high
school diploma but not
necessarily a four-year degree.
*State denitions of “CTE concentrator” vary, but we would argue that students
should take at least three CTE courses to be considered a concentrator.
†
To learn about the 16 career clusters, visit careertech.org/what-we-do/career-clusters.
6 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
to concentrate by completing three or more courses in a single
eld or program of study. Overall, white male students are more
likely to participate in CTE than female students and students
of color, and there tends to be an occupational divide wherein
female students are more likely to study health sciences and fewer
students of color are enrolled in STEM elds. In 2021–22, the most
popular career clusters were business, arts and communications,
agriculture and natural resources, and health sciences.
11
A 2018 survey of public school districts found that CTE is
oered in 98 percent of districts, but delivery mechanisms are
diverse. e majority of school districts (83 percent) oer CTE
courses at comprehensive high schools, while less than half (43
percent) oer courses at CTE centers that students attend part-
time and even fewer (12 percent) oer courses at full-time CTE-
focused high schools. irty-ve percent oer courses at two- and
four-year colleges.
12
Overview of the Evidence for CTE
As national interest in CTE has grown, so has rigorous research
on the topic. Alongside longstanding observational studies, new
research demonstrates that high-quality, high-intensity CTE can
lead to improved academic and economic outcomes for students,
particularly higher rates of student engagement, on-time high
school graduation, and workforce earnings.
13
Studies suggest that
impacts can vary by the form of content delivery, course timing,
and eld of study, among other factors.
Historically, the evidence base for CTE has been relatively
slim because students tend to self-select into courses. However,
a causal study of admissions data from CTE high schools in Mas-
sachusetts found that participation increased the likelihood of
on-time graduation by 7 to 10 percentage points for students from
higher-income families, with even larger impacts for students
from lower-income families.
14
Another study of CTE-dedicated
high schools in New York City found that CTE coursework led
to increased school attendance and a higher likelihood that
students were on track to receive a diploma. At smaller schools
with a single or themed career focus, there were even more mean-
ingful increases in student graduation and college enrollment
rates.
15
Similarly, a study of national data found that high school
CTE course-taking is associated with lower dropout rates and
increased rates of on-time graduation, especially when courses
are taken in later grades.
16
The impact of CTE may vary for different student popula-
tions. A causal study of students at CTE-focused high schools
in Connecticut found that male CTE students were 10 percent-
age points more likely to graduate from high school, had higher
attendance and 10th-grade test scores, and had 32 percent
higher quarterly earnings than non-CTE students at age 23, but
the same benets did not accrue for females.
17
Another study
using student data from Massachusetts uncovered dierences in
academic outcomes by gender as well as large variations across
elds such as IT, healthcare, and construction.
18
Meanwhile,
evidence on the impact of CTE on college enrollment is mixed,
but a study using transcripts from the High School Longitudinal
Study of 2009 found that participation in CTE programs was not
related to a student’s probability of enrolling in college.
19
at is,
CTE can be a dierent path to college—not one that precludes
or discourages attendance.
Importantly, the structure and amount of CTE coursework
that a student engages with seem to have an impact on outcomes:
more advanced, sequenced coursework is associated with better
results. A comprehensive longitudinal study that followed three
cohorts of more than 100,000 students in Arkansas from eighth
grade to college and into the workforce found that students who
chose to concentrate in CTE (by earning three or more credits in a
program of study) were 21 percentage points more likely to gradu-
ate from high school than their peers who did not concentrate.
e study found that additional CTE coursework translated to a
higher probability of graduation, community college enrollment,
and employment and earnings.
20
ese ndings are supported by
a study nding that taking advanced CTE courses is associated
with a 2 percent wage premium for each additional year of study,
while introductory CTE courses created little wage gains.
21
Some
of the strongest evidence supporting CTE has been conducted
at career academies,
22
which oer highly structured, sequenced,
themed CTE learning, as we discuss below.
The Development of the Career
Pathways Movement
While the term career pathways has been floating around for
decades, it took on a more specic meaning with the launch of
the Pathways to Prosperity Network
23
in 2012. e Pathways Net-
work, cofounded by Jobs for the Future and the Harvard Gradu-
ate School of Education, was established in response to a 2011
report
24
that one of us (Schwartz) coauthored, which argued that
we should create multiple pathways alongside the four-year col-
lege path for students after high school. e Pathways Network
was deliberately designed to build generally on the CTE system,
and specifically on two well-established prior initiatives: (1)
career academies, best represented by the work of NAF, formerly
the National Academy Foundation; and (2) early college high
schools, a structured form of dual enrollment that helps students
get started on college while in high school.
Career academies are typically small schools within a larger
comprehensive high school, using career-focused coursework and
aligned work-based learning opportunities to engage students and
keep them motivated to stay in school. NAF, for example, supports
academies in ve industry sectors: engineering, nance, health
sciences, hospitality and tourism, and information technology.
NAF began with one Academy of Finance in 1982. Today, there are
over 600 NAF academies in 35 states and territories serving 112,000
students. Beyond NAF, the National Career Academy Coalition
We must build stronger
pathways from high school
to postsecondary education
and training and then to
careers for every student.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 7
estimates that there are career academies operating in 7,000 high
schools serving over one million students.
25
ey are designed to
be college as well as career focused, but career academies typically
have little or no direct connection to postsecondary institutions.
By contrast, early college high schools (ECHSs), an innova-
tion largely sponsored initially by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation in the early 2000s, are explicitly connected to post-
secondary institutions—mostly community colleges—but only
occasionally designed with a career focus. Two states in particular,
North Carolina and Texas, led the development of the early col-
lege movement.
26
With initial Gates funding, both states created
new statewide organizations—North Carolina New Schools and
Educate Texas—to develop and spread the ECHS model. ese
schools were deliberately designed to create a low-cost, acceler-
ated pathway to a rst postsecondary credential for students from
groups historically underrepresented in higher education. In a
relatively few years, North Carolina launched 130 ECHSs, Texas,
170. In Texas’s Pharr-San Juan-Alamo district, all high schools are
ECHSs and students can graduate with a high school diploma and
an associate degree, 60 hours of college credit, or an occupational
certicate from South Texas College.
27
e best-known national network of ECHSs, and one of the
best examples of career-focused early college, is P-TECH: Path-
ways in Technology Early College High School. is model was
developed by IBM and rst implemented in a single Brooklyn
high school in 2011. P-TECHs require collaboration among a
high school, a community college, and one or more employers.
Students enroll in the school for a six-year period, beginning in
ninth grade and culminating in an associate degree in a tech eld
leading to a job in a partner company or transfer to a four-year
college or university. As of 2021, there were nearly 250 P-TECHs
serving over 150,000 students in 12 states and 28 countries.
28
It is difficult to estimate the number of early college high
schools in the nation, especially because some states, including
Massachusetts, have developed an ECHS model that focuses
on programs within comprehensive high schools rather than a
whole-school model. A conservative guess, based on our knowl-
edge of the eld, would place the number of ECHSs around at least
1,000, in addition to the P-TECHs.
The Pathways to Prosperity Network, as mentioned above,
was designed to combine the strengths of career academies and
early college high schools. e goal was to help member states and
regions develop career pathways systems that combine academic
and career learning, span grades 9–14, and ultimately help young
people get launched in high-growth, high-demand elds where
they could expect to earn a living wage and have opportunities for
upward mobility and further education. As with career academies
and ECHSs, career pathways programs have been deliberately
designed to serve students from groups that have historically been
underrepresented in higher education and focused on career
elds with the greatest opportunities for growth and mobility.
Over the past 12 years, the Pathways Network has supported the
development of career pathways systems in over a dozen states,
metropolitan regions, and big cities. Among the states that have
been with the Pathways Network the longest and have made the
most progress are Arizona, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, Tennes-
see, and Texas. Of these, Delaware is furthest along in scaling career
pathways into a mainstream system. (It’s easy to dismiss Delaware’s
success because of its small size, but we argue that the core design
principles of Delaware Pathways are relevant for all states.)
Delaware Pathways has been the subject of three case stud-
ies since 2019.
29
All have commented on the thoughtful way the
program has been designed and developed. Delaware Pathways
is the product of a genuine public/private partnership, with
strong political leadership from two successive governors, excel-
lent executive leadership from the former state CTE director,
and strong support from private and nonprot sector leaders. A
cross-sector steering committee developed a strategic plan by
mapping the regional labor market, identifying 12 high-demand
and high-growth industry sectors with good middle- and high-
skill jobs, and then slowly developing and making available to
the high schools course materials for 24 CTE programs of study,
all aligned with programs at Delaware Tech, the state’s single
statewide multicampus community college. Beginning with 27
students from one high school enrolled in an advanced manufac-
turing program at Delaware Tech in 2014, Delaware Pathways now
serves over 50 percent of the high school students in the state, with
over 20 percent of students earning some type of postsecondary
credit before graduation.
e career pathways movement has now spread well beyond
the members of the Pathways Network. Several other national
organizations in addition to Jobs for the Future are active in this
space, including Education Strategy Group, Advance CTE, New
America, and ExcelinEd, as well as state-based organizations
like the Linked Learning Alliance in California and CareerWise
in Colorado. ere is also
a consortium of national
funders that is fueling the
further development and
expansion of the career
pathways movement.
The Role of Community
Colleges in Career
Pathways
As the career pathways
movement has evolved,
community colleges
have emerged as central
institutional players, sit-
ting between high schools on the one side and employers on the
other. In our experience, employers have generally been more
willing to engage with community colleges than with high schools,
though building such partnerships is not without challenges.
30
Many American employers, unlike their counterparts in youth
apprenticeship countries like Germany and Switzerland, have
a dicult time imagining that 16-year-olds can be productive
contributors to their bottom line. Consequently, they are more
willing to invest in training older students who are closer to the
point of employment.
Community colleges at their best are the nimblest, most mar-
ket-oriented institutions in our postsecondary education system.
However, they face many challenges that impede their ability to
enable the career pathways movement to scale. First, community
colleges are multipurpose institutions serving a broad range of
constituencies, not just career-focused 18-year-olds. In many
8 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
states, community colleges were created primarily to provide
students a low-cost way of starting a four-year degree. As a result,
many are seen and funded as transfer institutions, with little or
no support for workforce development. Although community
colleges serve the highest-need students in our postsecondary
system, including half of Hispanic undergraduate students and
40 percent of African American undergraduate students,
31
they
are the least well-funded colleges in our system. A 2020 estimate
found the funding gap between community colleges and their
four-year public counterparts to be $78 billion, which translates
to an $8,800 per student revenue dierence.
32
Community colleges have been the beneficiary of the huge
growth in dual enrollment in the last few years—from 800,000 stu-
dents in 2009 to 1.5 million today. ere are now 1 million students
under the age of 18 enrolled in community colleges, accounting
for 17 percent of community college enrollments in credit-bearing
courses. is continuing growth—a 16 percent increase just from
2021 to 2023—has enabled community college enrollments to sta-
bilize after a precipitous decline during COVID-19.
33
Perhaps the most striking national example of the growth of
the college-in-high-school movement is at Dallas College, where
nearly 30,000 dual credit high school students are enrolled. ese
students constitute nearly a third of the college’s 100,000 credit-
seeking students. A substantial number of these students are in
ECHSs or P-TECHs. Collectively, in 2022, these students were
awarded 2,100 credentials and earned over 235,000 credit hours.
34
e growth in dual enrollment presents an opportunity for
community colleges that is linked to a larger challenge: to ensure
that all course-taking leads to credentials with value in the labor
market, whether or not the student decides eventually to pur-
sue a four-year degree. is will require high schools and their
community college partners to strategically design dual enroll-
ment programs to ensure courses are connected to academic
and career majors while discouraging random course-taking.
Fortunately, the major reform initiative in community colleges
over the last decade has been the adoption of guided pathways, a
strategy to channel student course-taking into pathways leading
to academic or career majors that are aligned with in-demand
regional industries.
35
What do community colleges look like when they operate on
the premise that any student who walks in the door, including dual
enrollment high school students, is there for economic opportu-
nity and advancement? To answer this question, Schwartz and
our former colleague Rachel Lipson recently coedited a volume of
case studies proling the work of ve community colleges: Lorain
County Community College in Ohio, Mississippi Gulf Coast Com-
munity College, Northern Virginia Community College, Pima
Community College in Arizona, and San Jacinto College in Texas.
America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges
Can Drive Shared Prosperity documents the internal policies and
practices that enable these colleges to focus so intently on the
goal of providing economic opportunity and mobility for their
students. Most importantly, these colleges realize that to deliver
on that goal, they must position themselves as go-to players in
their regional workforce and economic development ecosystems
to align their programs with current labor market needs and help
shape the future regional economy. ese colleges illustrate the
comparative advantage that good community colleges have over
high schools in bringing industry leaders to the table and provid-
ing meaningful work experiences for students.
The Evidence on Career Pathways
e career pathways movement is little more than a decade old,
so there is scant evidence on the most important metric: the labor
market outcomes of graduates. However, we do have credible
evidence on the two foundational initiatives on which the career
pathways movement has been built: career academies and early
college high schools.
Thirty years ago, a multisite, eight-year study compared
1,400 career academy students with a similar number of care-
fully matched nonacademy students. e researchers found that
academy graduates earned about $2,000 more annually than their
counterparts. e eects were even more signicant for Black
males, who earned $30,000 more than their counterparts over
the eight years. Overall, there was no dierence between the two
groups in high school graduation rates or postsecondary attain-
ment rates. Roughly 90 percent of both groups graduated high
school and half earned a postsecondary credential.
36
Another rigorous study of career academies in North Carolina
found that enrollment increased the likelihood of high school grad-
uation and college enrollment by about 8 percentage points, but
only for male students.
37
A multiyear evaluation of Linked Learn-
ing—a California-based academies model—found that participants
were 2 percentage points less likely to drop out of high school and 3
percentage points more likely to graduate high school.
38
Since 2010, an outside evaluation rm has tracked the impact
of participation in NAF academies on graduation rates. e most
recent four-year study found that students in NAF academies had
a 6 percent higher high school graduation rate than nonacademy
students. For at-risk students, the NAF academy eect was even
stronger, a 10 percent dierence.
39
With regard to early college high schools, there have been two
substantial studies monitoring impact. e rst was a lottery-
based, random assignment study of students enrolled in 10 ECHSs
from 2005 to 2011. Researchers found that ECHS students were
signicantly more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in
college, and attain a postsecondary degree than comparison
group students. e postsecondary attainment dierence was
stark: 22 percent (mostly associate degrees) versus 2 percent.
And 20 percent of those degrees were attained by students while
in high school. Among ECHS students, there were no signicant
High-quality CTE can lead
to higher rates of student
engagement, on-time high
school graduation, and
workforce earnings.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 9
dierences by subgroup—all students experienced the benets
of accessing college while in high school.
40
e second study, also a lottery-based, randomized control
study, followed students from 19 North Carolina ECHSs for 15
years. e results of this substantial study were striking:
• 49 percent of ECHS students attained a postsecondary creden-
tial, compared with 36 percent of control group students
• 37 percent of ECHS students earned an associate degree, com-
pared with 14 percent of control group students
• 28 percent of ECHS students earned a bachelor’s degree, com-
pared with 25 percent of control group students
ECHS students also earned their degrees more rapidly than
non-ECHS students. ECHS associate degree holders saved two
years, while ECHS bachelor’s degree holders saved six months.
41
Massachusetts is a relative newcomer to the early college high
school network, having launched its rst ECHS programs in 2017.
e state now has more than 6,000 ECHS students enrolled in 48
programs, involving 58 high schools and 27 postsecondary educa-
tion partners (mostly community colleges).
42
e Massachusetts
ECHS program model is career-focused, with partners targeting
one or more career areas in their application for state funding.
Early results are promising, particularly with regard to college
enrollment immediately after high school:
• 69 percent of all ECHS students enrolled in college, compared
with 54 percent of matched peers
• 61 percent of economically disadvantaged ECHS students
enrolled in college, compared with 45 percent of matched
peers
• 63 percent of Black and Hispanic ECHS students enrolled in
college, compared with 48 percent of matched peers
Results are also promising for college persistence, with 60 per-
cent of ECHS students returning for their second year, compared
with 44 percent of matched students.
43
Career-Connected Learning at Scale
Before turning to broader implications for policy and practice,
we’d like to briey describe strategies that two jurisdictions are
pursuing to scale career pathways with quality: Career Connect
Washington and FutureReadyNYC.
Career Connect Washington
Career Connect Washington’s comprehensive approach oers a
powerful strategy. e Washington story began with a 2017 alarm-
bell report from the state’s Business Roundtable highlighting a
projected 30 percent gap between the number of jobs requir-
ing some postsecondary education or other credential and the
number of young adults with such a credential.
44
at same year,
Governor Jay Inslee announced the creation of a task force co-led
by the Microsoft president and the chair of the state’s Workforce
Training and Education Coordinating Board to address this prob-
lem. e task force’s report
45
led to the design and development of
Career Connect Washington (CCW). e program was launched
in 2019, supported by legislative authorization and funding.
At the heart of the CCW plan is a three-stage framework for
career development: Career Explore, Career Prep, and Career
Launch. e rst two stages are designed to ensure that by the
time students arrive at their senior year of high school, they have
had systematic year-by-year exposure to the world of work and
careers, career-aligned classroom instruction, and hands-on work
experience through an internship or pre-apprenticeship program.
Career Launch is really the focus of CCW, requiring meaningful,
high-quality job experience, aligned classroom learning, and
an industry certication
or other credential with
value in the labor market.
ese criteria are dened
with an admirable degree
of specificity. Although
Career Launch is aimed
primarily at graduating
seniors, it is also designed
to serve young adults up
to age 29, especially since
the expansion of Regis-
tered Apprenticeships*
is a key element in the
Career Launch program.
One of the distinguishing features of CCW is that organized labor
has been a core partner from the inception of the program.
What is most striking about CCW is its strategy for getting to
the goal of 60 percent of the class of 2030 completing a Career
Launch program by age 29. At the state level, there is an extraor-
dinary coalition of about a dozen state agencies, business and
industry organizations, labor organizations, and equity-focused
nonprots. e initiative is led by a small team with a dotted line
to the governor’s oce but carried out primarily through a highly
decentralized regional structure supported by two types of com-
petitive grants.
Each region has a funded intermediary organization with
convening and coordinating responsibilities. Cutting across the
regions is a network of funded “program builders,” organizations
responsible for expanding existing Career Explore, Prep, and
Launch programs or creating new ones. Program builders can
be industry sector organizations, trade unions, workforce inter-
mediaries, community colleges, or education service districts.
CCW recently funded employer associations in 10 key industries
to expand employer participation and ensure that Career Launch
programs meet industry needs. is is not an act of charity by
employers; it is in their economic best interest to ensure that they
have a productive workforce.
There is also an extraordinary student-facing online direc-
tory
†
of career-connected learning programs with links to sup-
port services that can help remove barriers to participation.
Across all three stages, CCW is carefully tracking completion by
subgroups within regions and industries. ese disaggregated
reporting requirements typify the very strong equity current that
runs through the entire initiative. As of summer 2023, there are
over 19,000 enrollees in Career Launch programs, a 30 percent
enrollment increase since 2019. With nearly 6,000 Career Launch
completers already, CCW is o to an impressive start.
46
*Registered Apprenticeships are industry driven and approved by either a state agency
or the US Department of Labor. To learn more, visit go.aft.org/s2i.
†
To explore this directory, visit careerconnectwa.org.
10 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
FutureReadyNYC
New York City, with
approximately 915,000
public school students,
47
is by far the largest school
district in the nation. In
2019, the mayor’s office
published CareerReady
NYC, a landmark report
48
two years in the making,
produced by a working
group of representatives
from the New York City
Public Schools, the City
University of New York, the Department of Youth and Community
Development, the mayor’s oce, employer organizations, and a
variety of youth-serving organizations across the city. e report
laid out a compelling vision of a coherent, coordinated K–16 sys-
tem that would provide developmentally appropriate experiences
across the age span designed to prepare all young people for col-
lege and career success. Unfortunately, this report sat on the shelf,
without political or educational leadership to act on the vision.
Fast forward to 2022, when a new mayor, Eric Adams, and
a new schools chancellor, David Banks, declared career path-
ways a major priority of the new administration. Chancellor
Banks established a new Oce of Student Pathways with the
goal of ensuring “that each student graduates on a pathway to a
rewarding career and long-term economic security, equipped to
be a positive force for change.”
49
is oce created the Student
Pathways initiative, with the FutureReadyNYC program as a
cornerstone to meet that goal.
FutureReadyNYC has ve components, with some further
along in implementation than others. All participating students
currently receive (1) career-connected instruction ranging from
broad awareness to specic career preparation, (2) early col-
lege credits and credentials that demonstrate skills employers
value, and (3) work-based learning (including workshops and
paid internships). e last two components are being built out:
(4) personalized college and career advising and (5) nancial
literacy education.
50
(e latter is especially important for stu-
dents to be able to make an informed cost-benet analysis of
their postsecondary education and training options.) To ensure
students’ career-focused learning is meaningful and leads to
practical job skills, students choose a pathway in one of four
high-wage, high-demand sectors: technology, business, health-
care, or education.
What’s most striking about this strategy is that FutureReady-
NYC is embedded in a comprehensive citywide initiative coordi-
nated out of the mayor’s oce that includes the other two major
youth-serving organizations in the city, the City University of
New York and the Department of Youth and Community Devel-
opment (an agency that connects 100,000 city youths to jobs
through its Summer Youth Employment Program). In Decem-
ber 2023, the mayor’s oce released Pathways to an Inclusive
Economy: An Action Plan for Young Adult Career Success. is
65-page plan provides a detailed road map to accomplish the
following ve goals:
1. Expand career-connected learning at every stage of a young
person’s journey….
2. [Provide] early interventions to ensure youth and young
adults remain connected to career pathways….
3. Re-engage young people who are now out of school and
out of work….
4. Improve data collection and analytics to support stron-
ger transitions, promote continuous improvement, and …
address … disparities….
5. Implement a coherent and comprehensive strategy to
improve and expand employer engagement.
51
With this action plan, city leaders have declared their inten-
tion to make career-connected learning a new mainstream system
designed to put all city youth on a path to career success.
Implications for Policy and Practice
What are the implications of our ndings for policy and practice?
We oer six takeaways from this summary of CTE and career path-
ways and from our broader research and experience in the eld:
1. CTE is the critical building block for spreading career-con-
nected learning to most high school students. As we docu-
ment, the evidence shows improved academic outcomes for
students, especially for those students who take at least three
courses in a career eld and participate in an aligned work-
based learning experience.
2. As the Delaware, Washington state, and New York City exam-
ples illustrate, political leadership is critical for building the
cross-sector coalition needed to develop and support a new
college and career readiness system that benets all students.
3. Career readiness needs to begin at least as early as the middle
grades, including through career exploration, and extend
across the secondary/postsecondary divide. Dual enroll-
ment, especially through the career-focused early college high
school model, is the best vehicle for helping students attain a
rst postsecondary credential with value in the regional labor
market.
4. Community colleges are better positioned than high schools to
engage industry leaders in the co-creation of programs leading
to meaningful career opportunities, a crucial element in suc-
cessful programs. One of the best ways to engage employers is
through sector-based organizations. Sector associations can
help employers understand that engaging with young people
helps them build a reliable talent pipeline at a time when they
are struggling to acquire talent.
5. Work-based learning, especially paid internships or aligned
summer jobs, is a critical element of career-connected learn-
ing. Essential professional skills (teamwork, communication,
problem-solving) are best learned in well-structured work set-
tings, not in classrooms. Experiential learning writ large should
be a core element embedded in all educational programs from
kindergarten through college.
We also have suggestions for two key areas needing more inno-
vation and investment:
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 11
1. Career counseling in schools and career services in colleges, as
currently structured, are woefully inadequate for a fully imple-
mented career-connected education system. is is an area
crying out for experimentation. In Switzerland, this function
is seen as so important that it is carried out not through the
schools but through a network of community-based informa-
tion and counseling centers staed by professionals and acces-
sible to all parents and students.
52
We oer this as an example
of the kind of fresh thinking this issue requires.
2. The development of strong, well-staffed, employer-facing
intermediary organizations that operate between schools and
companies to scaold and support both sets of institutions as
they scale up quality work-based learning opportunities is cru-
cial. Intermediaries can be especially important in enabling
small and medium-size companies to participate, sometimes
serving as employers of record to handle payroll and other
logistical matters that are seen as barriers to participation.
Lastly, we oer four specic state policy recommendations to
facilitate career-connected education at scale:
1. In some states, seat-time requirements are real or perceived
barriers to the expansion of internships and other forms of
extended work-based learning. States must make it clear to
districts and schools that they have the exibility to provide
academic credit, as well as compensation, to students for
structured and documented learning that occurs outside the
classroom, whether during the school day, after school, or in
the summer. Learning should be the focus, with schools having
sucient exibility over time and resource use to maximize
learning opportunities for all students.
2. If community colleges are expected to become central play-
ers in a career-connected learning system, legislatures need to
fund them appropriately and hold them more accountable for
student outcomes. is means funding systems that acknowl-
edge that career programs are more expensive to operate than
academic programs, and using accountability systems that
focus less on enrollment and program completion and more
on labor market outcomes. Texas just passed legislation that
trades a substantial increase in state funding, with special sup-
port for expansion of dual enrollment and for adults seeking
short-term credentials, for improved labor market outcomes.
53
We think this is a model that other states should study.
3. Employers play a crucial role in providing work-based learning
opportunities for students. erefore, we believe it is worth explor-
ing incentives for employers who agree to provide high-quality,
structured internships or other forms of substantial work-based
learning, especially for students unlikely to nd such opportuni-
ties on their own. ere are some states, notably South Carolina,
that provide tax credits for employers that participate in the state
apprenticeship program. We think this is a policy other states
should examine, especially for programs designed to increase
the ow of well-prepared workers into high-demand elds.
4. States must improve coordination between education,
labor, and economic development departments to facilitate
stronger alignment between schools and regional economic
growth strategies. Improving economic outcomes for students
requires building programs of study that lead to high-demand,
high-paying careers. In Massachusetts, the governor created a
Workforce Skills Cabinet, which brings together the executive
oces of Education, Labor and Workforce Development, and
Housing and Economic Development to oversee a common
economic growth strategy. To date, this cabinet has issued
several grants to CTE schools and intermediaries to support
programs in strategic industries, like advanced manufacturing
and cybersecurity. Cross-agency coordination is also crucial
for states to develop longitudinal data systems to track student
academic and economic outcomes from K–12 into the work-
force, enabling policymakers and practitioners to understand
which programs work, and for which students.
Our recommendations have focused mainly on states, but
we close with a word about the federal role in advancing career-
connected education. Today’s federal policy environment is strik-
ing: there is an unprecedented focus on education and workforce
development that extends well beyond the US Department of Edu-
cation. In 2022, the Departments of Education, Labor, and Com-
merce joined together to launch an extraordinary cross-agency
initiative, “Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success.” e initiative
aligns closely with the pathways vision we outline in this article,
including by expanding access to career-focused dual enrollment,
work-based learning, credentials of value alongside the four-year
degree, and sucient exposure to the world of work to enable
informed student choice of pathways beyond high school.
Furthermore, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and
the CHIPS and Science Act provide unprecedented resources for
workforce development, with a focus on training Americans for
high-paying, high-demand jobs that do not require a four-year
degree.
54
ese new federal investments underline the broader
economic importance of bringing career-connected learning to
scale. e nation needs more young people with the skills that the
best CTE and career pathways programs are designed to produce.
By expanding and strengthening CTE and career pathways,
we can address the technical skills gaps that impede economic
growth while putting millions of young people from low-income
families on a path to the middle class. A career-connected educa-
tion system—based in evidence—can improve outcomes for all
young people. Now is the time for systemic transformation; we
have the knowledge and tools to do so. ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/schwartz_mckittrick.
We can address the technical
skills gaps that impede
economic growth while putting
millions of young people
from low-income families on
a path to the middle class.
12 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Signature Features of
High-Quality Career and
Technical Education
By James R. Stone III
A
lthough the United States has been attempting to address
education for the workplace for over 150 years, it still has
no national system linking education and the workforce.
1
Instead, it has a nonsystem built upon a series of ad hoc
eorts in which the 50 states individually make and carry out most
education policy, with some federal policies providing direction
or oversight. Within each state, school districts often modify and
interpret state policy. As a result, state and local eorts have shaped
career and technical education (CTE) policy and programming in
many ways. In a very real sense, context matters.
Because of our nonsystem, CTE has evolved into a broad
concept with a variety of working denitions. Even key terms like
CTE concentrator (which relates to how many courses in a specic
career pathway a student takes) and work-based learning have
multiple denitions used by dierent states, with none used by
a majority of states.
2
A recent cost analysis of standalone CTE high schools in two
states showed the impact of these dierences among states in
definitions—and thus in their program implementation. The
researchers found one state’s approach offered clear positive
returns to its investment; the other produced mostly “non-
negative” smaller returns.
3
Clearly, each state’s denitions and
resulting real-world context matter.* With shared denitions—
ideally embedded in a national system connecting education and
work—lagging, states would have better odds of learning from
higher-functioning states.
Given the variability among states and programs, the best
approach a district or school might pursue to create a high-quality
CTE program is to focus on the essential skills that students need
to develop and the signature features common to any high-quality
CTE program regardless of context, label, or description. In this
article, I summarize the research on both these skills and features.
James R. Stone III has held faculty positions at the University of Wiscon-
sin–Madison, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Louisville.
He served as the director of the National Research Center for Career and
Technical Education for nearly two decades and has authored or coau-
thored more than 100 reports of research, journal articles, or books. His
most recent book, coauthored with Morgan V. Lewis, is College and Career
Ready in the 21st Century: Making High School Matter.
*For details on context effects, see “From Margins to Mainstream: Bringing Career-
Connected Learning to Scale” on page 4.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES YANG
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 13
Essential Skills
Among researchers and policymakers, there is general agreement
that a high-quality CTE program must address three types of skills
in context: academic, technical, and employability (although dif-
ferent terms may be used to describe each).
4
To cultivate these
skills, the focus will necessarily be adapted to the stage of student
development: career awareness, career exploration, career prepa-
ration, and career training.
5
For academic skills, it is obvious that dierent occupations
require dierent levels of reading ability and knowledge of math-
ematics and science—often requiring a level of skill that extends
beyond or is dierent than what is necessary for successful high
school completion. For example, strong oral skills are considered
paramount for students pursuing business careers.
6
Potential
engineers and workers in advanced manufacturing will most
certainly require dierent and higher levels of math skills (e.g., sta-
tistics) than those pursuing careers in the arts or culinary industry.
More generally, research has found that while the math needed
to be “career ready” is typically found in college-prep courses, it
tends to have more advanced content than what is necessary to
be considered “college ready.”
7
Despite the recognized variability across careers, and in
keeping with our nonsystem, the eld of CTE still does not have
a baseline or benchmark that denes what academics all future
workforce participants will need to master to be career ready.
Although the World Economic Forum summarized over 200
studies and identied how students apply core skills to everyday
tasks,
8
far more needs to be done to support how academics are
embedded in CTE programs.
Regarding technical skills, the situation is clearer. e most
powerful signal of an individual’s career readiness is earning an
industry-recognized credential (IRC). Acquiring skills unique to
dierent work environments enhances employability because
IRCs signal to the labor market that an individual possesses a
specic set of technical skills desired by an employer. A robust
system of career pathways would nest IRCs in specific CTE
programs, providing a series of stackable credentials that give
individuals a variety of pathways to future success. ese cre-
dentials should signal an individual’s developmental growth,
which begins with general work readiness credentials (e.g., the
ACT WorkKeys National Career Readiness Certificate or the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s 10-hour safety
certication), leads to entry-level skills, and provides a specic
path to more advanced skills (such as becoming a certied nurse
aide by the end of high school and then a licensed practical nurse
after another year of training).
Beyond academic and technical abilities, employers look for
employability traits, behaviors, or skills that are necessary for get-
ting, keeping, and doing well on a job. From the simple ability to
communicate with a customer or supervisor to navigating rela-
tionship challenges in the workplace, these are often selected as
the most desirable skills in employer surveys.
9
Research indicates
that college typically does not build these skills. One study found
that recent college graduates lack basic workplace prociencies
such as adaptability, communication skills, and the ability to solve
complex problems.
10
Character traits are also critical. Noncognitive skills such as
persistence, dependability, self-control, curiosity, conscientious-
ness, grit, and self-condence are more important than sheer
brainpower to achieving success in the workplace as well as in col-
lege.
11
As with academic skills, the World Economic Forum’s litera-
ture review identied 10 employability competencies needed to
equip students to succeed in the emergent digital economy,
12
but
CTE instructors will need support to embed these skills in their
programs. Fortunately, there is some evidence that work-based
learning and out-of-classroom experiences through career and
technical student organizations may oer better venues for this
aspect of youth development than classroom-based learning.
13
How best to engage students in acquiring these academic,
technical, and employability skills is the primary challenge of
developing high-quality CTE programs. Implementing the fol-
lowing signature features will help.
Signature Features
e signature features of high-quality CTE programs described
below are a distillation of research drawn from many sources,
14
including lessons learned from several advanced industrial nations.
ey emphasize the need for CTE programs to address elements
of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment within a career pathway
framework that begins no later than middle school.
Rigorous CTE Curriculum
A high-quality curriculum
begins with a context that oers
both meaning for the learner
and an appropriate locus for the
application of academic, tech-
nical, and employability skills.
Work provides a social context
15
and experiences that will engage
the learner.
16
To maximize learn-
ing in the classroom and in
work-based settings, the curriculum needs to be authentic, which
is marked by the following four elements.
1. The curriculum is derived from industry and reects qualica-
tions for future employment.
e curriculum for any given CTE program ought to begin with a
career focus and the knowledge and skills needed for successful
entry into and advancement within that career pathway. It must be
driven by industry-recognized standards. For many CTE programs,
identifying these standards remains a challenge. Unlike many of our
economic competitors, US labor markets lack a national framework
for education, credentials, or qualications for most occupations.
The curriculum for any given
CTE program must be driven by
industry-recognized standards.
14 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Consequently, the market proliferates with perhaps as many as one
million education and industry credentials.
17
is includes degrees
but also badges, certicates, licenses, apprenticeships, and myriad
industry certications. Many are narrowly focused, and many are
proprietary. Further, many career elds have few if any nationally
recognized credentials. (By contrast, Germany has 350 apprentice-
able occupations in which more than 60 percent of high school
graduates participate.
18
) e best strategy for addressing this chal-
lenge is for educators to work closely with regional leaders from
in-demand industries or occupations.
Despite the limitations of our nonsystem, there are regional
and national credentials that can be built into a high-quality CTE
curriculum and stacked over time as students move from high
school to the workplace and to further education at a postsecond-
ary institution or an employer-based training program. A career
pathway with such stackable credentials oers options for the
many youth who will not move directly from high school to col-
lege to the workplace.
2. The curriculum is delivered
through activities that address
authentic problems.
In a robust technical course,
authentic problems of practice
abound, requiring the appli-
cation of both academic and
technical knowledge to resolve.
Students need to struggle with
authentic, real-world problems
and “gure it out” to encourage
deeper learning and to develop
critical employability skills
such as persistence. An authentic, problem-focused curriculum
that integrates related academics must begin with the technical
requirements, not the academic. Other academic curricula may
use context-based approaches that are often framed as applied
learning. Such approaches may make academics more interest-
ing, but absent authenticity of a real work problem to solve, they
contribute little to a student’s career development.
3. The curriculum continually enhances related mathematics, lit-
eracy, and science concepts.
Academic teachers and courses are responsible for educating
students in academic content. However, CTE courses can show
the connections to academic learning and how the workplace
uses academic concepts, reinforcing what students learn in other
classes. is also helps ensure that students graduate from high
school prepared to continue learning in a postsecondary insti-
tution. CTE programs should integrate multiple strategies for
building students’ mastery of math, science, technical reading
and writing, and communication. e National Research Center
for Career and Technical Education (NRCCTE) developed and
experimentally tested an approach to integrating academics into
CTE courses that showed strong positive outcomes in mathemat-
ics and literacy (for more, see the box below).
19
4. The curriculum seamlessly feeds into postsecondary CTE pro-
grams because it is guided by an industry advisory committee.
A structural mechanism to facilitate student transitions, stackable
credentials, dual high school and college credit, and other link-
ing elements is for secondary and postsecondary CTE programs
to share a joint industry advisory committee. e benet is that a
single pathway advisory committee that speaks to secondary and
postsecondary program leaders helps ensure a more unied career
pathway to better meet the needs of students and employers.
20
rough such advisory committees, educators and employers
have one conversation and therefore engage in complementary
work. Central to this conversation is describing the needs of indus-
try and facilitating the design of a more tightly integrated curricu-
lum derived from a common set of industry standards and advice.
e result should be a smooth pathway from high school into the
postsecondary technical curriculum and into employment.
Educators with Technical and Pedagogic Skills
Although it should be obvious that well-prepared teachers are
important to the delivery of high-quality CTE programs, develop-
ing CTE teachers can be a challenge. Many CTE teachers come
directly from industry with great technical expertise but little or
no traditional teacher preparation.
High-quality CTE programs provide three pedagogic venues for
CTE teachers: the classroom/lab, work-based learning, and career
and technical student organizations.
21
As shown in the table on
page 15, each oers opportunities for CTE teachers to eectively
enhance students’ academic, technical, and employability skills.
1. The classroom/lab integrates academic content and connects to
work-based learning.
Relatively few CTE teachers enter the classroom with a traditional
teacher education background, especially those who teach in
the skilled trades. One state estimate suggests that as many as
95 percent of CTE teachers begin as experts in their trade and
Videos on Integrating Academics
After developing and testing its approach to integrating academic
content in CTE, the National Research Center for Career and Technical
Education produced a series of free videos to support educators.
• “Maximizing the Academics in CTE: The NRCCTE Curriculum
Integration Studies” provides an overview of the approach and
the research ndings: go.aft.org/xgw.
• “An Introduction to the Math-in-CTE Curriculum Integration
Model” includes interviews with educators in Arlington, Virginia;
Detroit, Michigan; and Eugene, Oregon, explaining how they
transformed their teaching: go.aft.org/a7e.
• “Math-in-CTE at the Arlington Career Center, Arlington Public
Schools,” offers more in-depth commentary and examples from
educators in Virginia: go.aft.org/ytw.
• “Math-in-CTE Sample Lesson: Information Technology” shows
a class at the Arlington Career Center using Scratch (a coding
language for youth) and learning how to plot points on a coordi-
nate plane: go.aft.org/6ew.
• “Math-in-CTE Sample Lesson: Cashiering” shows a class at
Detroit’s Breithaupt Career and Technical Center using basic math
to handle guest checks in a restaurant: go.aft.org/woy.
–J. R. S.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 15
Pedagogical Setting Integrated Academic Skills Technical Skills Employability/Work-
Readiness Skills
Classroom, Lab, or Shop
Address math, English language
arts, or science in the context of
the industry skill.
Develop and practice industry
standards-based skills.
Work in teams on in-class
assignments.
Work-Based Learning
Reinforce relevant skills in an
applied setting.
Apply skills in an authentic con-
text working with occupational
incumbents.
Engage in occupational
socialization as part of a
work group.
Career and Technical Student
Organization
Participate in leadership devel-
opment activities.
Test skills in a competitive
environment.
Interact with industry
professionals.
later pursue a career in teaching.
22
Other estimates are lower
but as high as 75 percent in the 30 states surveyed.
23
Not only are
CTE teachers more likely to enter the profession sans traditional
teacher education, but there is also evidence that their leaving
rate is considerably higher than traditionally prepared teachers.
24
To address these challenges, the NRCCTE developed an
intensive, evidence-based approach to help new CTE teachers
master essential teaching skills and reduce their leaving rate.
25
Called “Teaching to Lead,” it focuses on four traditional teacher
skills adapted for the CTE classroom, beginning with classroom
management and moving on to instructional planning, instruc-
tional strategies, and student assessment. is iterative approach
is designed to span a new teacher’s first year, starting with a
10-day summer institute before school begins and continuing
with an intensive coaching component during the school year
and another institute the following summer. An evaluation found
that teachers improved their classroom management and student
engagement.
26
(To implement this professional development, see
sreb.org/cte-teacher-preparation.)
In addition to the instruction they provide, high-quality CTE
teachers are necessary for the authentic learning contexts they
facilitate. Most important are work-based learning and career and
technical student organizations.
2. Work-based learning is authentic.
Work-based learning (WBL)—and connecting work- and school-
based learning—can be done in many ways, such as applying
academic and/or technical skills learned in school to tasks encoun-
tered on the job, showing the relevance of school to the real world,
or demonstrating mastery of skills to earn a certication.
27
Regard-
less, authentic WBL must be a goal of high-quality CTE program
design.
28
e National Governors Association,
29
in its argument for
more authenticity in WBL, identied four key characteristics:
• a partnership agreement that details the expectations for each
partner: the employer, the participant, and the school;
• a work experience where the student is engaged in real or
authentic work activities supervised and mentored by an
industry professional;
• a structured learning component that intentionally connects
theory with practice and workplace skills; and
• a third-party assessment and recognition of skills (such as an
industry-recognized credential), ensuring that the student is
progressing in a career pathway.
Many researchers have considered European models of WBL
for lessons that might be applied to US educational systems. Colo-
rado implemented a Swiss-style apprenticeship program, a more
intense form of WBL than most CTE students experience in the
United States.
30
Its essential features include
• engaging in meaningful work experience, such as earning a wage
while receiving hands-on work experience;
• earning a nationally recognized industry certication;
• being a true team member doing meaningful work;
• being part of a professional network; and
• having opportunities to earn college credit without incurring
debt.
Authentic WBL benets are many, including students gaining
the soft and hard skills necessary to be successful in both college
and career settings
31
and improving reading scores, attendance,
high school graduation, college attendance, and postsecondary
achievement.
32
More than skills, authentic WBL also provides a test
of how well students’ interests and abilities align with the occupa-
tions they are considering.
33
What is critical but rarely discussed is the importance of occupa-
tional socialization as a function of high-quality WBL pedagogy.
34
While schools can replicate the appearance of a workplace in a CTE
program, they cannot replicate occupational socialization.
Industrial psychologists dene occupational socialization as
the process whereby individuals learn to be t for performing
work by becoming aware of organizational and occupational
practices, internalizing them, and carrying them out as partici-
Authentic work-based learning
provides a test of how well
students’ interests and abilities
align with the occupations
they are considering.
16 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
pating members of a work group. It is the learning of attitudes
and behaviors, informal work norms, and peer-group values
and relationships necessary for success in an occupational
context.
35
Formal elements include company, team, or organi-
zational meetings where the adolescent worker engages with
adults (including customers); classes, including those taught by
external vendors, demonstrating the newest tools or processes;
and meetings with mentors and with other adult employees
working on the same tasks. Informal elements include casual
conversations with other employees, social get-togethers, and
the simple act of observing
how adults in the work-
place interact with each
other, their supervisors,
and the work itself. These
are experiences that cannot
be replicated in a school
setting and are fundamen-
tal to an adolescent’s career
development.
Finally, authentic WBL helps youth begin to acquire the social
capital created by interactions with adult supervisors, mentors,
instructors, and others who can provide access to valuable
resources such as information, assistance, support, encourage-
ment, and connections.
3. Career and technical student organizations provide students more
opportunities to explore career pathways and develop their skills.
Successful CTE programs have active student organizations.
Career and technical student organizations (CTSOs) are co-
curricular, meaning activities are directly related to the CTE
curriculum and some activities occur during school. CTE teach-
ers can use CTSO competitive events in their classes to develop
teamwork, decision-making, career awareness, and personal
development. CTSO leadership opportunities also add to stu-
dents’ development through club meetings and projects. Many
CTSO activities occur outside of the classroom and include
community service projects, conference participation, and
professional development through state and national CTSOs.
For teachers, CTSOs are an eective pedagogy to enhance stu-
dents’ career development, noncognitive skills, and academic
engagement.
36
One of the few studies of CTSOs found evidence
of positive eects on several proximal variables linked to post-
secondary student success, including academic motivation,
academic engagement, grades, career self-efficacy, college
aspirations, and employability skills.
37
An Assessment Framework That Incentivizes Career Pathways
Although it is benecial for CTE programs to be open to students
who are just exploring, it is also important to develop well-dened
pathways that ensure students are on their way to their chosen
careers. States and school districts should oer options among
high school CTE programs and pathways, recognizing that not all
students will wish to pursue the same level of technical prepara-
tion—and they should incentivize establishing more intensive
CTE options.
At an operational level, it might be useful to consider three lev-
els of standards that CTE programs must meet to receive funding,
with bronze as the minimal level acceptable for state or district
support.
Bronze-level CTE programs require that students meet all high
school graduation requirements and have an option for students
to earn at least one industry-recognized credential (IRC).
Silver-level CTE programs require that students meet all high
school graduation requirements and
• ensure students meet established postsecondary entrance
requirements—for example, a score of 22 on the ACT exam or
the reading and math cut scores on a two-year college place-
ment exam such as Accuplacer;
• integrate related math, literacy, and science concepts into each
career pathway;
• include at least one authentic work-based learning experience
in a related industry setting;
• meet at least one IRC requirement that links to a next-level IRC;
• incorporate dual enrollment so students have the option of
earning college credits; and
• lead to a two-year technical education program that provides
the next-level IRC or academic credential.
Gold-level CTE programs require that students meet silver-level
expectations and
• have higher academic expectations (e.g., advanced math and
science courses as appropriate for each career pathway, etc.);
• include an extended, more intensive authentic WBL experi-
ence in a related industry setting; and
• include a four-course technical education sequence in each
career pathway that concludes in at least one dual enrollment
course in the technical sequence.
H
igh-quality, world-class CTE programs and pathways
are necessary for a prosperous 21st-century society.
By designing CTE programs that include the essential
skills and signature features described here, schools
and districts greatly increase their likelihood of success in pre-
paring youth to move from secondary education into productive
adult lives. ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/stone.
It is important to develop well-
dened pathways that ensure
students are on their way
to their chosen careers.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 17
Maximizing the Effectiveness
of Workplace Learning
Instructional Principles for Career and Technical Education
By Paul A. Kirschner, Mirjam Neelen, and
Tim Surma
I
t seems like everyone who has ever gone to school is an expert
in how to teach. And all of this “folk wisdom” seems based on
two simple thoughts: “Well that’s the way I learned and look at
me now!” if the results turned out positive, or “Boy did I hate
school; it was all wrong!” if they were negative.
Perhaps this pervasive folk wisdom is why there are so many
myths about teaching and learning, including the notion that 70
percent of our learning happens informally (via experiences), 20
percent happens socially (via others), and 10 percent happens
formally (via school).
1
While there is absolutely no evidence in
the scientic literature to support that idea, it is of course true
that informal learning and learning from and with others is very
important, especially in the workplace.
As educators and cognitive scientists, we want to support excel-
lent instruction and ecient learning in all contexts. So we’ve been
considering how the 10 principles of instruction described by Barak
Rosenshine (a high school teacher turned educational psycholo-
gist) apply to learning in career and technical education (CTE).
2
ese principles are based on three compelling lines of research:
cognitive science, expert teachers and what they do, and cognitive
strategy instruction. e major strength is that even though these
are three very dierent bodies of research, there is no conict what-
soever between the instructional suggestions that they provide.
Our vision of CTE aligns with the Department of Defense Edu-
cation Activity (DoDEA), which describes CTE as
an education pathway that provides students with the aca-
demic, technical, and real-world knowledge, skills, and expe-
rience they need to be prepared for a variety of career options
… [giving] students training and skills in many different
types of careers in high growth industries.… CTE programs
are personalized, hands-on, and let students explore dier-
ent career elds … [during] middle school and high school
… [preparing] students for the full range of post-secondary
opportunities, including college and careers.
3
Paul A. Kirschner is an emeritus professor of educational psychology at the
Open University of the Netherlands and a guest professor at the omas More
University of Applied Sciences in Antwerp, Belgium. He is a research fellow of
the American Educational Research Association whose books include How
Learning Happens and How Teaching Happens. Mirjam Neelen is the global
learning experience design lead at Novartis and has over 15 years of experience
with companies such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Google, Learnovate
Centre, and Accenture. Together, Kirschner and Neelen write the blog 3-Star
Learning Experiences, and they recently published the book Evidence-
Informed Learning Design. Tim Surma is the director of the Expertise Centre
for Education and Learning at the omas More University of Applied Sciences
in Antwerp, Belgium. A former teacher in secondary education and teacher
education, he turned to research on eective teaching and learning strategies
and has published four books to date.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MIKE AUSTIN
18 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
As such, CTE is meant to “empower students to acquire the
necessary academic, technical, and employability skills to enter,
compete, and advance in their education and career in a global
economy.”
4
CTE tries to achieve this by combining regular course-
work in school with mentored internships from potential employ-
ers in the community to give students extra preparation for their
later careers. Local instructors take the role of workplace teachers.
CTE becomes more eective when the instructional content
is placed in a context that mirrors real-life situations. e DoDEA
suggests that creating authentic learning experiences that closely
resemble the actual workplace scenarios where the knowledge
will be applied can greatly enhance the transfer of skills. e more
closely aligned the learning situation is to the ultimate workplace
environment, the smoother the transition of knowledge will be.
We need to note here that CTE is not meant as an updated ver-
sion of vocational education. CTE programming is meant to link
secondary and postsecondary education (including workplace
learning) in a sequenced series of courses that aligns the edu-
cational curriculum with industry-validated standards. As such,
one could see CTE not as a track, but rather as a pedagogy that
contextualizes learning in real-world settings.
5
Rosenshine’s 10 Principles in the CTE Context
In the Spring 2012 issue of American Educator, Barak Rosenshine
shared his 10 principles of instruction (see go.aft.org/ms7) and
summed them up with this brief description:
The most effective teachers ensured that their students
eciently acquired, rehearsed, and connected background
knowledge by providing a good deal of instructional sup-
port. ey provided this support by teaching new material
in manageable amounts, modeling, guiding student practice,
helping students when they made errors, and providing for
sucient practice and review. Many of these teachers also
went on to experiential, hands-on activities, but they always
did the experiential activities after, not before, the basic mate-
rial was learned.
6
In a blog
7
published in 2015, two of us (Mirjam Neelen and Paul
Kirschner) explored to what extent Rosenshine’s instructional
principles can be applied to the informal and nonformal ways of
learning* in the workplace and to what extent they can enhance
the work of learning professionals. Although Rosenshine’s prin-
ciples were not initially intended for workplace learning, they
have been demonstrated eective when applied and tested in the
workplace context.
9
In this article, we apply these same principles
to workplace learning with students in CTE programs.
Principle 1: Begin a learning experience with a short review of
previous learning.
Review at the workplace doesn’t mean glancing over an article that
you read the day before (besides, rereading is a completely ineec-
tive learning strategy that is likely to create vague familiarity with
the content instead of a strong memory of the content
10
). Review
could take place as an individual or collaborative exercise through
reecting on how newly learned content could be applied or curat-
ing recently learned content to better organize and more deeply
understand it. It could also be a well-structured discussion with
peers in which all involved can review and discuss a learning expe-
rience or moment experienced during working. In the CTE setting,
this would involve a combination of (1) reviewing with the teacher
how previous learning can be applied in the training situation
and (2) discussing with the workplace mentor the relevance and
importance of the previously acquired knowledge in the workplace.
Principle 2: Digest small amounts of new material, then practice
that material.
In the workplace, it is very common to encounter learning tasks
that involve practicing the entire task (such as removing an engine
from a car or checking a patient’s vital signs), which means using
all or nearly all of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to
complete the task. In the context of CTE, it is advisable to begin
with easier whole tasks to learn and gradually move to more chal-
lenging ones.
11
For nursing students, low-risk tasks like taking
vital signs can be practiced on peers, while higher-risk tasks like
drawing blood or inserting an intravenous line can be practiced
on medical manikins. To support this whole-task approach,
instructors can provide simple just-in-time procedural informa-
tion to students about how they will be expected to do certain
things.
12
Microlearning is hot in many dierent learning settings,
including workplace learning. When we search the literature on
microlearning, we nd many denitions; the one we nd most
useful in a workplace learning context is that “microlearning is an
instructional unit that provides a short engagement in an activity
CTE becomes more effective
when the instructional content
is placed in a context that
mirrors real-life situations.
*Formal learning in the workplace is an extension of formal schooling and includes
credentialing programs to certify learners’ competencies. Nonformal learning does
not result in certication but still contains important learning elements in planned
activities, and it can be seen as a form of tacit learning.
8
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 19
intentionally designed to elicit a specic outcome.”
13
For example,
employers often provide point-of-need performance support
tools in systems that employees use on the job (e.g., a help func-
tion that provides bite-sized pieces of just-in-time information to
help employees learn how to use the system). In CTE, using the
system itself is the practice.
Principle 3: Ask a large number of questions to support
connections between new material and prior learning.
In every phase of the CTE learning process, it’s necessary to ask ques-
tions. Between demonstration and independent practice of the tasks,
instructors ask questions to ensure that everyone understands the
steps involved. Even while students are practicing, the instructors
move around to oer assistance, demonstrating more complex steps
in slow motion, asking questions, providing explanations, and oer-
ing help whenever it is requested or needed. Who will determine
what the critical questions are to ask? Experts often nd it hard to
put themselves in novices’ shoes and truly understand what novices
need to learn and how they can get there. Peer learning, where indi-
viduals have the same level of expertise, might work better because
peers often have the same problems. It is also the case that in a CTE
setting, one would expect the mentor to understand the needs of the
CTE student as a novice employee better than a traditional senior
employee. However, knowing what questions to ask to support learn-
ing is a skill that requires learning and practice. And being open and
secure enough to admit that you don’t know something requires a
strong person and a psychologically safe environment. As a result,
we believe this principle should be applied to CTE by instructors and
mentors constantly asking questions of students and encouraging
students to ask each other questions.
Principle 4: Provide models to support learners for solving
problems.
In CTE, instructors demonstrate the approaches and activities
needed to solve problems in the workplace, while oering suitable
supports (which we describe in principle 8) to assist the students’
own endeavors. In other words, they model the behaviors that the
students need to carry out. is principle works particularly well
for recurrent tasks that are rule-based processes performed in just
about the same way from one problem or situation to the next.
14
ere is no dierence here between traditional workplace learn-
ing and CTE. Some workplaces even have traditional classrooms,
where instructors can use real-life situations to explain theoretical
ideas. ey might tell stories, provide hands-on examples, and
show pictures or videos to guide students’ learning. Another
option is simulations, where the vocational context and tasks are
recreated. Simulations can be live, hands-on, or virtual, using VR
(virtual reality) or AR (augmented reality) technology. Finally, stu-
dents can also learn from each other’s experiences (so called vicari-
ous learning) through discussion, observation, challenge, support,
storytelling, and scaolding from a more competent peer.
15
Principle 5: Guide practice of new material.
Nowadays, we assume that people are capable of self-directing
and self-regulating their own learning. is, however, disregards
the fact that both require content-specic knowledge and that
acquiring that knowledge is the goal in most learning situations.
Simply put, novices are not very good at directing their own learn-
ing.
16
Although there are many advantages to less-formal learning,
good guided practice is particularly eective—especially when
rst learning something new. Guided practice usually involves
the teacher working through problems with students at the
same time, modeling what they are doing in a step-by-step way,
while checking that they execute each step correctly.
17
A specic
example is what is known as I do, we do, you do. It’s helpful to
think of this as the assistant looking over your shoulder.
18
While in
the traditional workplace learning situation, a manager or coach
could provide guided practice, in a CTE setting this is part of the
pedagogy. And it is, or at least it should be, a requirement for all
mentors. In the workplace, part of this guidance is oered within a
more controlled and monitored environment (for example, care-
fully selected work tasks) compared to an unmonitored work area.
Principle 6: Check learner understanding at each point.
If the learning objective is clear and the steps to success are clear,
the critical “learning points” could be identied as well. ese
wouldn’t be traditional ways of checking for understanding, but
they could be pre-identied tasks to complete that show mastery
of certain standards. Objectivity is key here. CTE has an advantage
above both traditional classroom learning and workplace learning
in that it provides two settings in which to check for understand-
ing. In traditional workplace learning, this check needs to be infor-
mal (employees are not tested), and it is often based on proxies for
actual understanding. In CTE, the workplace is complemented by
the classroom, where testing is possible. is, however, requires
good communication between the teacher and the mentor. In
addition, development assessment portfolios play an important
role in a CTE setting.
19
ese portfolios are formative and summa-
tive assessment instruments used to gather evidence of learning
over time. At each moment in time, the portfolio gives information
on the learner’s overall level of performance (i.e., task-centered
assessment) and quality of performance on particular aspects of
the task (i.e., standards-centered assessment).
Principle 7: Obtain a high success rate during practice.
is principle refers back to principle 5 and again, the guided
practice piece is currently a gaping hole in the less formal
approaches to learning, especially in the workplace. A high suc-
cess rate cannot be obtained without a well-structured training/
learning approach. is can be achieved through, for instance,
overlearning: continued repeated practice of a task after some
initial mastery of that task has been achieved. However, there is
evidence that this has a greater eect on cognitive activity than on
CTE instructors and mentors
should constantly ask
students questions and
encourage students to ask
each other questions.
20 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
motor activity.
20
Furthermore, constructive feedback that identi-
es and corrects inaccurate (or missing) skills and misconcep-
tions further renes knowledge and skills. ere is no dierence
here between CTE and workplace learning.
Principle 8: Provide scaffolds for difcult tasks.
is principle requires carefully designed processes. However,
workplaces should be able to successfully implement such scaf-
folds. A more experienced peer or colleague looking over your
shoulder is a good example. Also, performance support tools
such as checklists, short instructional videos, and repositories of
background information and how-to guides can be scaolds. One
challenge is that it’s hard to know the exact level of scaolding that
each learner needs. How do you know when to remove a scaold
to enable the learner to move toward mastery? Maybe the assis-
tant looking over your shoulder is the best scaold to be found.
In this respect, CTE oers the opportunity of taking a time-out
and making use of the classroom environment to provide training
prior to when deeper or dierent knowledge or skills are required.
It also oers the opportunity of reviewing more dicult tasks after
the fact to rene and hone the necessary knowledge and skills.
Principle 9: Require and monitor independent practice.
To implement this principle, you need to establish the standards
that need to be met. is is probably easy for some tasks but very
dicult for others. Take the case of critical parts of a process where
making a mistake during independent practice could cost a lot
of time, money, or even lives. e CTE setting is the ideal place
for putting this principle into practice. After all, monitoring one’s
performance is an essential workplace skill that all employees are
expected to be able (and willing) to do.
Principle 10: Engage learners in weekly and monthly review.
Review is very important. Effective forms of review require
learners to recall what they have learned from their long-term
memories, which reinforces and consolidates what they have
learned. In addition, increasing the time between learning and
review strengthens what has been learned—which is why these 10
principles call for daily, weekly, and monthly review. In the tradi-
tional workplace setting, this can be done through well-structured
discussion groups, either face-to-face or in an online community
of practice format using often-not-available predened outcomes
(such as complex problems to be solved or novel tasks, for which
employees are collaboratively guring out the best solution or
approach, learning together as they go). In CTE, these outcomes
are predened and the classroom setting is an eective and e-
cient place to do these reviews.
***
So, where does this leave us? In considering how to apply these
principles in a workplace and/or a CTE learning context, we need to
state the obvious rst: as usual, the whole learning journey should
start with a learning need and a learning objective. en, there
needs to be a careful analysis of the required steps to successfully
achieve the learning objective. One thing to keep in mind is that in
workplace learning, the instructor is often missing. It is important
to acknowledge that this is a major challenge. It is not about control
or about being rigid. It’s about acknowledging how critical it is that
a competent individual (or system) who knows the learner’s skill
or knowledge gaps oers appropriate (point-of-need) instruction,
guidance, support, learning content, and constructive feedback. In
CTE, mentors and managers play an instructor role. While this is
expected of the mentor, managers need to take o their boss “hat”
and truly support professional development (and have those just
mentioned skills and/or competencies).
Given the importance of structure and review in Rosenshine’s
10 principles, here’s our summary of how they can maximize the
eectiveness of CTE.
1.
Offer daily review:
Recap practical skills, safety procedures,
and hands-on tasks completed in the last learning session.
2.
Present new material in small steps:
Break down new complex
technical skills or processes into smaller, manageable parts,
demonstrating each step, while making sure that the student
doesn’t lose sight of the whole task.
3.
Ask questions:
Ask questions about practical application,
problem-solving, and decision-making in real-world sce-
narios, and create an environment in which students feel safe
asking questions.
4.
Provide models:
Demonstrate tasks or techniques, modeling
best practices and procedures during simulations and while
executing real-life tasks.
5.
Guide practice:
Closely monitor hands-on practice, oering
immediate feedback and correction.
6.
Check for understanding:
Conduct practical assessments or
observe task execution to evaluate skill mastery.
7.
Obtain a high success rate:
Ensure students master each skill
or technique at a high level of prociency before progressing.
8.
Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks:
Provide step-by-step
guides, checklists, or mentor support for challenging tasks.
9.
Create time for independent practice:
Give students oppor-
tunities to work on projects or tasks independently, applying
their skills (make sure to choose the appropriate task level
for the student).
10.
Engage in weekly and monthly review:
Conduct reviews of
practical skills, including cumulative hands-on tasks or port-
folio assessments. ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/
kirschner_neelen_surma.
Although there are advantages
to less-formal learning,
guided practice is particularly
effective—especially when
rst learning something new.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 21
Advancing Tech Dreams
A Union-Driven Workforce Development Partnership for New York Students
Thanks in part to the CHIPS and Science
Act, which President Biden signed into law
in August 2022, Micron Technology plans
to build the nation’s largest semiconduc-
tor fabrication facility—and it chose a
site in central New York. Realizing that
this could open a wide array of career
pathways to students in the region, lead-
ers from the AFT, New York State United
Teachers (NYSUT), the United Federation
of Teachers (UFT), Micron, and New York
state quickly developed a shared vision for
introducing students to advanced manu-
facturing and semiconductors.
To learn about that vision and how it is
coming to life, we spoke with David Chiz-
zonite, Leo Gordon, and Robert Simmons.
David Chizzonite, a former engineer, has
been teaching at Chittenango Central
Schools for 27 years—20 as a middle
school science teacher and the past 7 as a
STEM (science, technology, engineering,
and math) specialist. He’s also the presi-
dent of the Chittenango Teachers’ Asso-
ciation, the advisor for award-winning
student robotics teams, and the coach
for girls’ volleyball and boys’ lacrosse. Leo
Gordon is the vice president of career and
technical education (CTE) for the UFT. He
was a CTE student, then completed a CTE
apprenticeship to become a CTE teacher in
information technology, graphic design,
art, and architectural drafting. After sev-
eral years with the UFT Teacher Center as
a CTE instructional coach, and nearly three
decades into his career, he was elected to
his current position. Robert Simmons,
who began his career as a middle school
science teacher with the Detroit Public
Schools, is the head of social impact and
STEM programs at Micron Technology. He
is also a scholar in residence and scholar of
antiracist praxis at the School of Education
at American University and a member of
the Diversity Scholars Network with the
National Center for Institutional Diversity
at the University of Michigan.
–EDITORS
EDITORS: Let’s dive into the heart of this
partnership: the Advanced Technology
Framework that schools and districts will
use to develop their own career pathways
in advanced manufacturing and semicon-
ductor education. How did you develop the
framework and how will educators use it?
LEO GORDON: e goal of this initiative is
not just to prepare youth in New York to
work for Micron but to introduce them
to the many careers in and related to
advanced technology. When the union
began talking to Micron about creating
new educational opportunities through-
out New York, no one discussed Micron
specically; it was all about industry needs.
is is bigger than just education and
bigger than just Micron—that’s why this
collaboration is working. We have been
talking about workforce development and
how it aligns to education. at remained
true as we developed the framework.
At our first meeting to develop the
framework, there was a room full of edu-
cational leaders, superintendents, district
content specialists, and principals talking
about what we should do. As a former CTE
teacher, the first question I asked was,
“What about the teachers?” Absent the
teachers, this conversation should not be
happening because the teachers are the
closest to the students.
Within a few weeks, we had more than
20 teachers contributing to a Google doc,
dropping in whatever they thought would
interest middle and high school students
in learning about advanced manufacturing
and semiconductors. en we expanded
to a larger group of content teachers with
dierent specialties—AutoCAD, mechan-
ics, programming, etc.—who rened the
content and added ideas for projects that
students would nd engaging. With teach-
ers now leading the framework develop-
ment, we mapped out the necessary skills,
whether young people want to go directly
to work in the industry or go to college.
In Micron’s Girls Going Tech Español at Onondaga Community College, eighth-grade
girls from the Syracuse City School District make binary bracelets.
COURTESY OF ONONDAGA CC
22 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
e biggest advantage of having Micron
at the table is we all know education can’t
pivot as quickly as industry. Micron will
alert us to industry shifts in real time, and
we’ll be able to shift curriculum instruction
and materials so that the students’ skills are
truly aligned to the industry.
Now that the framework is eshed out
and districts are getting ready to pilot it, we
are positioning ourselves to be the national
leader in the conversation. ere’s never
been a time in my history of almost 30
years as a CTE professional that we have
had workforce development, industry, gov-
ernment, education leaders, and teachers
all on the same page.
DAVID CHIZZONITE: I’m excited about
the framework and the partnership with
Micron because of the opportunities they
create to expand our STEM courses and
to put more students on the path to STEM
careers. As a STEM specialist, I’ve had the
opportunity to develop many new courses
and programs at our high school, along with
some new programming at our elementary
and middle schools. My focus is bringing a
lot more STEM education, and especially
engineering-based education, to our dis-
trict. Among a few other roles, I am the
advisor for our high school robotics teams.
Four out of the past ve years, we’ve earned
the right to represent New York state in the
VEX Robotics World Championship.
In developing the framework, one of the
things I liked was that our goal was not to
hand a teacher or a school district a cur-
riculum in a box and say, “Here are your
modules. Follow this formula to STEM
success.” It’s truly a framework. How each
school district will adapt some of the ideas
and practices in that framework is going to
vary based on what that district already has
in place and what it wants to put in place.
Micron’s new semiconductor fabrica-
tion facility is going to be 15 miles from
our high school in central New York. So
my district has a vested interest in students
preparing for careers in advanced manu-
facturing and semiconductor manufac-
turing. But a district a couple of hundred
miles away doesn’t have that exact same
interest—they may have another tech-
nology company to partner with. Making
the framework a very broad, general set
of practices and ideas gives districts the
ability to adapt it to what their local com-
munity needs and build on their existing
courses and resources.
LEO: I agree. One of the reasons we kept
the framework flexible is that teachers
have dierent licenses and districts have
dierent resources and needs. at’s why
the framework is for advanced technol-
ogy—not just advanced manufacturing
and semiconductors. Each teacher, school,
and district can pull dierent parts from
the framework to build out their curricula.
In New York, most of our CTE classes
are very linear: you do this, this, and this
for a specic certication. When we started
planning the framework, we had to ask,
“What is it we’re really teaching students
for?” A lot of our CTE classes are teaching
for a specific skill, a specific job. This is
broader preparation for lots of careers in
advanced technology.
We didn’t want to pigeonhole young
people, saying, “This is the
job in advanced manufac-
turing that you need to have.”
At first, the educators and
administrators were talking
about the highly techni-
cal clean room jobs. But
Robert and other Micron
staff emphasized that we
shouldn’t be preparing for
one specific job. We should
prepare for the industry itself.
Fortunately, most entry-level
jobs in this industry lead to
higher-paying jobs.
We developed the frame-
work to make sure educators
had exibility and scalability
”A lot of our CTE
classes are teaching
for ... a specic
job. This is broader
preparation for ...
careers in advanced
technology.”
–LEO GORDON
at the school level. We also had the fore-
thought to establish industry certications
that schools can oer if they choose. at
does require specific licenses, along with
classroom structures and CTE course
sequences to earn those licenses.
Some districts may offer an elective to
give students understanding of the industry;
others may do a series of courses that open
up multiple career pathways. Either way,
we’re bringing them real industry skills that
they can utilize, such as learning the Python
programming language. Maybe it’s not spe-
cically for Micron, maybe it’s not specically
for advanced manufacturing, but Python is
the same program whether you’re doing
advanced manufacturing or physics or con-
struction and architecture. All the skill sets
we placed in this framework are interchange-
able for so many other industries.
DAVID: In the workgroup developing the
framework, I think I’m relatively unique
because I am going to be one of the people
right on the frontlines who is helping imple-
ment it. Everything in that framework aligns
with some of the coursework I’m already
offering in terms of project-based and
experiential learning. It’s about taking a
step back as a teacher and being more of a
facilitator instead of a deliverer of content.
In my robotics classes and club, for
example, there is no textbook. The first
thing students do is take apart last year’s
robots. I don’t sit down and teach them,
“This is how you attach things together.
This is what a drive base or a lift mecha-
nism looks like.” ey learn by dissecting
robots. When we go to competitions, kids
see things that they want to use—but
AP PHOTO / STEVE HELBER
A view of a Micron chip manufacturing plant
in Virginia.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 23
there’s no blueprint, so they have to design
and replicate it themselves.
e framework emphasizes this type of
learning by necessity through experience.
It also emphasizes collaboration, which
is the heart of our teamwork. In robotics
competitions, students have to work with
their team and with other teams. It really
helps broaden students’ capacities, which
I know our employers are looking for when
these students go out into the workplace.
One of my students said, “I feel like
I’m running a marathon, but the finish
line keeps changing.” And I said, “Exactly.
Welcome to engineering.” You’re always
trying to improve. Somebody didn’t invent
the cell phone and say, “at’s it. e cell
phone is nished.” We continue to inno-
vate. ose are sometimes hard lessons for
students, but they’re good lessons.
I am really excited about how this
framework fits with some of the things
we’re already doing and also gives us a
pathway to expand opportunities for kids.
We have to start at pre-K and kindergarten
to build an engineering mindset.
Building an engineering mindset is
hard for teachers—myself included. It goes
against some of our long-ingrained prac-
tices. Teachers need to become comfort-
able with the idea of their students having
different ideas and producing different
things. e process is just as important as
the outcome. e framework helps build
that kind of capacity into the coursework.
It’s not about a sequence of predetermined
classes; it’s about developing an engineer-
ing mindset in all your classes.
Drawing from the framework, there are
a few specific courses I hope we can add
for our high schoolers. We used to have an
electronics course (which ended when the
instructor left our district), and we need to
bring it back as a foundation for advanced
manufacturing and semiconductors. en,
since the new Micron facility will be so close
by, we’ll need a hybrid class about semicon-
ductor functioning and manufacturing. I’m
excited about that because there’s some
really amazing science involved, including
chemistry and physics, plus technology.
The last course I’d love to see developed
is resource management and recovery.
Where do the materials for semiconductor
manufacturing come from? at includes
mining, but also reusing materials that are
already in products. How can we repurpose
that material instead of having it wind up in
a landll? ose are important pieces of the
manufacturing process.
EDITORS: It’s interesting that Micron is
more focused on education and workforce
development for the industry than on lling
jobs at Micron. How does this new initiative
t with Micron’s larger views on education?
ROBERT SIMMONS: ere are no Micron
employees—or employees in the semicon-
ductor industry—without K–12 education.
ere’s a reason that Micron has a team of
people working with K–12 educators and
that most of the people on that team come
from K–12. We need to partner with those
who are closest to communities and clos-
est to kids: the teachers. We see this as a
continuation of our eort to ensure young
people have a pipeline not just to a job but
to a dream.
One of my colleagues said, “If the com-
munity isn’t healthy, it doesn’t matter what
we do at Micron. So we need to make sure
we’re doing our level best to contribute to
the greater good.” And I believe through
this partnership we’re contributing to the
greater good. We’re also learning from
educators. Colleagues have told me that
they reimagined how they engage with
young people when they’re volunteering
and how they frame interview questions for
new college graduates because of learning
from educators.
We rmly believe that our partnership
with the teachers union demonstrates that
corporations, school systems, and unions
can work together for the betterment of
young folks. I started out as an AFT teacher
”We see this
[partnership] as a
continuation of our
effort to ensure
young people
have a pipeline
not just to a job
but to a dream.”
–ROBERT SIMMONS
in the Detroit Public Schools, and I’m a
product of my hard-charging, hardcore
United Auto Workers (UAW) grandfather.
So I am here because of the union. My
grandmother was able to support our fam-
ily when my grandfather passed because
the UAW ensured his union benets were
handed down to my grandmother. I’m
always humbled and honored to stand in
solidarity with organized labor.
With all this discussion of the Advanced
Technology Framework, one thing I want
to clarify is that you don’t need to be an
engineer to work for Micron. We need
people in nance, human resources, com-
munications, and more. No one wants an
engineer trying to run payroll.
LEO: at’s a good point. As a CTE person,
I always look at the career clusters we have
and the disciplines in which we teach. We
can argue that Micron covers almost every
career cluster: architecture and construc-
tion, maintenance and operation, art and
advertising, technology and manufacturing,
communications, business management
administration, education and training,
government and public aairs, hospitality,
and legal. at’s what makes this industry
so dierent than what we’re used to in the
CTE space. When we’re building out a CTE
class, normally it’s for one specic career
cluster. is is a catchall. We’re making the
state department of education and school
districts think dierently because we’re not
talking about one particular class.
DAVID: I agree—and I think the framework,
even though it’s focused on technol-
ogy, helps develop broad skill sets. In my
robotics classroom, our curriculum is built
around dierent principles of engineering;
there’s mechanical engineering, electrical
engineering, computer engineering, and
coding. But there are also other pieces of
the puzzle that the kids learn they need to
have, like collaboration.
Just as a company has to recruit people
to do marketing and graphic design, our
kids have to recruit teammates to do tasks
that they don’t know how to do. I love Rob-
ert’s comment about an engineer doing
payroll. I’ve seen engineers attempt to do
payroll, and Robert is absolutely correct—it
didn’t work out so great. You don’t want the
engineer trying to make your logo either.
e kids discover that for themselves.
One team had a student dedicated to doing
24 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
the technical writing for their engineering
notebook. at’s a full-time job for one kid.
He wasn’t really strong in engineering or
computer programming, but he was really
good at documenting their work—and a
vital member of the team.*
ROBERT: David’s robotics teams sound fan-
tastic—and they remind me of a couple of
my favorite programs for kids. Chip Camp
and Chip Camp Jr. are programs we run for
third- through eighth-graders that are all
about semiconductor education. Young
people learn some of the basics of what it
takes to make a semiconductor and some
basics of STEM. ey usually apply their
learning to the memory used in rockets
and do a rocket launch.
Chip Camp can range from one to three
days. It’s dependent on the community
because we co-construct each camp with
the school district and local educators. We
don’t charge, and we offer hot meals. If
needed, we provide transportation too. At
the end, we also invite families to join in
our celebration.
One important feature is that we work
with local educators. Many educators
have said that they take some of the les-
sons back to their classrooms, and then
their colleagues may adapt those lessons
too. So we believe that Chip Camp has a
multiplier eect, not just for students but
also for educators.
Two other programs we
run are Girls Going Tech,
which provides STEM role
models for female, non-
binary, and gender-fluid
middle school students,
and Careers in a High-Tech
World, which shows high
school students a day in the
life at advanced technology
businesses. ese programs
are flexible, so they are dif-
ferent in different commu-
nities, just like Chip Camp.
We also partner with Norfolk
State University for STEM at
the Beach.
DAVID: These sound like
great ways to get students
excited about STEM. Another way I’ve
found is through the environment. Since
we’re near the Great Lakes, I already have
projects for second- and third-graders
that deal with water conservation and
keeping our water resources clean. With
the new Micron facility, which will need a
tremendous amount of water, I’m adding
projects for middle and high school stu-
dents on resource management. Micron
will be pulling water out of Lake Ontario.
at water has to be brought in, treated,
used, and then retreated to be returned to
the lake. Students are amazed to learn that
we can’t put perfectly clean water back
into the environment; it would disrupt the
ecosystem. e water chemistry has to be
adjusted to match the water chemistry of
the lake.
EDITORS: One shared goal driving this part-
nership is bringing more students of color
and more young women into advanced
technology elds. How are you accomplish-
ing that goal?
ROBERT: The folks who are underrepre-
sented in STEM are a core part of our con-
versation at Micron. We’re actively trying
to ensure that our workforce continues to
bring in more folks from underrepresented
communities. Personally, it’s important
to me because I’m the son of a Spelman-
educated mother. It’s deeply personal to
make sure that young people of color have
opportunities.
In central New York, we’re committed
to working with communities where we
know young folks don’t have access to
STEM opportunities, like the South Side
of Syracuse. We built the Youth STEM
Funder Collaborative and brought in
the nonprot STEM From Dance, which
encourages girls of color to learn STEM
by designing and building technology to
integrate into the dances they choreo-
graph and perform.
When I rst joined Micron, we launched
a major K–12 STEM collaboration with a
university outside Idaho (we already had
many partnerships in Idaho where our
company was founded). It was Chip Camp
with Norfolk State University, a historically
Black university. All of the counselors
were Black women from the College of
Engineering.
We also take pride in our employee
resource groups and in making sure that
they are strong, that they’re healthy, that
they have resources, and that they have an
executive sponsor who will listen and be a
liaison to carry forward issues. e team
that I lead is very diverse—they are from
all walks of life, races, genders, ethnicities,
sexual orientations, ages, locations. All the
ways in which diversity shows up in our
society, you see it in who’s on our STEM
education team.
ere’s still work to do in the tech sector,
as is the case in all sectors, and we remain
committed to the work. One reason this
partnership is working so well is that the
leadership of the AFT, NYSUT, and the
UFT consistently discuss making sure that
underrepresented students—in particular,
students of color and girls—have access to
opportunities in advanced manufacturing
and semiconductors.
LEO: In New York City, which is highly
diverse and highly segregated, we were
intentional when we chose the schools to
be involved in this partnership. We looked
for diversity in the students and in the
schools’ leadership. It was intentional that
we brought Micron to the Brooklyn STEAM
Center headed by a former CTE student,
turned CTE apprentice, turned CTE princi-
pal who is of Jamaican descent in a school
that’s 80 percent students of color.
As we grow these programs, if we are
going to be the example for the nation, we
have to make sure we call out the dispari-
ties in opportunities for underrepresented
students. at’s the only way we’re going to
help close the gaps in employment that hap-
*To learn more about David’s approach to guiding
his robotics teams, see “Learning by Necessity: How
Robotics Develops an Engineering Mindset” at aft.org/
ae/spring2024/chizzonite.
COURTESY OF NYSUT
Gabriel Robinson, captain of the Chittenango robotics team, and
David Chizzonite with one of their award-winning robots.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 25
pen in our low-income families, the gaps in
education that happen in our inner cities.
We have to be intentional to make true
change, and we have to be condent enough
to have uncomfortable conversations.
ROBERT: When I think about central New
York, and communities of color in particu-
lar, I think of growing up in Detroit, where
working in manufacturing provided a life
that I doubt my family would’ve had if my
grandfather weren’t at Ford Motor Com-
pany. What I do know is that his job killed
him, because he worked in the foundry.
What settles my soul with Micron is that
it’s clean manufacturing. You can come out
of high school, become a technician, stay
for 30 years (if you want), and retire from
Micron with enough money to live on.
Whereas my grandfather made enough
money but died early because of the haz-
ards of his job. To me, access to clean, safe
manufacturing is an equity issue. Micron
provides those opportunities. And there’s
no better way to spread those opportuni-
ties than by working with the AFT, NYSUT,
and the UFT.
LEO: I am proud to be a part of something
that’s going to be life-changing for young
people.
EDITORS: Thinking about educators and
union leaders across the country, what
recommendations would you offer if they
want to develop this type of workforce
development partnership?
LEO: I knew the connection between
school and work at a really early age—and
CTE has been my life. But as I progressed in
my career, I’ve found that a lot of our young
people haven’t made that connection.
Across the country, there’s been too much
emphasis on going to college—without an
idea of what you want to do or what work-
ing in various elds is actually like—and
too little emphasis on industries that need
a skilled workforce and provide pathways
for developing those skills.
This collaboration is different than
what I’ve seen in CTE before because we
had the New York State Education Depart-
ment and Office of Strategic Workforce
Development, Micron, and the AFT,
the UFT, and NYSUT deeply involved. It
is hard work to get everybody to agree
with the trajectory of an initiative that
has national implications. Making sure
everybody at the table understands the
long-term goal and is aligned is probably
the most challenging part.
roughout the spring and summer of
2023 when we started this conversation,
money wasn’t a factor. We asked, “What’s
best for students? What’s best for the work-
force? What’s best for the future of semi-
conductor education in New York state?”
Discussions of money came after we had
a shared vision.
And if there’s one lesson that Robert
and I learned, it’s that communication is
critical. When we started developing our
communication plan, we did frequent
check-ins to maintain engagement with all
the stakeholders. As you build something
like this, you can’t predict the obstacles.
And people don’t always hear things in the
way they were intended. When something
is miscommunicated or an email goes out
with misinformation, it’s always best to just
pick up the phone and have a conversation.
ROBERT: I agree. is reinforces the need
for people to be in community and com-
municate in the process of building public-
private partnerships.
DAVID: Communication is key at the local
level too. When you have a superintendent,
a board of education, and a union that
work together, a collaborative relationship
is going to produce much more meaning-
ful, productive results.
The message I receive from folks like
Melinda Person, NYSUT’s president, is
“Work together, solve problems.” The
framework is a great example of that. It’s
the union, the state government, and
Micron working together to make new
career pathways for our students. Being
collaborative doesn’t mean you’re going
to agree on everything, but as long as you
can maintain that collaborative relation-
ship, you can disagree respectfully and still
move forward.
e union is more eective when you
develop strong relationships. You’ll see it
when negotiating a new contract and han-
dling the myriad issues that a union leader
has to deal with every day. I recently spent
an afternoon in our assistant superinten-
dent’s oce guring out how to fund new
materials for several programs, including
3-D printing and drone technology. If you
don’t have a collaborative relationship
with your administrators, a career path-
ways partnership can be the perfect spring-
board to start to work together. Everybody
is excited to create new opportunities for
our youth.
ROBERT: I’ll share a recommendation for
industry leaders: listen to and learn from
educators.
Other than my mother and grand-
mother, my teachers were the most inu-
ential people in my life as I was growing
up, especially Deborah Peek Brown—my
sixth-grade teacher for an integrated
science class. Years later, we became col-
leagues. She was teaching in the Detroit
Area Pre-College Engineering Program
when I joined as a CTE teacher. Because
of her, my entire career as a teacher
and administrator has been centered
around STEM education and workforce
development.
Perhaps my most impactful experience
as an educator was building a workforce
development program largely for students
who were under-credited and overage at
a school where 50 percent of the students
had been incarcerated. rough our CTE
and workforce development programs, 89
percent were not incarcerated again; they
lived productive lives.
I always say that the most hopeful peo-
ple in the world are educators. e group
of educators working on this project, their
excitement, motivates me every day. I can
pay forward what education has given to
me by providing educators and young
people an opportunity not just to work at
Micron but to realize their dreams. ☐
”A career pathways
partnership can
be the perfect
springboard ...
to create new
opportunities
for our youth.”
–DAVID CHIZZONITE
26 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Creating a Healthy Community
How a High School in a Hospital Launches Careers and Enhances Well-Being
By Pamela Hummer
O
n a busy Wednesday morning, several high school
teachers are expertly directing a lively group of students
gathered around their lockers to the correct places to
begin the school day. But even though the hall has
lockers and classrooms and school posters, this is not a school
building; it is the MetroHealth Main Campus Medical Center, and
the high school students are wearing white hospital coats and
genuine hospital ID badges.
is is the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s Lincoln-
West School of Science and Health (LWSH). Its partnership with
Cleveland’s MetroHealth main hospital is a unique model for
experiential learning and career preparation.
In this high school housed in a hospital, students study a
biomedical curriculum with a STEM (science, technology, engi-
neering, and mathematics) focus, in addition to more traditional
high school courses. They learn firsthand about the variety of
careers available in a hospital system and work one-on-one with
a mentor who is a healthcare professional. ey receive training
in advanced healthcare programs such as Stop the Bleed, the
American College of Surgeons program that teaches how to stop
bleeding in a severely injured person, and Code Red, which is
training for an emergency that includes CPR, AED (automated
external debrillator), and rst aid certication. Students have
access to internships and networking opportunities in the hospital
system, which can lead to jobs in the system. Juniors and seniors
also have an opportunity to earn state tested nurse aide (STNA)
credentialing in an accelerated three-week program in the spring.
“is school—a high school embedded in a hospital—is the
only program of its kind in the country,” explained Shari Obrenski,
president of the Cleveland Teachers Union (CTU). “e former
CEO of Cleveland’s MetroHealth hospital system, Dr. Akram
Boutros, had a vision about what a hospital system should be to a
community. And it’s far more than just taking care of the physical
health of the people. He really was taking a look at the determi-
nants of health and asking, ‘How can our hospital impact those
determinants of health?’ And one of the determinants was around
education, and how the hospital system could be part of that.”
In 2015, Dr. Boutros and Christine Fowler-Mack, then the school
district’s chief portfolio ocer, were both part of Leadership Cleve-
land, a local program for community leaders designed to enhance
their collaborative leadership skills and deepen community impact.
Pamela Hummer is the editor of Critique, the Cleveland Teachers Union
newspaper, and the monthly newsletter of the Northeast Ohio AFT retirees’
chapter. A retired early childhood teacher and former union representative,
she enjoys traveling and attending Cleveland cultural and sporting events
with her husband, also a retired Cleveland teacher and former union o-
cer. She volunteers weekly in several Cleveland preschool and kindergarten
classrooms.
PHOTOS BY SUZANNAH HOOVER
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 27
ey wanted to create leadership experiences for students around
a hospital setting and designed the high school within the hospital.
Local philanthropic organizations provided start-up funding.
With the strong support of Dr. Boutros and the backing of David
Quolke and Eric Gordon, then the union and district leaders,
the program came together. e Lincoln-West School of Science
and Health opened in the fall of 2016, and the rst senior class
graduated in 2019. “When the top people in the highest roles in
the organizations have a deep belief in the program, anything is
possible,” said Juliet King, LWSH’s principal.
at level of commitment to and support of the partnership
continues under MetroHealth’s current CEO, Dr. Airica Steed.
“Our CEO is on board with the partnership and ready to remove
barriers to its success,” said Tiany Short, MetroHealth director
of external education and workforce development. “She is always
willing to talk to a student and has even asked to be a mentor! Dr.
Steed believes in the vision and is committed to the success of our
students and the program.”
Preparing for a Healthcare Career
In grades 9–10, students attend regular classes in the Lincoln-
West school building, and they also attend regular MetroHealth
experiences—presentations, trainings, and activities—at both
the school and hospital locations. In December, for example,
10th-graders attended a presentation on nutritional disparities
and their relationship to community health. It included informa-
tion about nutritional resources available in the community, a
discussion with a dietitian, a cooking demonstration, and
an explanation of the healthy plate model.
In grades 11–12, students take all their classes at the
hospital. ey have regular high school classes on Mon-
day, Tuesday, ursday, and Friday. e LWSH wing at
the hospital campus has classrooms for core and elec-
tive subjects such as English, math, history, psychology,
chemistry, Spanish, and various biomedical sciences, with
teachers assigned full-time to the site.
Juniors are assigned to mentors based on their inter-
ests and meet with them at least once a month. ey also
attend lectures and presentations by dierent healthcare
professionals, learn about a wide array of career possibili-
ties in the hospital system, and participate in a variety of
healthcare experiences. Seniors are engaged in internships
on Wednesday mornings. They begin in science teacher
Jessica Wardzala’s large state-of-the-art science lab, where
they use a QR code to link to a Google document. On the docu-
ment, they sign in and record any problems or concerns they may
have. Wardzala monitors Wednesday attendance, since there are
no regular classes in the morning for seniors on that day, and uses
the information provided by students to address any issues.
On a drab Wednesday in January, MetroHealth secondary
education specialist Salethia McPherson energetically delivered
morning announcements to the quiet group of seniors, including
opportunities for afterschool activities that could be included on
their college applications and important details about applying
for the spring STNA certication program. Her comments incor-
porated an encouraging “pep talk” and some specic instructions
before sending the seniors to meet their internship supervisors
throughout the hospital.
On Wednesday afternoons, seniors participate in a capstone
study experience. is is a regular course in every senior’s weekly
schedule, in which they journal about their internship experi-
ences from the morning, recording their observations and assess-
ments. As a culminating activity, students use this information
to study problems or situations they observed at the hospital
and devise possible solutions. One recent capstone study was
about improving the emergency department patient experience.
Students discovered that the ED was short-staed on weekends,
one of the busiest times. e students proposed possible solu-
tions, such as compensation incentives for those who work on
weekends and expanding and enhancing the ED area to better
accommodate patients.
Avriel Chaney, a teacher and CTU chapter chair, said the
senior-year capstone observation and intense journaling expe-
rience motivates students to notice details and interactions. It
allows for self-assessment, challenges some preconceived ideas
of the realities of working in the medical eld, and gives students
a more realistic perspective about those career choices.
For its healthcare-related courses, the school uses a curricu-
lum developed by Project Lead the Way that combines the study
of biology with principles of biomedicine. Students engage in case
studies with a series of labs, dissections, and other procedures to
determine diseases. ey learn how to measure blood pressure
and what the normal levels for blood pressure and cholesterol are.
ey study human anatomy and physiology, along with medical
interventions and biomedical innovations.
Students also get training from emergency department doc-
tors, ultrasound technicians, and other healthcare professionals.
ey get hands-on experiences in various departments in the hos-
pital system and see rsthand not only dierent medical careers
but jobs in other areas such as human resources, nance, busi-
ness, nutrition and culinary services, and information technology.
“We are building a school-to-workforce pipeline,” said Prin-
cipal King. “We are getting students engaged in STEM, and this
model is changing the game in so many ways. We hope this
inspires others to see education in a dierent way.”
Although LWSH is highly regarded and students are thriving,
there is one major challenge: space. In grades 11–12, due to space
limitations at the hospital, only 50 students can be accepted in
each grade. “We are very hopeful now, with the opening of the new
Lincoln-West students study
a biomedical curriculum,
learn about health careers,
and train in advanced
healthcare programs.
28 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
MetroHealth Glick Center and additional available space,
that more students can continue in the program in grades
11–12,” said Obrenski. “In 9th and 10th grades, we have
about 100 students in each grade. But in 11th and 12th
grades, the hospital can currently only take 100 students
total, 50 in each grade, so the program is losing up to 100
students in grades 11–12. We need to x that and make
sure that we can accommodate all of them—not half of
them—in this valuable program.” e need to accommo-
date more students is especially pressing because of the
success LWSH is having. Its graduation rate of 85 percent
1
is 10 points higher than the district’s graduation rate.
2
One of those graduates is Khandah Abdullah, the
2023 valedictorian; she now attends Cleveland State
University majoring in biology. “I was interested in study-
ing medicine but had limited knowledge about the high school,
even though my brother graduated from Lincoln-West two years
earlier,” she said. “I didn’t realize how unique the program was
and what great opportunities it provided.”
She was planning a career in nursing when she entered the
school in the fall of 2019. In her junior year, her mentor was a nurse.
“I learned a lot from that experience and from my senior-year intern-
ship about the reality of a nurse’s schedule, duties, and expectations.”
Abdullah participated in the white coat ceremony in fall of
2022 and obtained her STNA credentials in the school’s special
three-week program in the spring. With her experience and train-
ing at MetroHealth, she is now qualied to work as a patient care
nursing assistant (PCNA).
“I wouldn’t be able to work at this level, a PCNA, without
the experiences I had through the Lincoln-West/MetroHealth
program,” she said. “Other college students I meet are surprised
because they are just starting to learn those skills now. I learned
them in high school.”
e exposure to real career experiences was valuable in other
ways, too. She learned what it takes to run a big hospital, all the
behind-the-scenes people and departments. “ere’s a lot more
than doctors and nurses. ere are so many specialties and other
career opportunities, and they aren’t all in direct patient care.
We learned about many dierent jobs in a hospital system. is
program helped me nd my passion.”
Responsibility and Relationships
MetroHealth is a unique partner in that it is a community hospital,
and addressing the social determinants of health—such as aord-
able quality housing and education, nutritious food, public trans-
portation, and well-paying jobs—is one of its key goals. Cleveland
has some of the best healthcare institutions in the world, but its
population also has some of the worst health outcomes. Across
two communities just two miles apart, there is a 23-year dier-
ence in residents’ average life expectancy.
3
is is in large part
because the social determinants of health have a huge impact on
health and well-being—often far greater than healthcare
4
—and
Cleveland is the second-poorest large city in the United States.
5
Although the LWSH program has open enrollment for stu-
dents throughout the district, most of its students live in the
MetroHealth hospital area. e hospital is located just west of
Cleveland’s downtown, in a racially mixed area with a signicant
Hispanic and Latinx population. While English is the most preva-
lent language, Spanish is second, with 21 percent of residents
speaking it at home. e median annual household income in
the area is $32,000.
6
MetroHealth’s view is that Greater Cleveland’s overall health—
the fabric of the community and its quality of life, culture, econ-
omy, and future—depends on the health of its residents, and
that MetroHealth has a personal and collective responsibility to
address these disparities and improve health outcomes for all.
CTU President Obrenski believes this sense of community
responsibility was, and is, a crucial factor in the success of the
partnership. “In a collaboration like this, you need some level of
altruism in the partners. e product of a health system is people,
and MetroHealth sees our students as valuable contributors to a
healthier community and invests in them. It’s a win for the stu-
dents, the healthcare system, and the community.”
Gordon echoed her thoughts on MetroHealth as a partner:
“e viewpoint that the hospital system should serve the com-
munity and be an anchor in the community was key to the part-
nership. Also, we had principled leadership in all three areas—the
hospital system, the school district, and the union—who were
willing to work together and be innovative.”
Director Short stressed the importance of buy-in from leader-
ship to the partnership’s success. “Leadership support is essential.
For us at MetroHealth, we believe it’s important for students to
see dierent professionals, many who look like them and have
had similar life experiences. Our leadership team always shows
up for our students.” She told about an emergency room doctor
who faced challenges through school; he was not an A student and
even considered dropping out. But with resiliency and hard work,
he became a doctor. rough his story and experiences, students
see that there are all kinds of dierent paths to a career goal.
McPherson, the education specialist, said that organizations
looking to establish partnerships like this one need to understand
that it’s more than just the curriculum; building relationships and
trust is important, and commitment to the partnership is a service
to the students and community. “If you start by building good
relationships though, everything else can be worked out.”
“The problem-solving approach worked for us,” explained
Quolke. “Shari Obrenski was the CTU vice president representing
high schools and special schools and the director of negotiations
when LWSH was getting started. She took the lead. CTU’s nurses
chapter chair, Pat Forrai-Gunter, was at Lincoln-West and had a
great relationship with MetroHealth, having worked closely with
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 29
them on creating mobile health units in the schools. Christine
Fowler-Mack represented the district in the planning process.
They worked with all stakeholders to develop a contractual
memorandum of understanding (MOU) and any changes to the
school’s academic achievement plan.”
Cleveland has a portfolio of innovative schools, and each one
has a specic MOU agreed upon by the union and the district.
“CTU members don’t give up their rights when they choose to
teach in a special school like LWSH,” emphasized Quolke. “Unless
something unique to that program is spelled out in the MOU, all
language in the collective bargaining agreement is intact. Teach-
ers and sta who wanted to come to this new school had to apply
and interview, and they knew ahead of time what the expectations
were. ose who were selected were invested in the school and
wanted it to succeed.”
Chaney, the CTU representative for LWSH, agreed with the
cooperative spirit of the sta. “No plan can anticipate every prob-
lem, and the contract and MOU don’t have specic language for
every situation we may face—we’re partially housed in a hospital,
not a school building! But we try to maneuver gracefully through
any issues, to be fair, and to work in the best interests of students
and sta.”
Principal King said MetroHealth, the school district, and CTU
work together well to deal with issues as they come up. “We all
want the same thing, so we work together to work out the kinks
as they arise.” A team of teachers meets with the principal, the
campus coordinator, and two MetroHealth representatives on a
regular basis.
All stakeholders agree communication is key, and they
recommend over-communicating. They established a
teacher “ambassador” for each grade level, whose main
purpose was communicating with other teachers at that
grade to make everyone aware of current teaching top-
ics, expectations, and opportunities. For example, when
teachers were instructing on the topic of health disparities,
including environmental disparities in the community,
MetroHealth provided information about lead poisoning
with real-life examples. In another instance, students were
engaged in a dissection of cow eyes. A physician from the
hospital’s ophthalmology department provided a deeper
experience for students. Side by side with teachers, the
hospital’s medical professionals provide in-depth explora-
tions that go beyond books and classrooms. And best of all,
“When a 12th-grade teacher let us know that there were
some struggling seniors, our hospital residents helped tutor them,”
added Short. “More communication and collaboration can make
the dierence for students.”
Overcoming Challenges
MetroHealth and LWSH’s shared commitment to students and rela-
tionships enables them to be good problem solvers. eir revamp-
ing of the STNA certication process oers one example. Originally,
it was available to up to 10 interested seniors in weekly afterschool
classes held throughout the spring semester at the local community
college, Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C). Tuition for the class
was paid for by a grant, and the school district supplied transporta-
tion, meals, and scrubs. Stretched out over the semester, with state
testing scheduled in the spring right around prom time, students
tended to lose focus. e STNA certication passing rate was low,
and there was a possibility that the grant would be rescinded.
The school changed the plan. Since LWSH is a year-round
school, the STNA program became an intensive, three-week pro-
gram held entirely during the school’s long spring break between
its third and fourth marking periods. Study tables were set up in the
morning, and individual support was available. e result? A 100
percent passage rate last spring for LWSH candidates.
Abdullah, the 2023 valedictorian, was one of the students who
participated in the STNA program. “I think it was harder, all con-
centrated in just three weeks,” she said. “But it was nished in just
three weeks, and we all passed!”
Being exible when dealing with challenges is vital to the pro-
gram’s success. “ere is no one size ts all. Every year is dierent,
and our focus and plans and professional development may need to
change,” added McPherson. While the overarching objectives are the
same, the day-to-day of the program can be dierent.
e benets of this partnership continue to grow.
“The partnership between Lincoln-West and MetroHealth
began with a very dierent vision than many specialty schools that
accept only certain qualied students,” explained Obrenski. In
this school, the original vision was to enroll kids from the nearby
community, if they chose to attend, and genuinely involve them
in all of the work of the hospital, exposing them to all of the dier-
ent jobs associated with the hospital, teaching them about health
factors, and improving health and economic outcomes for them
and their families. e vision has only grown from there.
Students are nding many personal connections to their learn-
ing. For example, when AFT President Randi Weingarten visited
LWSH, students were engaged in a Stop the Bleed training. ey
were told that there are many dierent types of traumatic bleeding
that they might encounter and were asked what type they wanted
to focus on. Every student chose gunshot wounds because that’s
what they too often deal with in their community. ey have all
been impacted by gun violence in some way, and now they have
the knowledge and skill to increase a victim’s odds of survival.
Another example is an LWSH student who learned to identify
stroke symptoms. When he recognized that his grandmother was
having a stroke, he called an ambulance immediately. His grand-
mother received timely treatment for the stroke in the ambulance
on the way to the hospital, and it greatly improved her outcome.
Beyond the health-focused
curriculum, the partnership
provides wraparound services
to help every student succeed.
30 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
“ere are lots of stories like that,” added Obrenski. “Students
are working in the hospital, both as interns and in the summer,
and graduates of the school are now employed in the hospital.
Students and their families and communities are beneting from
their healthcare knowledge and employment opportunities.”
e community-focused aspect of MetroHealth is central to
the partnership’s success. People of color face the eects of racism
every day, and societal and economic inequities are apparent in
their poorer health outcomes.
7
Adding to the problem, mistrust of
the medical eld is more common among Black and Latinx people
than white people, often as a result of discrimination.
8
By enrolling
and then employing students from the community, the partner-
ship is helping to address some of the inequities and rebuild trust.
“We are trying to create pipelines out of poverty,” said McPher-
son. “It starts with students from the community having meaningful,
hands-on experiences in the healthcare eld. at leads to building
valuable skills that can be applied to a job or career that can economi-
cally sustain a household, and that creates better, healthier commu-
nities. at’s the golden ticket, that’s the pipeline, and it starts with
kids from within the community.”
Beyond the health-focused curriculum, the partnership pro-
vides wraparound services and other components to help every
student succeed. “Once you’re here, you are part of the Metro-
Health family,” asserted Short. Many of the students will be the
rst in their family to attend college. Part of the partnership’s goal
is to make sure students have an after-graduation plan—and a
plan B. The partnership provides them with help, even after
graduation, to navigate uncharted territory through mentors who
have had similar experiences.
Building relationships and trust with parents and families is
another important component. Students have big decisions ahead
of them, and the mentoring program and professional develop-
ment are more successful when families are on board, too. Short
shared an example of MetroHealth’s IT Workforce Development
Program. Some parents were not tech-savvy and did not under-
stand the possibilities of this program; during COVID-19, they
wanted to pull their children out of it. Short explained that stu-
dents who completed the IT program would graduate with three
separate and valuable IT certications worth 17 college credit
hours, giving students a $40,000 annual earning capacity right
out of high school. Helping families understand the opportunities
the IT program opened up for students was essential.
MetroHealth personnel have attended parent-teacher confer-
ences and helped families access available resources and services,
including workforce training classes. “We believe if a student is
in a distressed situation at home—food insecurity, parents work-
ing several jobs, students providing sibling care—there will be
problems in the classroom. ere are resources MetroHealth can
bring to help these students and families,” said Short.
T
hose who helped establish and who continue to work with
the program are proud of its benets for students and the
community. Chaney, an LWSH teacher, is proud of the way
the program is training students from the neighborhood,
giving them knowledge, skills, and opportunities to serve and
give back in their own community. “e partnership sees services
that the community needs and trains students to ll those gaps
in healthcare needs, to serve those who look like them and live in
their community.” She noted that there are about 20 former and
current students working at MetroHealth in certied healthcare
positions as well as food services and other departments.
Gordon witnessed a freshman class in a cadaver study analyzing
blood to determine how a person died and was impressed
by the science and math skills used in the activity. Other
students were learning how to take vitals on a fussy robotic
patient. “Experiential learning is a great motivator,” he said.
“Students were deeply engaged, inspired, and interested
in their work. In this program, students are engaged in
productive tasks worth their time and struggle, preparing
them for careers. And MetroHealth gets the advantage of
having young people ready to ll important job openings
in a healthcare sta shortage.”
“The thing about MetroHealth that sets it apart is
also a challenge in replication because of the mission of
the hospital,” said Obrenski. “e hospital is concerned
about not just the physical health of the people they
serve, but really addressing all of the determinants of
health in a more holistic way. That’s what makes this
program successful. You can’t replicate this with just any hospital
or organization. You need an administration that is committed
to the larger mission. at’s a really important component and
something that I think gets lost. I’ve heard them talk about the
nuts and bolts of the program, but to me, that commitment—that’s
where the secret sauce is. And now, with the opening of the new
MetroHealth Glick Center, we are hopeful that this important
program can be expanded to include more students.”
On a cold Wednesday morning in January, Cleveland’s LWSH
juniors were in the hospital’s professional learning center. e
presentation was on nursing: the various types of nursing roles
and the education requirements for what is currently the highest-
demand job in healthcare.
And in the science lab, just before the seniors in white lab
coats and hospital badges went to their internships for the
morning, McPherson ended the announcements and her spir-
ited pep talk with a request of the students: “I need an arma-
tion word for today.” A young lady shyly raised her hand and
held up a copy of her recent report card. “My word for today,”
she said, “is PROUD.” ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/hummer.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 31
Empowering Futures
How Salem’s Comprehensive CTE Programs Are Shaping Students’ Lives
By Mario Sousa
A
s an immigrant scholar who arrived in the United States
in the mid-’90s at 12 years old, I was steered toward
career and technical education (CTE) programs due
to presumptions about me as a bilingual immigrant.
Regrettably, that meant I was not exposed to college options and
had limited interaction with my high school counselor. Like many
other multiple language students, the message I received was
that college was not a viable path for me. e only postsecondary
options I was introduced to were direct-to-industry and union
apprenticeships. This exposure, along with employability and
entrepreneurial skills, was provided by my CTE instructors, who
played a critical role in preparing me for life after high school.
I ventured into entrepreneurship during my sophomore year
with my instructors’ support after completing my rst year in the
vocational program. ey guided me in launching my own con-
struction business in high school and promoting it to all teachers.
is endeavor became a cornerstone of my professional expe-
rience and led to 12 successful years in construction company
management.
Subsequently, I had the opportunity to become a substitute
teacher for the very program I had graduated from, and this unex-
pected experience was a turning point in my career journey. I
decided to pursue a degree in occupational education. My initial
college experience was marked by challenges, including learning
how to navigate college applications, needing remedial courses to
bridge academic gaps, and adapting to online learning platforms.
Nonetheless, I persisted and ultimately obtained my degree while
teaching carpentry to students who also needed the access to
postsecondary planning that could have greatly beneted me.
My journey strongly inuenced my commitment to providing
CTE that supports all students in maximizing their postsecondary
education and career options.
In today’s modern educational landscape, CTE is a power-
ful force that can transform students’ paths to success. As my
story shows, those paths are no longer confined to a rigidly
linear trajectory. rough CTE, students receive a personalized
approach that aligns with the ever-evolving needs of our global
Mario Sousa is the director of career and technical education at Salem High
School in Salem, Massachusetts. Previously, he was a lead carpentry
teacher for Somerville Public Schools and operated a successful construc-
tion company for 12 years.
JAIME CAMPOS / SALEM NEWS
32 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
economy and provides them exibility and support to achieve
their educational and career aspirations. To do this successfully,
CTE programs feature standards-based course content, career
pathways guided by industry professionals, and evaluations that
foster continuous improvement. In this article, I explore the role
of these elements in a comprehensive CTE program at Salem High
School in Massachusetts.
Bridging Academics and Practical Skills in Salem
In the past, vocational education often focused on preparing stu-
dents primarily for direct entry into specic industries, with lim-
ited exposure to other career pathways.* However, contemporary
CTE programs provide a highly comprehensive education that
goes beyond vocational skills. Students enjoy broader opportuni-
ties and are actively encouraged to prepare for diverse pathways,
including direct entry into industry or union apprenticeships,
or to pursue higher education. They are exposed to advanced
coursework and receive instruction in safety practices, embed-
ded academics to strengthen core knowledge, entrepreneurship
lessons, employability skills development, and computer literacy
and applications. e aim is to provide students with a robust
foundation of soft and transferable skills, empowering them to
excel in various careers and adapt to evolving job markets.
CTE is a dynamic bridge between academic learning and
practical skills, addressing the growing need for a workforce
equipped with both knowledge and hands-on expertise. A
fundamental aspect is its integration with academic standards.
These standards in CTE curricula underscore the belief that
technical expertise and academic prociency are mutually rein-
forcing, working in tandem to give students a broader skill set.
In our school, we have seen how this dynamic bridge provides
students with an array of postsecondary options and prepares
them for the modern workforce. Salem High School, one of 11
schools in Massachusetts’s Salem Public Schools district, boasts
a diverse student body of about 900 students with various racial
and ethnic backgrounds and various needs. e student popula-
tion is 49.7 percent Hispanic, 34.7 percent white, 8.2 percent
African American, and 3.1 percent Asian, and over half of all
students (64.9 percent) are classied as low income. Just over
a third of students (34.7 percent) report that English is not
their rst language, 15.7 percent identify as English language
learners, 24.2 percent receive support for disabilities, and 72.8
percent are categorized as high-needs students.
1
Salem High
School embraces this diversity. We are committed to providing
an inclusive and supportive learning environment to cater to all
students’ unique needs and aspirations.
Salem High School’s comprehensive CTE department stands
out as a unique vocational program in Massachusetts, oering
an educational model distinct from the state’s regional techni-
cal school approach.
†
Salem students follow a comprehensive
daily schedule that seamlessly integrates academics (includ-
ing advanced coursework), electives, and CTE classes. They
begin with a ninth-grade exploratory program, which oers a
comprehensive introduction to our career and technical areas
through an engaging project-based curriculum. Students
gain insight into various elds through our 10 programs:
Automotive Technologies, Building and Property Man-
agement, Carpentry, Culinary Arts, Early Education and
Care, Electrical, Graphic Design, Marine Services Tech-
nology, Medical Assisting, and Programming and Web
Design. is early exposure helps them make informed
choices about their educational and career paths. Fresh-
men also engage in postgraduation course planning
through the school counseling oce.
After this initial introduction, students, or “scholars,”
as we call them, choose one area of concentration, plus
two alternative concentrations in case their rst choice
is oversubscribed. While it is possible for scholars to be
placed in a second- or third-choice program, placement
by nonselective lottery ensures that every scholar has an
equal opportunity to secure their rst-choice program.
ose who do not are placed on a waiting list so that as
many students as possible can explore their preferred
areas of study.
Once accepted, our scholars begin three years of
increasingly in-depth study within their chosen field.
ey take a carefully structured sequence of technical
courses—complemented by detailed syllabi and hands-
on work experiences designed by the program teachers in
collaboration with advisory boards—that facilitates their pro-
gression to advanced prociency. eir educational activities
emphasize higher-order reasoning, continuous improvement,
professional development, and problem-based learning. Addi-
tionally, we prioritize career planning through workshops and
career software tools like MEFA Pathway and Pathful, fostering
self-assessment, exploration, and goal setting.
†
To learn about Massachusetts’s regional technical schools, see “From Margins to
Mainstream: Bringing Career-Connected Learning to Scale” on page 4.
*For more on the history of CTE, see “The Shaping of CTE in Massachusetts and
Beyond” at aft.org/ae/spring2024/sousa_shaping.
JAIME CAMPOS / SALEM NEWS
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 33
Our CTE programs also feature postsecondary linkages
through Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Dual Enrollment
Partnership and optional pathways with endorsements (which
indicate a student has completed a CTE course sequence).
Salem now has several specialized elds of study or pathways,
including pharmacy tech in our Medical Assisting program and
K–12 education in our Early Education and Care program. ese
pathways represent alternative or specialized tracks, allowing
students to make choices aligned with their interests, goals, or
aptitudes. Endorsements within these pathways focus on spe-
cic skills, knowledge areas, or industries and provide students
a more customized and relevant learning experience.
roughout their CTE coursework, scholars have opportuni-
ties to earn nationally recognized certications and accredita-
tions in the automotive (ASE), hospitality (ServSafe), medical
(CCMA, CPR/AED, rst aid, OSHA), and technology (Adobe,
CompTIA Security+, Google Data Analytics, ISC2 Certied in
Cybersecurity) elds, among others. ey also gain essential
postsecondary education and career skills, including emotional
intelligence and critical thinking. Crucially, every CTE scholar
pursues a clear pathway toward industry engagement with
options for postsecondary education to achieve an industry
certificate, associate degree, or higher. Our well-established
articulation agreements with colleges and technical institutes
both locally and across the United States ensure a seamless
transition for our students pursuing their higher education and
career goals.
As subject matter experts-turned-instructors, educators in
CTE play a pivotal role in fostering all of these opportunities.
Salem High School has utilized networking to draw experienced
industry professionals from automotive dealerships, hospitals,
and restaurants into our CTE programs. eir dual expertise
ensures that students receive a comprehensive education
beyond traditional classroom learning. Moreover, the practical
nature of CTE programs often resonates with students, resulting
in increased engagement in and enthusiasm for their studies. To
nd highly credentialed industry professionals willing to edu-
cate high school scholars, Salem recognizes years in industry as
years in education for competitive pay and to acknowledge the
value of these individuals’ knowledge and expertise. Addition-
ally, Salem High School assists with continuous professional
development so that CTE educators can stay current in teaching
methodologies and the dynamic changes within their industries.
Continuous Improvement
In the ever-evolving CTE landscape, continuous improvement
is essential to meet the needs of scholars and the demands of
the modern workforce. We enhance our program through regu-
lar evaluations, active advisory group engagement, integrating
technology and academic curriculum standards to adhere to
performance targets, and improving program accessibility for our
students. is reects our unwavering dedication to providing all
students with a comprehensive and inclusive CTE experience.
Evaluation
A key component of Salem’s continuous improvement is an evalu-
ation process that involves all CTE program stakeholders. is
collaborative approach maximizes the eectiveness of our edu-
cational programs, aligning them with the needs and expectations
of students, families, educators, industries, and higher education
institutions. e collective wisdom of these stakeholders is pivotal
in shaping CTE programs that are dynamic, relevant, and respon-
sive to both education and industry.
As part of the evaluation process, we survey all CTE scholars at
the end of each school year, particularly emphasizing the outgoing
senior class. We follow up with our graduates at six months, one
year, and three years postgraduation. e evaluation thoroughly
examines students’ experiences with our CTE programming,
focusing on seven areas:
1. Teaching and learning. We prioritize providing students with
relevant, timely, and holistic learning experiences.
2. Postgraduation readiness. is core focus ensures our pro-
gram equips students to choose between entering employ-
ment in their program’s industry or pursuing postsecondary
education.
3. Equitable access. Committed to providing every student with
equal opportunities to engage in high-quality CTE programs,
we prioritize CTE education and college and career planning
initiatives starting as early as middle school. Our nonselective
lottery system reects our dedication to fostering a diverse and
inclusive educational environment.
4. Safe, healthy learning environments. Our learning environ-
ments are designed to foster optimal conditions for student
growth and development.
5. Postgraduation planning. We proactively engage students in
thoughtful decision-making aligned with their future goals.
6. Data-informed strategies. Our commitment to continuous
improvement involves data-informed strategies to enhance
the overall CTE experience.
7. Compliance/regulatory requirements. We diligently observe
and adhere to statutory, regulatory, and policy standards.
rough this rigorous and comprehensive evaluation process,
we aim to elevate our CTE programs’ quality and eectiveness. In
addition, we actively seek feedback from our students’ employ-
ers. is ongoing assessment allows us to adapt and improve our
programs to meet the evolving needs of both our scholars and the
industries they enter.
Contemporary CTE
programs provide a
highly comprehensive
education that goes
beyond vocational skills.
34 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Advisory Group Engagement
Our evaluation process is facilitated through a comprehensive
local needs assessment, which actively involves students, par-
ents, sta, advisory board members, and workforce develop-
ment boards. By engaging these critical voices, we ensure that
our CTE programs remain aligned with industry standards and
continue to provide enriching educational experiences for our
students and the broader community.
Collaborating with the MassHire North Shore Workforce Board
2
and Salem High School’s CTE advisory boards has signicantly
heightened the impact of our CTE programs. e MassHire
North Shore Workforce Board is composed of inuential
business leaders appointed by Salem’s mayor on behalf of
the 19 communities that make up the North Shore region,
while Salem High School’s CTE program advisory boards
are composed of business leaders along with union and
postsecondary representatives aligned with each CTE pro-
gram. ese advisors collaborate with educators and provide
valuable input on industry workforce trends, necessary
credentials for immediate employment, and articulation
agreements with colleges. ey are also instrumental in pro-
viding work-based learning experiences and postgraduation
opportunities for CTE scholars. Close partnership with these
groups allows us to customize CTE oerings to precisely
match the local job market’s specic requirements.
We continually adapt our programs based on feedback
from our advisory boards to align with our region’s work-
force needs. One recent example is our carpentry program.
Before 2021, this program focused heavily on cabinet-
making and woodworking. Salem High School realigned
certifications and curriculum for residential carpentry
after establishing a comprehensive advisory board with
privately owned businesses and union business representatives/
organizers outlining in-demand needs on the North Shore. Now,
carpentry students learn to use technology to create and interpret
plans and develop skills in hand and power tools as they make
custom furniture. is collaboration, an indispensable element of
contemporary education, highlights the adaptability and respon-
siveness of CTE to the dynamic nature of the job market.
Technology and Academic Frameworks Integration
In our pursuit of quality CTE programming and access for all stu-
dents at Salem High School, we are dedicated to ongoing reviews
within our School Improvement Plan. e curriculum used in
each program is chosen with feedback from industry and advisory
partners and aligned with the Massachusetts Curriculum Frame-
works,
3
emphasizing a thorough exploration of industry-specic
elements. ese frameworks are currently undergoing a multiyear
process of enhancement and alignment with industry needs.
Technological advancements are instrumental in shaping
workforce needs, and the inuence of technology on our CTE
curriculum development is twofold. First, the Massachusetts
CTE Frameworks focuses primarily on industry-specic tech-
nical standards. This technology integration in CTE ensures
that scholars have the latest skills and knowledge demanded
by contemporary workplaces. Salem High School has invested
heavily throughout all programs on cutting-edge tools and tech-
nologies for our scholars’ education. Recent investments include
restaurant-grade induction cooktops and combination ovens, an
automotive alignment rack and tire machine, alternative energy
trainers, and two virtual dissection tables.*
Second, the frameworks highlight digital literacy as a dedicated
avenue for addressing the impact of technology on education to
ensure that CTE students are procient academically and have the
digital literacy skills to succeed in a technology-driven world. Inte-
grating technological advancements into our CTE curriculum posi-
tions graduates as well-rounded individuals capable of navigating
modern workplaces, where digital prociency is increasingly vital.
Integrated reading and writing strategies also have a paramount
role in the embedded academic strand of the Massachusetts CTE
*In addition to the Massachusetts CTE Frameworks, I have found it helpful to review
other states’ standards. For details, see “Resource Alert: State CTE Standards Report”
at aft.org/ae/spring2024/sousa_standards.
Frameworks—and analyzing our state testing data revealed this is
an area that needs our attention. To address this need, we prioritize
integrating embedded academics into all aspects of learning in the
CTE classroom. CTE educators utilize common planning time with
academic coaches to align program curricula with reading and
writing activities and assessments. ey also review data to identify
achievements and decits in scholars’ skill sets and determine if
course activities and summative assessments align with Salem High
School’s expectations for academic rigor.
Improving Program Accessibility
Another identied opportunity for improvement was in making
CTE accessible to all students. Improving accessibility requires col-
laboration with multiple school departments—specically with
counseling and special education. is could include rening shop-
based and related curricula, as in the case of Omar. Omar, a scholar
enrolled in a Life Skills sub-separate electrical program, had limited
manual dexterity—so Salem purchased a circuit kit that allowed
him to participate in a wiring unit alongside his peers. Creating
these opportunities involves attention to detail in lesson planning,
AFT
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 35
understanding accommodations, conducting assessments, and
actively contributing to developing students’ individualized educa-
tion programs. is departmental collaboration extends through-
out our students’ college and career planning journey and always
includes transferable skills aligned with their interests. By address-
ing this identied area for enhancement, we show our commitment
to fostering a supportive learning environment for our scholars.
Challenges
ere are notable challenges in implementing CTE programs. Suc-
cess requires a concerted eort to alter perceptions, address resource
constraints, adapt to industry changes, reduce student representation
gaps, and maintain program quality and consistency. It is pivotal to
address these challenges by developing eective solutions to ensure
sustainable integration of CTE into educational systems.
Altering Perceptions
One prevalent challenge is the perception and stigma asso-
ciated with CTE that stem from a historical bias favoring
traditional academic pathways over vocational or technical
education.
4
To combat this, educators and policymakers need
to reshape the narrative around CTE, emphasizing its value in
providing academic and practical skills crucial for success in
various career paths.
In Salem, while this perception is on the decline, some com-
munity members still believe CTE programs are for students
who are not successful in core academics and cannot succeed
in higher education. is bias can result in a lack of interest and
participation in CTE programs. We have invested in educat-
ing our students about their postsecondary opportunities in
Salem. We highlight articulation agreements with colleges that
recognize scholars’ CTE credentials as college credits, include
higher education–related careers in our public newsletters to
families, and expose students to college panels alongside career
and union panels.
Addressing Resource Constraints
Another signicant challenge is resource constraints—including
limited funding, outdated equipment, and inadequate training
opportunities for educators—that potentially compromise the
quality of CTE programs. Partnerships between educational
institutions and industry can be harnessed to secure funding,
mentorship programs, access to modern equipment, and other
needed resources. As an example, our current partners, such as
Salem State University, are increasing opportunities for an edu-
cator pathway at Salem High School that includes college credit
through early college. Another example is a business partnership
that allowed us to double the amount of equipment accessible to
students in the electrical program. And we continue to advocate
for increased government funding for CTE initiatives, which is
vital to ensure equitable student opportunities.
Adapting to Industry Changes
Aligning CTE programs with rapidly evolving industry needs
poses an ongoing challenge, given that certain sectors require
constant updates to curriculum and resources. Educators and
industry professionals can mitigate this challenge by establish-
ing regular communication channels to stay informed about
industry trends. Our CTE advisory boards are instrumental in
ensuring that our curricula and resources align with industry
standards and that students have access to education and cer-
tication opportunities for the jobs of tomorrow. We have also
implemented flexible and modular program structures that
allow for easier curriculum updates.
Reducing Student Representation Gaps
Despite the numerous benefits students gain from participat-
ing in CTE programs, certain demographic groups—such as
women and individuals from underrepresented racial and eth-
nic backgrounds—still face visibility challenges in specific CTE
fields. This lack of representation may be influenced by stereo-
types, limited awareness, and systemic barriers that impede
access. Inclusivity in CTE is crucial to addressing socioeco-
nomic disparities and ensuring that all students have equal
access to educational and career opportunities. A diverse and
inclusive CTE environment prepares individuals for success in
different industries, contributes to innovation, and effectively
addresses the varied needs of the labor market. Recognizing
and addressing representation gaps and implementing tar-
geted inclusivity initiatives are essential to fostering diversity
and inclusiveness in CTE.
Salem High School actively seeks opportunities for diverse
student representation in all programs. is means dismantling
barriers and creating environments that inspire individuals from
diverse backgrounds to explore career pathways. First, our CTE
department is among the district’s most diverse, including
educators who are nontraditional by gender, are multilingual,
and represent multiple ethnicities. Additionally, we carefully
consider inclusive representation in our educational tools, such
as our Medical Assisting manikins and the baby simulators in
Early Education and Care. Finally, all our advisory boards are
highly inclusive and representative of Salem High School’s stu-
dent body. By actively breaking stereotypes, addressing biases,
and fostering diversity, CTE can contribute to overcoming tradi-
tional gender or cultural dominance in specic elds. Initiatives
aimed at enhancing diversity in CTE—such as targeted outreach,
awareness campaigns, mentorship programs, collaborations
with community organizations, and including diverse role
models and success stories in curricula—help us create a more
inclusive educational setting.
Salem High School’s
CTE program provides a
personalized experience
that integrates
academic knowledge
with practical skills.
36 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Maintaining Program Quality and Consistency
Ensuring the quality and consistency of CTE programs across
dierent regions is a multifaceted challenge that necessitates
standardizing curricula and certication processes. Govern-
ment bodies are crucial in establishing and enforcing these
standards, requiring collaboration between dierent levels of
government, educational institutions, and industry representa-
tives to create a cohesive and nationally recognized framework
for CTE. Governments play a pivotal role by oering adequate
funding, establishing supportive policies, and emphasizing the
signicance of CTE. Educators must continually update their
skills and collaborate with industry partners to ensure their pro-
grams remain relevant. Industry leaders contribute substantially
by providing internships, apprenticeships, and insights into
the skills required in the workforce. By fostering collaboration
among these stakeholders, CTE implementation challenges can
be reframed as opportunities to establish a resilient and eective
CTE ecosystem.
integrating digital tools into classrooms, and simulating real-
world experiences are integral aspects of educators’ instruc-
tional practices.
Salem High School ensures all CTE educators can attend
the yearly Massachusetts Association of Vocational Adminis-
trators (MAVA) Connecting for Success conference. Multiple
educators have been able to travel to other comprehensive and
regional schools to observe their CTE programs and receive job
alike professional development with other educators in their
elds. Finally, CTE educators are continually connected to the
MAVA training that applies to their programs and individual
professional learning goals. ese opportunities underscore
the dynamic nature of modern career-focused education, where
educators play a pivotal role in preparing students for the ever-
changing landscape of the professional world.
Conclusion
Salem High School’s comprehensive CTE program showcases
our commitment to providing a personalized educational expe-
rience that seamlessly integrates academic knowledge with
practical skills. rough meticulous evaluation and continuous
improvement eorts, we aim to deliver a well-rounded, inclusive
educational journey for all our scholars. Collaborations with
regional workforce development boards and advisory boards
exemplify our adaptability and responsiveness to local job mar-
kets, solidifying CTE’s standing as an indispensable element of
contemporary education.
My journey from immigrant scholar to entrepreneur and
educator illuminates both the profound impact of CTE on stu-
dents’ lives and careers and the pivotal role of CTE educators.
My participation in CTE equipped me with practical skills for the
workforce, and my instructors were central to my career trajec-
tory and success. Similarly, the success stories emerging from
Salem’s CTE programs show the magnitude of their impact on
students. Our graduates share narratives of CTE experiences that
propelled them into thriving careers and unforeseen opportuni-
ties. ese stories show CTE’s immediate impact on employability
and its long-term impact on career growth and advancement.
For instance, one 2023 Medical Assisting graduate is currently a
student at Endicott College and works part time at North Shore
Physicians Group, utilizing the Medical Assisting certicate she
received in high school. In essence, the combination of hands-on
skill development, critical-thinking enhancement, and real-world
experience associated with this student’s CTE program shaped
the trajectory of her life.
While we celebrate the numerous success stories and benets
we have seen through CTE at Salem High School, we know that
there are many challenges yet to address to ensure equal access to
educational and career opportunities for all students. It is impera-
tive that governments, educators, and industry stakeholders col-
laborate to cultivate a robust CTE ecosystem. CTE is a dynamic
and responsive force that goes beyond a mere academic pursuit. It
is a transformative inuence that prepares students for success in
an ever-evolving professional landscape and ultimately empow-
ers them to thrive amid the challenges and opportunities of our
contemporary world. ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/sousa.
Another facet of maintaining quality and consistency is pro-
fessional development so that CTE teachers continually update
their instructional practices and subject matter knowledge to
maintain relevance in their elds. To address this, Salem High
School provides tuition reimbursement to take the necessary
academic classes for professional licensure, connection to a
mentor to navigate professional development, weekly common
planning time with an academic coach to align lesson planning
to embedded academics, and regular supervision and observa-
tion to provide feedback and reinforce strong teaching practices.
e broader spectrum of skills and career pathways now covered
by CTE necessitates a diverse teacher skill set, including techni-
cal expertise and the ability to foster critical thinking, problem
solving, and eective communication in students. Additionally,
the blurred boundary between vocational and academic educa-
tion means that keeping up with technological advancements,
JAIME CAMPOS / SALEM NEWS
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 37
Skills for the
Waterways and Beyond
A Look Inside New York City’s Harbor School
Ever wondered how to become the captain
of a ferry or the leader of a team of engineers
designing robotic submarines? New York
City’s Harbor School has answers for you.
This unique school offers eight career path-
ways: aquaculture, marine biology research,
marine affairs, marine systems technology,
ocean engineering, professional diving, ves-
sel operations, and welding and fabrication.
We spoke with three Harbor School
teachers—Clarke Dennis, Rick Lee, and
Robert Markuske—to learn about the
school and how they help students develop
a strong foundation for careers on and off
the water. We’re particularly impressed
with how they maintain close ties to
industry professionals and keep tabs on
job trends so they know they’re preparing
students for growing careers.
–EDITORS
EDITORS: Tell us about the Harbor School.
RICK LEE: The Harbor School is a career
and technical education (CTE) school
designed to meet the growing demand
for maritime-related careers through
academics and hands-on learning. It is on
Governors Island in New York Harbor—not
far from the Statue of Liberty—and acces-
sible only by ferry. We tailor our academic
programs to themes and projects that are
tangible for the students in this environ-
ment. Our mission is to develop aware-
ness of the waterfront, the industries of
the waterfront, the environmental impact
of the waterfront, and the waterways and
all of the commercial, environmental, and
recreational functions of those waterways.
Importantly, our enrollment is open to all
high school students in New York City. We
have more applicants than we do seats,
so students are chosen by lottery. We also
have eight dierent CTE programs, which
is unusual. Much larger schools in New
York City have fewer career tracks.
EDITORS: What led you to the Harbor
School? What do you teach?
ROBERT MARKUSKE: I teach marine aairs.
It’s a natural resource and management
class with an environmental anthropology
lens. We examine the human impact on
the environment and try to solve complex
problems through both policy and hands-
on approaches. For example, my students
are guring out how to manage our food
waste at the Harbor School and starting an
urban farm to manage stormwater.
Prior to coming to the Harbor School,
I was a park ranger on Governors Island,
and I won a grant to manage a partner-
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE HARBOR SCHOOL
38 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
ship between the Harbor School and the
National Park Service to introduce stu-
dents to national parks. en, while I was
working in a national park out west, the
Harbor School asked me to come teach
history. I took that position in 2012, and
then a couple of years ago I was asked to
transition into marine aairs. Prior to the
park service, I did environmental policy
and activism.
CLARKE DENNIS: I’ve been in the welding
industry for 30 years. I’m a journeyman
ironworker by trade but have done a lot
of welding in other industries, including
ship repair and scenery building for the-
aters. I was recruited to work with one of
the school’s nonprot partners, the Billion
Oyster Project, in 2015. I ran an afterschool
program for them two days a week for a
couple of years, then became full-time
with the school, teaching welding and
fabrication as part of the marine systems
technology career pathway.
RICK: I teach the ocean engineering course
of study. I joined the Harbor School faculty
as a math teacher in 2005 when it was just
getting started. e school didn’t become
a full-fledged CTE school until about a
decade ago. Prior to that, there were a lot
of shop classes, and some courses were
aligned with career pathways. In those
early days, I had an afterschool robotics
program. Partnering with the Stevens Insti-
tute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jer-
sey, we were building underwater robots.
at soon became an elective class and was
part of the school’s transition to having an
ocean engineering career pathway.
Before I became a teacher, I was a lot of
things: a metal worker in small fabrication
shops, a commercial sherman in south-
east Alaska, and a freelance writer.
EDITORS: In the past, too many CTE pro-
grams were not designed to prepare
students for higher learning and for jobs
with opportunities to advance. How do you
ensure you’re opening doors for students?
ROBERT: With my students, I have a three-
pillar approach with a classroom compo-
nent, a lab component, and a work-based
learning experience. For our waste man-
agement project, I teach the science and
impact of waste in our society and how
waste is managed at the school. Students
realize that it’s a problem because schools
are inherently wasteful, so then they work
with other stakeholders to make our school
less wasteful. Currently, my students are
guring out how to make as much waste as
possible into compost. en they are using
that compost in an urban farm that they’re
developing. And since I’m teaching marine
aairs, my students also write about what
they’ve learned and done. Last fall, they
wrote testimony and spoke at City Hall on
behalf of citywide composting.
is multidisciplinary approach is inher-
ently experiential but also grounded in and
reinforced by academic skills. It prepares
kids for both careers and college. Students
from my program can move right into work-
ing for urban farms, compost organizations,
or environmental nonprots—or they can
go to college to study environmental policy
or further enhance their academic and
hands-on experiences with an associate
degree in natural resource management.
I try to make sure my students understand
all aspects of what they’re doing. When they
are planting on our urban farm, do they know
the science behind what they’re planting? Do
they know the reason behind what they’re
planting? Is it a native plant? Is it what Indig-
enous people grew here? I think the Harbor
School tries to make everything our students
study multidisciplinary.
CLARKE: With welding and fabrication,
we’re focused on postsecondary options.
I’m a product of an apprenticeship. I
worked full-time and was paid while learn-
ing at night. Now I’m working with unions
and the building trades to prepare my stu-
dents for apprenticeships—and I’m also
working with colleges to develop articula-
tion agreements to be sure our students
are ready for their welding programs. We
have an articulation agreement with City
Tech here in New York, and in January I
took a group of students to meet with the
apprenticeship coordinator for the local
ironworkers’ unions.
Our courses are not just hands-on.
Students also learn about the different
welding processes, safety, and literacy in
“Students from
my program can
move right into
working for urban
farms, compost
organizations, or
environmental
nonprots.”
–ROBERT MARKUSKE
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 39
terms of being able to read blueprints and
welding symbols. ese are online assign-
ments that my students do, and then they
earn industry-recognized credentials.
RICK: Internships are a big part of our
coursework. All of our seniors have intern-
ships in the spring, and we try to arrange
summer internships for students after 10th
and 11th grades. I’ve had students intern
with architects, with professionals who are
designing circuit boards for satellites, and
with those who are using 3-D manufactur-
ing for rapid prototyping.
ROBERT: We do a lot of networking to nd
these summer and senior internships. We’re
looking for workplace learning that draws
on the content we teach, career trends in
New York City, and students’ interests. I
recently had students intern with the Brook-
lyn Children’s Museum, a compost facility,
and an environmental nonprot.
RICK: An important part of work-based
learning is helping students research what
careers align with their skills and interests.
When I have students take career surveys
early on, they’re given a list of matching
careers and I ask, “How many of these do
you actually know what they are?” Educa-
tion helps, but experience is key. Students
may not gure out what they want to do while
in high school, but we can give them tools
to keep exploring and doing career research.
ROBERT: Students also need to experience
“a day in the life.” Some said, “Oh, I want to
do scientic research.” After I arranged an
internship, they saw the challenges of day-to-
day work. Students spent a summer working
with scientists in our estuary, looking at data
and making presentations. It was hard work,
and they needed to see this to reassess their
interest moving forward. Sometimes kids
come in with a very supercial, very glamor-
ous view of what a career is. Our job is to not
only gain their interest but also show them
what it really is to be in that career.
EDITORS: If you think back a decade or so,
what do you wish you had known? What
have you learned that may be of use to
educators ramping up their CTE pathways?
ROBERT: I want to highlight that it is an
incredible amount of work because our
programs are predicated on career outlooks
and trends. The program I facilitate has
changed because of the job market. A lot
of my content and projects are now geared
toward green careers and sustainability. We
have to be educated ourselves, constantly
watching where career opportunities are
growing. The program is up for reevalua-
tion every five years; although that’s a lot
of work, I agree with that process because
it ensures we regularly examine what we’re
teaching. We’re teaching students to pursue
careers, and if we’re teaching toward careers
that are in decline or are oversaturated, we
have to know that and change directions.
CLARKE: We’re trying to build an even more
diverse group of advisors for our program
to keep tabs on market trends. at’s one
thing I would suggest to anybody who’s
starting a CTE program: develop partners
that are not just one- or two-dimensional.
You need a broad look at career opportuni-
ties for your students.
Each CTE program at the Harbor School
has a professional advisory committee of
academic and industry partners; staying
in touch with them is how we ensure we’re
preparing students for good careers. I sub-
scribe to several dierent industry maga-
zines to stay ahead. Our school is a member
of the American Welding Society, and I use
its curriculum and test. We also have local
connections to ironworkers, the shipbuild-
ing and ship repair industry, and the theater
industry (since welding and fabrication for
sets is a big business in New York City).
I let students know that it’s good to
diversify in terms of what kind of welding
job they may be doing in the future—it
could be anything from wind turbines to
HVAC systems to skyscrapers. Once they
become welders, they need to be exible
and jump from one industry to another as
demand rises and falls.
ROBERT: I think something that you can
hear in our answers is how important it is
to go out in the community and see what
is available. We nd problems in commu-
nities and work with students on solving
those problems, with a trade or career
focus. For instance, Clarke and I are col-
laborating now. My students are trying to
start a farm, but we had a problem with our
“I’m working with
unions and the
building trades
to prepare my
students for
apprenticeships.”
–CLARKE DENNIS
40 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
irrigation system. My kids designed the
irrigation system, and Clarke’s students
will build the infrastructure.
RICK: Shifting gears a little, one of my les-
sons learned is to remember to step back.
After the 9th grade survey of all of our
career pathways, students select their path-
way to focus on for grades 10–12. Coming
into the 10th grade, do they really know
that they want to be a welder, an urban
farmer, or an engineer? Even if they stick
with their plan A throughout high school,
they may nd out later it’s not what they
want to do. We have to provide them with
specific skills and credentials and make
sure they have the knowledge and skills to
be able to change their minds later. Fortu-
nately, in their hands-on experiences our
students learn many transferable skills,
from safety on the job to how to collaborate
with colleagues. Even though this is a CTE
school, it’s also still a testing ground for our
students—and it should be. ey’re kids.
EDITORS: What are you excited about in
your programs?
CLARKE: We are applying for a grant from
the American Welding Society for about
$25,000 to help with expanding our fume
extraction so students can branch out into
dierent kinds of metals. I’m hopeful that
we’ll win this year—but I’ll keep applying
until we do win.
We are also creating a more real-life
work environment in our welding shop:
each grade now has a crew chief (what was
known as a foreman in the past). Students
are learning to take orders and direction
from another person around their age.
At the moment, all three crew chiefs are
female. ey truly earned their positions,
but I’m glad it has happened because it’s
good in a traditionally male-driven indus-
try for the male students to be comfortable
taking orders from a female.
ROBERT: I am very excited that this inter-
disciplinary approach to solving complex
problems with sustainability is becoming
a trend. One thing on the horizon for us is
that the marine affairs program and the
aquaculture program are collaborating,
along with a partner, on developing a con-
trolled environmental agricultural certi-
cate. It’s the epitome of solving a problem.
We’re a city, and our natural resources
are being depleted; hydroponics is a way
of providing communities with food. Stu-
dents will leave high school with the skills
to be technicians in providing communi-
ties with sustainable produce options. I’m
excited about that. In addition, students
are working with several stakeholders
on evaluating the coastal resiliency plan
for Lower Manhattan; they are engaging
with professionals from multiple fields
to explore solutions from different per-
spectives. is is really opening up career
exploration. If they can tie in composting,
hydroponics, and advocacy in a future plan
for Lower Manhattan resilience projects,
that will be pioneering.
Our school has been selected to be a
pilot for the New York City Public Schools’
Exploring Sustainability and Green Careers
course. We have chosen a cohort of stu-
dents from each of our CTE programs to
learn the fundamentals of sustainability
and then work with an outside organiza-
tion to obtain solar installation training.
ereafter they will design and install solar
panels for a drip irrigation system that uses
rainwater. is embodies career explora-
tion, training, and implementing solutions
at a micro level on our campus.
RICK: I think the offshore wind industry
will provide great opportunities that poten-
tially impact all of our programs. ere are
marine biologists studying the effects of
having wind turbines in the water. There
are policymakers examining environmen-
tal impact studies to determine appropriate
regulations. It cuts through all of us, which is
awesome because it also allows students to
have a direct, high-need training program.
We’re working with the New York State
Energy Research and Development Author-
ity, which is a state agency working toward
reducing greenhouse gas emissions and
promoting economic growth. It’s providing
money for oshore wind training.
Another great opportunity is that we
received funding to become a P-TECH
school; this is a nationwide model in which
students earn industry-recognized associ-
ate degrees and gain work experience. It’s
a natural extension of our current career
pathways. We just had our rst meeting in
January, so there’s lots of planning ahead—
but it’s an exciting development. ☐
“Students may not
gure out what
they want to do
while in high
school, but we can
give them tools
to keep exploring
and doing career
research.”
–RICK LEE
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 41
Creating Career Pathways
How a Rural School District Is Meeting Students’ and Businesses’ Needs
By Jenny Shiplett and Erin Schumaker
S
ome students don’t enjoy school in the traditional sense,
and they don’t see how it relates to their future. is can
lead to poor academic performance, chronic absenteeism,
and a high likelihood of dropping out. We are addressing
this issue in many ways in New Lexington Schools, a small district
serving the roughly 35,000 people of Perry County, Ohio. Our most
important strategy is expanding career and technical education
(CTE) and workforce development opportunities to promote high
student engagement and help motivate students to stay in school
and graduate.
Adding career pathways, adjusting school schedules to allow
for exploration, incorporating a focus on experiential learning
and exposure throughout K–12, instilling soft skills, building part-
nerships with the local career center and local businesses, and
providing support and resources for students and their families
have helped us increase performance and attendance and raise
our graduation rate from 78 percent in 2018 to 92 percent in 2023.
1
In 2016, while examining district data, we noticed that only
about 20 percent of our students were going on to college. Real-
izing that we have local businesses with needs and students who
aren’t going to college, we asked, “What can we do to bridge that
gap so these young adults can be productive and successful in
careers right out of high school in their own hometown and sur-
rounding area?” We asked businesses in the community what
problems they were having nding good employees and what
we could do to prepare our students for the jobs they oered. We
made a list of the essential skills that our businesses said students
were lacking, such as punctuality, speaking clearly, making eye
contact, perseverance, and time management. We developed a
soft skills program to be taught starting in kindergarten. Busi-
nesses also said that access to a driver’s license and transporta-
tion were issues, so we brought back a driver’s education program
to the high school, free of charge, because the course outside of
school was too expensive for most of our students and their fami-
lies to aord.
All school districts in Ohio are required to have a business
advisory council to foster collaboration that will enrich students’
education and ensure employers have the workforce they need.
Our council, which was awarded three-star status by the state in
2023, has grown to 62 members composed of business partners
from Perry and surrounding counties. eir input helps us plan
and implement the programs that will train their future employ-
ees. Right now, we’re focused on our high school students, but
eventually we would like to oer adult workforce development
programming in the evenings.
Jenny Shiplett teaches third grade at New Lexington Elementary School
and is the president of the New Lexington Federation of Teachers. Erin
Schumaker is the federal programming and grants administrator for New
Lexington Schools.
PHOTOS BY AFT STAFF, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED
42 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
From Animal Husbandry to Healthcare
Our career pathways journey started with our vocational agricul-
ture (VoAg) programming. VoAg has been part of our high school
for many years. Currently, we have the second largest FFA (formerly
Future Farmers of America) program in the state of Ohio.
2
We have a
120-acre school farm that functions as a hands-on learning lab. Stu-
dents breed and take care of pigs, sheep, and rabbits. ey raise goats,
turkeys, and chickens. Our farm allows students who don’t live on a
farm or who can’t house an animal to experience animal husbandry.
Students are entered into a lottery to take one of the farm animals to
the county fair. Students do not have to pay for the animal, but they do
have to commit to taking care of the animal, its stall, and its training
while it resides at the farm. ey are then able to show at the fair;
when they sell their animal, they keep the proceeds. e farm also
has a contract with Beck’s, a seed company.
We are Beck’s testing plot for variations of
corn seeds. e kids take soil samples and
study the corn yields of the dierent seeds.
rough all of this, they earn certications
like OSHA 10 (a safety course), forklift opera-
tion, and welding along the way.
We also have potato and pumpkin
patches. The elementary students have
farm eld days and help plant the pumpkin patch. We also take
the elementary kids on a lot of short eld trips to the farm to see
the sheep, pigs, chickens, and rabbits. Our high schoolers in the
agricultural program teach the elementary students about the
animals and how to care for them.
Our VoAg program has long been popular, so we examined how
to engage more students within that pathway. We applied for and
were awarded grants that allowed us to include an entry-level weld-
ing certication (American Welding Society D1.1). And, through a
partnership with a local community college, our students take care
of a vineyard and harvest the grapes. e local community college
uses the grapes to make wine, while our students make jelly that
they give away and serve at FFA banquets throughout the year.
We recently won a grant from our local Soil and Water Con-
An Insider’s
Look at
Healthcare
Careers
I’m a nurse with Genesis HealthCare System
and a New Lexington Schools Business
Advisory Council member. As a council
member, I visit schools to talk to students
about healthcare careers, and I offer students
workplace tours and job shadow experiences
to show them there’s more to healthcare
than many of them know.
When I give a tour, I take the kids around
the building and have people from all
departments talk to them about careers and
the required schooling. That gives students
a better idea of what they might want to do
after high school. Students can also choose
a one-on-one job shadow experience with
different departments to understand what
a job entails. Currently, our job shadowing
focuses on high school students, but we
hope to expand to middle schools so that
younger students have more time to think
about careers.
We’ve also partnered with the school
district to work with high school phlebotomy
students. After students do some academic
work at their school—learning anatomy
and practicing on a phlebotomy training
arm—they come into the hospital and work
side-by-side with Genesis phlebotomists to
complete the required number of successful
sticks on live people for their certication.
That’s more than job shadowing; that’s doing
the job with somebody to guide them.
Our phlebotomists work with students
on their technical and communication skills.
A lot of this career involves explaining the
procedure and knowing what to say to help
patients who are afraid of needles. This
on-the-job education is valuable.
For students who complete the program
and earn their certication, we’re working on
being able to employ them as phlebotomists
for local nursing facilities. Phlebotomy
is a good entryway to other healthcare
careers. After working with Genesis for
a year, students are eligible for tuition
reimbursement from Genesis for a nursing
degree, so they graduate with minimal to
no student debt. If they don’t want to enter
nursing, they could try a position such as
patient transport or radiology technician.
There are many opportunities.
The school district is open to council
members’ input and help to guide the career
pathway programs they offer students.
We’ve recently discussed an opportunity
to remodel a campus building as a clinic.
Genesis provided input about the rooms
and equipment needed to offer x-rays and
other services.
This type of partnership between local
employers and schools through business
advisory councils is key for the future.
Businesses struggling with employee
recruitment and retention can help shape
the incoming workforce, and we can give
kids a sense of purpose for their future and
help keep talent in our local communities.
It’s a win-win-win.
–Jason Adams, RN, BSN, manager,
Genesis Perry County Emergency
Department; member, New Lexington
Schools Business Advisory Council
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 43
servation District to build a greenhouse. We have applied for a
US Department of Agriculture Farm to School grant to outt the
greenhouse with the equipment needed to grow our own fruits
and vegetables year-round, which will be used in our school caf-
eterias. If awarded, our middle school VoAg students will lead the
initiative and will help guide decision making alongside our food
service entity, VoAg teachers, and middle school science teachers.
With our VoAg program thriving, we started wondering what
we could do for our students who were going to the Tri-County
Career Center. Tri-County is a state-approved vocational school
that services several surrounding high schools, including ours,
but students’ interest far outstrips the school’s capacity. Many of
our students couldn’t take various programs they were interested
in because there were not enough spaces. When they were able
to enroll, they missed out on afterschool activities because the
center is an hour away by bus.
By partnering with Tri-County, we started our own building
trades program, with electrical trades embedded in our workforce
building. e district provides the materials—and we have plenty
of spaces for our students. This allowed our school district to
obtain state CTE dollars to help sustain the program. Our students
have partnered with Habitat for Humanity to help build a house
within the community. e district also has a partnership with
the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) for
electrical trades in which students train on virtual reality headsets
in a virtual electrical lab and then move to an actual lab. Students
will be able to interview with the IBEW upon graduation and if
accepted, will start an apprenticeship at the second-year level.
Now, we have career pathways beyond agriculture and trades.
Drawing from the state of Ohio’s Top Jobs website, district sta
analyzed the careers that are expected to grow within our region.
is analysis, as well as student surveys, helped drive the district’s
vision for the future.
Many of our students are interested in healthcare careers. In
conjunction with Tri-County, we started a phlebotomy program,
complete with draw arms and a medical manikin for training prior
Pre-Apprenticeship for a Go-Getter
I’m 18 and nishing my senior year at New
Lexington High School. In the fall, I enrolled
in the combined carpentry and electrical class
because I thought I might want to be a car-
penter. But carpentry didn’t feel like a good
t. One day during class, Daryl Jones from the
IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers) visited to tell us about the electrical
trades and the pre-apprenticeship we could
do in the spring semester. It sounded like a
great career path for me.
I started to learn more about the benets
of becoming an electrician—about the great
pay and benets and the different opportuni-
ties available if you fully commit to this path.
I loved it. I was the second person to nish my
online credential coursework to be eligible for
the pre-apprenticeship, and the local union
instantly placed me at a job site helping set up
the new Facebook data center near Columbus.
Five days a week, I work on a team of six
people—journeymen electricians and another
pre-apprentice who is a friend, with a fore-
man overseeing us—doing a lot of the physi-
cal work to lay out the electrical setup for the
data center. We’re running conduit for the
buildings that will be built, and we’ll even-
tually be running wires through the dirt to
connect to the buildings. Everything is being
built from the ground up, so it’s a lot of work.
I have great relationships with my team.
My friend—the other pre-apprentice—and
I carpool to work every day, and we are
learning so much from the journeymen who
have been mentoring and guiding us since
we started. We learn by watching them, but
they also let us do some things, helping us
every step of the way, so we get hands-on
experience. They don’t hesitate to help us or
to explain everything that we’re going to do
before we even get started, so I really feel
comfortable working with them.
I’m really seeing how both the carpentry
and the electrician classes helped prepare me
for this job. When I took the electrician course,
I didn’t realize how much of what I was learn-
ing would actually translate to what I’m doing
now. I haven’t pulled wire yet, so I’m not calcu-
lating gures like we learned in class, but I’m
already using what we learned about safety.
And in the carpentry class, I was able to get my
OSHA 10 card, which I need for this job.
When I get home from work, I still have
school—I’m nishing my high school require-
ments online. After I graduate, I hope to
be accepted into the IBEW’s apprenticeship
program and start electrician school one day
a week while still working. One day, I would
love to have my own business and be able to
hire my own crew. But I’m very happy where
I am, working my way up to being a journey-
man and getting as much knowledge as I can.
This year was my rst CTE experience, and
it has been a much better t for me than the
college-going path that other kids are on. I’m
a go-getter, and I want to get my life planned
out and started as quickly as possible. Now I
have a great job where I’m getting paid well
for my age and earning a pension already. As
I work my way up this pathway, I’m going to
be making more money than a lot of other
kids who graduate college with student debt.
I would denitely encourage other high
school students to pursue a CTE pathway, even
in ninth or tenth grade. Learning a career that
can start you out well in life and that pays you
while you’re learning is amazing.
–Chase Dumolt, senior,
New Lexington High School
Our career pathways journey
started with our vocational
agriculture programming.
We have a 120-acre school
farm that functions as a
hands-on learning lab.
44 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Future Electricians Earn While They Learn
As the special projects coordinator for an
IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers) local in Newark, Ohio, and an advi-
sor for IBEW’s apprenticeship program, I work
with high schools to build pre-apprenticeship
programs for those who are interested in
upskilling and nding their way into a trade.
Being on the New Lexington Schools Busi-
ness Advisory Council is a great opportunity
to partner with schools to prepare the future
workforce. We have a great relationship with
New Lexington High School, which recently
added building trades as a CTE pathway.
We partnered with them to supplement this
pathway with a credentialing course for stu-
dents who are interested in electrical careers.
This partnership helps meet our region’s
huge need for electricians and apprentices.
Intel, Facebook, Google, and Amazon data
centers are all in our region, so we are the
future Silicon Valley of Ohio. Through this pro-
gram, students are receiving credits to gradua-
tion, but more importantly, they are receiving
a path to a career. I love meeting students like
Chase and encouraging them to learn about
pre-apprenticeship and the great career oppor-
tunities available through apprenticeship.
We began the rollout of our state-recog-
nized pre-apprenticeship program with New
Lexington High School. Students complete
our first-year curriculum, called the interim
credentials (created by the Electrical Training
Alliance), as a self-paced online course with a
virtual reality component that allows them to
experience a job site virtually. Students learn
about the electrical industry, apprenticeship,
and employment in general, and they receive
job-specific knowledge such as electrical
theory, how to wire devices, and how conduc-
tors and insulators work. The national average
time to complete the interim credentials is 220
hours. Chase is one of two New Lexington stu-
dents who nished in less than half that time.
After completing the interim creden-
tials, students receive a certicate and can
interview for just about any apprenticeship
program across the nation. Chase has inter-
viewed for our local IBEW program; in late
spring, a committee will select candidates.
Chase is on track to be admitted, and we’re
hopeful that he’ll soon be one of our new
apprentices. In the meantime, he’s doing
great as a pre-apprentice.
Students, schools, and local businesses all
benet from the Business Advisory Council
partnerships. Students and schools can learn
about our career paths that help students
who work with us earn over $60,000 right
out of high school. IBEW benets by directly
sharing our needs for soft and hard skills in
our future workforce. This partnership also
helps us intentionally bridge representation
gaps and bring more equity and inclusion to
our workforce. We are working directly with
our schools to point more female students
and students of color into our programs.
I encourage schools to consider offering
pre-apprenticeships. It’s an opportunity that
I never heard about when I was in high school
because everyone was talking about college
for all. Today the conversation has shifted
to “college-ready for all,” which is a great
direction for students. All our apprentices
earn college credits as they complete chal-
lenging coursework with strict academic
performance requirements. But they also get
access to the trades, which is an amazing path
for many, many people. It’s great to be part
of a partnership that helps students make the
connection between their academic learning
and their future careers.
–Daryl Jones, special projects coordinator,
Newark Electric Joint Apprenticeship and
Training Committee; member, New
Lexington Schools Business Advisory Council
to students’ rst live stick. We’re currently developing a pathway for
our students to obtain their licensed practical nurse credentials by
the time they leave high school. at would allow them to obtain
their registered nurse license in less time and enter the workforce
earlier. is programming is possible through our new partnership
with a local hospital that is part of Genesis HealthCare System,
which has locations all over southeastern Ohio. e hospital has
750 jobs, from clinicians to IT and custodial workers, that it can’t
ll right now. rough this partnership, our students can meet their
clinical hours as high school students. We have a memorandum
of understanding that allows students 16 years of age and older to
have opportunities to intern in many careers within the hospital.
Based on our combined state job-growth and student-interest
data, we’ve also expanded our CTE course oerings to include a
fabrication lab, a teacher academy, media plus (which encom-
passes podcasting, video and photo editing, light and image
processing, social media, and website design), and a drone pilot
license. Our plans for the future include developing CTE pathways
for advanced manufacturing, additional healthcare credentials
(including respiratory therapists, x-ray technicians, and multi-
skilled technicians), broadband/fiber optic technicians, and
additional welding certications.
Lessons Learned
Since we began oering CTE pathways, sustainability has been a
concern. Our district is continuously looking for grants to help oset
new programming costs, maintain programming, and provide or
Based on our state job-growth
and student-interest data,
we expanded our CTE offerings
to include a fabrication lab,
a teacher academy,
a media plus program,
and a drone pilot license.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 45
Deeper Insights for a
Future Teacher
I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to
be a teacher. I love working with kids, and
I think I have the heart for it. A lot of my
friends say, “I could never do that. I don’t
know how you’re doing it.” It’s denitely not
for everyone. But when I heard about the
Teacher Academy at New Lexington, I was
excited for the opportunity to get a feel for
the classroom before I move on to college.
Teacher Academy courses are fully online,
offered through Central State University. My
first class was Intro to Education, and I’m
currently in the second class, Educational
Technologies. We complete coursework inde-
pendently and turn in weekly assignments.
One day a week, we get to spend time with
the kids in our school’s daycare, which pro-
vides free care for the children of teachers.
This helps us learn whether we want
to work with the very young kids or
if older students are a better t. One
day every other week, we have an
observation class where we get more
hands-on experience in a classroom
of our choice. Once a week, our
teacher for that class meets with
us to make sure we’re on track and
doing what we need to do to achieve
our career goals.
I chose to observe Ms. Shiplett’s
third-grade classroom. I was debat-
ing between elementary or high school, but
elementary classrooms are so fun, and the
kids are a lot more entertaining. Typically, I
work with kids one-on-one or in small groups
and help out with any activities they’re
doing. One day, I got to plan a lesson—a
scavenger hunt using math problems—and
do it with the class. I’m able to apply some
of the things I’m learning in my online class-
room almost immediately in my observation
experience. One example is my technology
class, where we learned about websites,
activities, and other resources that we can
use with students. But the most benecial
thing for me has been getting the hands-on
experience connecting with students.
My mom teaches rst grade, so I already
had a lot of insight into what it’s like to be
an elementary teacher, but now I have even
more understanding. It’s exhausting but
rewarding. The kids get so excited to see
you, and it’s just so sweet to watch their faces
light up when they learn something new or
get the right answer to a problem.
So far, I love third grade and I’m pretty
sure that’s what I want to teach. But I’m
a junior this year, so if I change my mind,
I can choose a different class to observe
next year. In the meantime, I’m working on
earning enough college credits to graduate
early once I leave high school. All but one
of my classes are College Credit Plus classes.
They’re offered to students for free not just
through the Teacher Academy but through
other local schools as well. Our core classes
are through Hocking College, and we can
also take classes through Central State Uni-
versity or Zane State College. I’m taking a
sustainable agriculture class and an agribusi-
ness class because I’ve always been really
interested in agriculture, and a teacher told
me the credits could count toward a teach-
ing degree in agriculture. But even if I don’t
take that path, I’ve learned a lot from those
classes, and they’ve helped put me on track
to graduate college early and start my career
that much sooner.
I would definitely encourage other
students to explore careers this way. Take
advantage of everything your school offers.
A lot of kids I know are just focused on
graduating top of their class but not really
considering their future after high school. I
think it’s important that if you’re interested
in a career path, you just pursue it now and
don’t care what other people think or say. Do
what’s best for you and what’s going to help
you in your future.
–Jade Simpson, junior,
New Lexington High School
upgrade equipment. Additionally, the state of Ohio provides CTE
funding tied to the number of students in each CTE class we oer,
so that money comes in on our foundation payment to support our
CTE programs. Ohio also oers reimbursement for each credential
earned by the students. Some reimbursements are 100 percent of
the cost of the credential, while others are a portion of the cost.
is process has been challenging and rewarding. While there
have been bumps in the road, there have been valuable lessons
learned. Partnerships are key! Whether those partnerships are with
businesses or other educational institutions, they are paramount
to success. Listen! Listen! Listen! Students have a voice, and when
asked, they are happy to share what they are looking for. ey have
interests that can be explored and dreams that can be reached. And
businesses have needs. Bring them into the conversation. ey are
willing to help build tomorrow’s workforce. Be intentional! at’s
our superintendent’s favorite phrase. We have been intentional
with every move in designing and bringing this vision to life. CTE
is the future. It’s a way to impact students, families, and their com-
munities in positive ways. When students are ready to take fullling
jobs in their local communities, everyone wins. ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/shiplett_schumaker.
PHOTO OF JADE SIMPSON COURTESY OF JENNY SHIPLETT
46 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Constructing Our Future
Working Together to Prepare Students for Careers in the Building Trades
By Tom Kriger and Nicole Schwartz
G
reat career opportunities await students today in the
US construction industry, a product of massive pub-
lic investment in rebuilding American infrastructure,
bringing manufacturing back to the United States, and
shifting energy production to new green sources. But here is the
dilemma we face: with the decline in vocational education over
the past 40 years, combined with the push to send every student to
college, many middle and high school students do not have access
to shop classes or career and technical education (CTE) programs.
As a result, they don’t know these opportunities are available.
Sometimes young people nd the building trades by accident,
and when they do, it can change their lives. Michele Tammo Wafo
is a young man from Cameroon, the youngest of 13 children. A few
years back, his siblings pooled their money to send Michele to
the United States for an education. But he fell on hard times and
ended up living under a bridge in Austin, Texas. e only work
he could nd was driving a cab. Michele’s life was hard—but one
day he took a fare to the plumbers and pipetters union (United
Association Local 286) training center, where he learned about
a free program designed to prepare young people for Registered
Apprenticeships* that lead to careers in local building trades. For
Michele, that was all he needed to know. He was rst in line for
the next class. And the rest is history. Michele recently completed
his apprenticeship and is now a licensed plumber in Austin. His
employer was so impressed with his work ethic and life story
that he has sponsored Michele to return to Cameroon and bring
back his wife and son. A lucky coincidence brought Michele to
the building trades, but there is a better way for your students to
learn about our career opportunities.
Just as every good school relies on collaboration between
teachers, administrators, students, and families, our ability to
inform students of the career opportunities in construction and to
prepare them academically rests in part on collaboration between
the building trades unions and AFT members. North America’s
Building Trades Unions (NABTU) is a labor organization made
up of 14 national and international unions and more than 330
provincial, state, and local trades councils. Together, we represent
more than three million skilled craft professionals in the United
Tom Kriger is the director of education and research at North America’s
Building Trades Unions (NABTU). His previous positions include professor
of labor studies, provost and vice president for academics at the National
Labor College, and assistant to the president and director of legislation and
research for United University Professions (AFT Local 2190). Nicole
Schwartz is the executive director of TradesFutures. Previously, she was
NABTU’s Apprenticeship Readiness Program coordinator. She began her
career as a middle and high school social studies and Spanish teacher with
the Milwaukee Public Schools.
*Registered Apprenticeships are approved by the US Department of Labor or by a state
agency; they are created with industry representatives and provide paid pathways to
good jobs. To learn more, visit go.aft.org/s2i.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY EGLE PLYTNIKAITE
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 47
States and Canada in our mission to increase work opportunities
in the building trades, secure wages that support families, and
protect the standards of our professions. In this brief article, we
lay out what we see as the vital role that AFT teachers and coun-
selors can play in helping us recruit and train what our president,
Sean McGarvey, and the Biden administration have called “the
infrastructure generation.”
In construction today, the building trades unions and our part-
ner contractors confront two intertwined challenges related to the
increased demand for skilled workers. is increase in demand
can be traced directly to the Biden administration’s decision to
invest billions of dollars here in the United States. e Infrastruc-
ture Investment and Jobs Act, which passed with bipartisan sup-
port in 2021, was designed to rebuild our nation’s badly neglected
infrastructure—including schools, roads, transportation systems,
and broadband access. Similarly, the CHIPs and Science Act,
which passed in 2022 with bipartisan support, was enacted to
bring back critical manufacturing jobs in important sectors such
as electric vehicle battery manufacturing and production of the
semiconductor computer chips found in all electronics today.
Further, the 2022 Ination Reduction Act contains robust labor
standards, including tax breaks for developers that employ Reg-
istered Apprentices and pay them decent wages and benefits.
ese standards were designed to generate good-paying union
construction jobs. Together, these laws are projected to create mil-
lions of new construction jobs across the United States. According
to one estimate, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act alone
will generate 1.6 million construction and extraction jobs over
10 years, with millions of additional jobs in transportation and
materials moving.
1
us, the rst challenge we face is the need to recruit and train
enough Registered Apprentices to meet the increased demand
for highly skilled trades workers. A second and related challenge
is to diversify the construction workforce as it expands. Simply
put, there are too few women and people of color in construc-
tion today. Women, for example, make up roughly 6 percent of
building trades Registered Apprentices today, a number which
is going up but has been too low for too long.
2
But we can change
our industry with vital help from AFT members. e Infrastruc-
ture Investment and Jobs Act and the other related legislation
provide NABTU and the AFT with a unique opportunity to grow
a construction workforce that better reects the communities in
which projects are built and that guarantees middle-class employ-
ment for generations of Americans, too many of whom have been
historically underserved in construction.
How can NABTU and AFT members work together to
introduce students to more pathways to career success and
strengthen infrastructure in our communities? It might start
with a few simple requests of AFT teachers and school coun-
selors. We want students in all grades—from kindergartners to
graduating seniors—to be aware of the robust career opportuni-
ties available today in building trades Registered Apprentice-
ship programs.
Together, NABTU and its 90,000 signatory contractors (who
have all signed collective bargaining agreements with the build-
ing trades) invest $2 billion annually in Registered Apprentice-
ship and journey-level training. Within this system, our 14
aliated building trades unions and their contractor partners
jointly operate more than 1,600 training centers and train 70
percent of all construction apprentices in the United States.
Since 2017, NABTU’s aliated unions and signatory contractors
have registered an average of 73,000 new apprentices annually,
making NABTU’s Registered Apprenticeship system the largest
such training program in any US industry.
In our “earn-while-you-learn” Registered Apprenticeship
programs, there is no cost to the apprentice for their training. It’s
all paid for through our collective bargaining agreements, which
means no student loan debt when graduates complete their
apprenticeship. Construction is the only industry we know of
where the current generation of workers has designated money
through collective bargaining to pay for the apprenticeship
training for the next generation of workers. In addition, many
of our Registered Apprenticeship programs have been assessed
for college credit, which means that students can pursue an
accelerated associate or bachelor’s degree once they nish their
apprenticeship, equipped with the college credits they earned
from their apprenticeship. It’s a good deal. Our apprentices
work full-time and attend classes (often college credit bear-
ing) at night and on weekends for three to ve years, depend-
ing on the trade. When they graduate, they have high-quality,
portable skills that provide them with a middle-class lifestyle.
With the high demand today and opportunities for overtime,
some building trades apprentices are making six-gure wage
and benet packages.
In our “earn-while-you-learn”
Registered Apprenticeship
programs, there is no cost to the
apprentice for their training.
48 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
By completing their apprenticeship, workers achieve jour-
ney-level status. As journey-level workers, building trades union
members can continue to receive training at no additional cost
to themselves for the duration of their careers.
Collaborating for Brighter Futures
What NABTU has in common with the AFT is a commitment to
excellence in education, training, and equitable opportunities
for young people. Given the new demand for electricians, iron
workers, construction laborers, painters, plumbers and pipet-
ters, bricklayers, elevator constructors, insulators, and operat-
ing engineers, we need AFT teachers and school counselors to
spread the word among their students and communities that
union construction is a viable and well-paying career, especially
for young women and students of color. is “word spreading”
could include positive images of female construction workers and
those from communities of color. You may be familiar with the
expression “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” We need elementary
and middle-level teachers and counselors to explain to students
that our career opportunities are real and attainable for everyone.*
At the secondary level, we request that teachers and coun-
selors make their students and advisees aware of the oppor-
tunities available today. And we need them to steer interested
students into classes, such as applied math or CTE
construction skills classes, that will prepare them
to successfully enroll in building trades Registered
Apprenticeships after they graduate.
Our last request of AFT teachers and counselors
is to advocate for the integration of the Multi-Craft
Core Curriculum (MC3) in their schools.
†
The MC3
is a comprehensive, 120-hour, pre-apprenticeship
curriculum that is currently oered in approximately
75 US high schools as part of Apprenticeship Readi-
ness Programs (ARPs). In 2007, NABTU spearheaded eorts to
develop these programs, which can be oered in adult reentry
programs, high schools and community colleges, and programs
for justice system–involved individuals. e MC3 was designed
in 2008 for use in ARPs to prepare young people with the pro-
fessional skills necessary for successful entry into construction
Registered Apprenticeship programs, based upon an informed
choice about the particular trade they want to pursue. e MC3
teaches students construction skills and knowledge, including an
introduction to blueprint reading, construction health and safety,
tools, materials, and—most importantly—construction math to
improve their chances of successful enrollment in Registered
Apprenticeship programs. ese programs are designed to be
exible and meet the needs of the participants. Since 2016, 22,000
participants have successfully completed the MC3, of which 77
percent identied as people of color and 20 percent identied
as women.
In 2022, NABTU and other industry stakeholders created a
new organization called TradesFutures to continue the work
of rening the MC3 and creating new ARPs in partnership with
community-based and educational organizations—including
the AFT. As we see it, the MC3 is the critical link between two of
our nation’s premier education systems: the US public school
system and the building trades’ privately funded, high-quality
Registered Apprenticeship system. By working together, we can
rebuild our nation’s infrastructure and our middle class at the
same time.
As AFT members know well, we need to ensure young people
have full access to career opportunities that will provide them
with the ability to support themselves and their future families.
e current generation of students will encounter a future many
of us have never imagined. ey are interested in doing good in
their communities while also making a good living. We believe
the building trades oer young people opportunities to do both.
ere has never been a better time to capitalize on federal and
private investments in infrastructure to lift up our local com-
munities and provide students with the tools to build a future
they can believe in.
Let’s help them build this future together! ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/kriger_schwartz.
*NABTU also supports the recruitment and retention of our female
members by sponsoring Tradeswomen Build Nations, the largest confer-
ence of women in construction in the world. In addition, TradesFutures
has funded childcare pilot programs in New York City and Milwaukee,
addressing one of the fundamental barriers to women in the construc-
tion industry.
†
To learn more about using the MC3 in schools, see go.aft.org/8sp.
Our apprentices work full-time
and attend classes (often college
credit bearing) at night and on
weekends for three to ve years,
depending on the trade.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 49
Granite City
Building Partnerships Across the Rural-Urban Divide
By Jackson Potter
A
s the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union
(CTU), I used to assume that many of our big urban
teaching realities were a world apart from the concerns
of educators in smaller rural towns on the Illinois and
Missouri border. However, a recent experience challenged that
assumption. Now I see that our urban and rural locals face many
of the same challenges—and so we should be working together.
Activism is in my DNA (I led a walkout of my high school in 1995
to highlight the need for equitable school funding statewide), so
when I see a need, I start by exploring the problem and identifying
potential campaigns and activities. en reality settles in. My plate
is full in Chicago—can I really add urban-rural partnerships into
the mix? While I haven’t been able to devote the time I’d like, I
have been taking advantage of opportunities to learn.
In the fall of 2022, our Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT)
convention was held in St. Louis, Missouri (the St. Louis metro
area spans Missouri and Illinois). Wanting to get to know nearby
locals in Granite City and Madison, Illinois, I arrived early. And
thanks to my fellow IFT executive board member Chuck Noud—a
music teacher and the president of the Granite City Federation
of Teachers (AFT Local 743)—I was scheduled to teach a civics
lesson at Granite City High School before the convention o-
cially began. Ahead of my visit, Noud described Granite City as
“a community in ux that has experienced a lot of changes over
the years, resulting in economic decline and presenting oppor-
tunities for a creative resurgence. We see large economic growth
in surrounding areas.”
1
Granite City currently has a population of
nearly 30,000, down from a high of just over 40,000 in 1970 (before
a recent decline in industrial plants, and therefore jobs, began).
2
An avid biker—and a believer in getting to know an area by expe-
riencing it—I decided to bike from my hotel in St. Louis to Granite
City High School. It was pitch black when I started riding on the river
trail out of St. Louis at 6 a.m. Soon, I was surrounded by construc-
tion yards, encampments for unhoused people, steel manufacturing
shops, and timber salvaging operations on both sides of the trail. It
was the most industrial section of bicycle path I’d ever seen—until I
got closer to Granite City. After dodging numerous gravel sections,
dump trucks, and semis loading up and shipping out, I crossed a
bridge and reached the Illinois side of the Mississippi River.
Almost immediately, my senses were overcome by the inten-
sity and magnitude of industrial activity. e streets were lined
on both sides with warehouses, a US Steel Corporation mill
about a mile long, a coke processing plant, reneries, concrete
production, railroad depots, lumber and millwork facilities, and
more. Mixed in were small bungalows—a residential-industrial
remnant of how many mill towns in the United States were
Jackson Potter is the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU),
AFT Local 1. A former high school teacher, he was a founder of CTU’s
Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANDREA MONGIA
50 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
developed. Steel jobs have been part of Granite City’s identity
since 1895,
3
soon after the nascent industry was boosted by the
McKinley Tari Act of 1890.
4
Granite City has experienced its share of the old and new
economies. Shuttered plants have been replaced by hospitals and
retail jobs, and there has been an inux of Black, Latine, and Asian
families taking the lower-paying jobs left in the wake of deindus-
trialization and divestment.
5
While the city’s population is still
about 80 percent white,
6
the high school’s student population is
now about 64 percent white, down from over 70 percent in 2019.
7
Although all the students and their families share similar
economic interests, class solidarity in Granite City is being chal-
lenged by these changing racial demographics and job scarcity.
8
In 2024, the US Steel mill that employs about 1,400 people is at
risk of signicantly reducing production due to a pending sale of
the company to Nippon, a Japanese steel manufacturer.
9
e plan
still involves an earlier eort to repurpose the two blast furnaces
that will likely result in 1,000 people losing their jobs.
10
In this community, saving jobs is a top priority, even though
another interest all the students and families share is environmen-
tal. More than a century of steel production means more than a
century of pollution, and the Environmental Protection Agency
has noted very high rates of cancer in the area.
11
Arriving at Granite City High School, I was struck by both how
close the school is to the steel plant and how racially divided the
classes were. As is true in high schools throughout our country,
12
white students were disproportionately enrolled in the higher-
level honors and AP courses,
13
and students of color were dispro-
portionately in the regular and remedial courses.
e civics lesson I had been invited to teach was for an AP eco-
nomics class. I chose a lesson about power that the CTU uses with
its summer organizing interns (who are CTU members seeking to
boost their advocacy and activism skills). It centers on an interactive
discussion in which students grapple with and dene power. AP eco-
nomics students already have a macro understanding of power; they
are studying economic power, concentrations of wealth, and supply
and demand. Part of our discussion personalizes power: Who has
it? Who doesn’t? What are their experiences of power? How do they
distinguish the powerful and powerless—and why? Given how few
students of color there were in this class, it was striking when a Latino
student shared his experience of being exploited at work. He said
that he often has to “deal with verbal abuse and arbitrary demands,
low pay, and preferential treatment of some employees over others.”
None of the white students had a comparable example to share.
rough this discussion, we established a shared denition of
power focused on organized money or organized people. Students
soon saw that the ability to make and act on decisions is key: you
can’t put money under a blanket and expect to have power, and
you can’t not interact with people and expect to have power. en,
we considered examples of people who have or had power, from
Elon Musk to Martin Luther King Jr.
In the next phase of this discussion, I asked students what they
would do if they had a great deal of power. Like other classes in
which I’ve taught this lesson, the students in Granite City started
thinking very small, like buying a nice house. As I challenged them
to think bigger, soon they were demanding aordable housing for
all, free universal healthcare, free college, and so on. After egging
them on for about 10 minutes, I shifted gears abruptly, making it
clear that they have no power—I have it. en I told them what
I was willing, and not willing, to do. I took on a bullying persona
like a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, telling them they had to stay
in the room, simply because I said so. After a few minutes of this
bullying behavior, a student grasped that they had to stand up and
organize themselves to take power from me.
e lesson wraps up with a debrief: Why were they reluctant
to stand up to me? What aspects of our social conditioning were
holding them back? Why do powerless people accept abusive,
controlling behaviors and take so long to decide to organize in
order to create some power for themselves? What would it take to
wield power collectively? is activity always generates an intense
and memorable conversation for most students (and adults).
For these students in Granite City, it was a good opening exer-
cise to inspire them to consider what’s possible. Now, they need
to connect to a local challenge in which they see how exercising
their agency looks and feels in motion. ey should be asking tough
questions of decision makers and figuring out how to organize
people to advocate on the street and in the boardrooms. So one
question I left with that day was obvious: How can we, as educators
and union activists, help them help their community?
In the following months, the more I thought about the CTU’s
work in Chicago and the challenges facing Granite City, the more
I saw how much our needs and goals overlap. en more specic
questions came to mind: Can we teach students in Granite City
to become advocates for both saving steel mill jobs and reducing
pollution? Can we give them the skills and tools they need to form
diverse coalitions to bring about the just transition to a green econ-
omy that will be critical for their futures? Can the common causes of
saving jobs and improving health and the climate become enough
to form strong bonds between the longstanding white families in
the area and the more recently arrived families of color?
Lessons from the CTU’s Freedom School
It may seem like our big city locals are a world apart from our
rural ones, but eorts by the CTU to build coalitions across diverse
community and labor networks show how powerful partnerships
can transform our landscapes.
14
e CTU’s current drive to pro-
vide educational and economic opportunities while addressing
the climate crisis is a good example.
In the fall of 2024, the Chicago Public Schools will open up a
citywide public engagement process to create a 10-year facilities
master plan. e CTU has big plans to impact the district’s vision.
In the 2022–23 school year, we started a campaign to convert all 600
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 51
district schools to green, sustainable, and anti-racist schools that
convey love and liberation for our students and families. at objec-
tive requires anywhere from $15 to $25 billion to ensure all students
are transported by electric buses (instead of diesel) and all schools
are powered by solar, have heat pumps, possess gardens and green
space, and are free of PCBs, lead paint, lead pipes, and asbestos. If
achieved, this ambitious plan will provide countless opportunities
to partner with the trades and form career and technical education
(CTE) programs to ensure that our students, nearly 90 percent of
whom are students of color (with 47 percent Hispanic and 36 per-
cent African American students
15
), gain valuable insights and skills to
participate in the green economy. Already we are seeing results from
our advocacy, pushing the district to apply for and win a $20 million
federal grant to manufacture the rst in-sourced electric buses in
Chicago’s history.
16
Imagine school renovations that require contrac-
tors to hire and train people of color in economically distressed parts
of the city. And imagine CTE programs that provide apprenticeships
for students in solar panel design and installation, allowing them to
improve their school facilities and nearby residential housing units.
Starting to bring this vision to life, in the summer of 2023 the
CTU ran its rst Freedom School with 16 students and 5 educators
from schools across the city. Over two weeks, they engaged in
a series of learning adventures about environmental issues and
their impact on communities throughout Chicagoland.
17
The
participants developed action plans for refurbishing their own
schools and reimagining buildings across the city. On the nal
day, June 23, 2023, students met with the heads of the school dis-
trict and the school facilities department and then the mayor and
the deputy mayor of education to share their proposals. In early
July, three student leaders from three dierent schools testied
at a Board of Education meeting about their experiences at the
Freedom School. ey detailed the specic needs of their schools
and the importance of including them and their communities in
the development of the new master plan.
e idea for our Freedom School emerged from the work we’ve
been doing the last two years through our Climate Justice Com-
mittee. is is where CTU members forged our vision for a green,
healthy, sustainable, anti-racist school district that improves the
facilities where we teach and where students learn, starting with
the communities that have endured the greatest systemic inequi-
ties, such as environmental racism.
18
Two critical issues are removing lead paint from our schools
and adding solar panels. In addition, we have several hot zones
for pollution, mainly in communities of color. is is an ongoing
legacy of environmental racism.
19
For decades, industrial zones,
bus depots, highways, landlls, and other sources of pollution
were intentionally placed next to Black and brown neighbor-
hoods when people of color had no other housing options
because of redlining.
20
For our Climate Justice Committee, key questions are: How do we
center the communities that have been harmed the most to receive
the greatest school renovations and healthiest environments? How
can we oset some of the historical damage and environmental
racism that those communities have experienced and continue to
endure? How can we ensure this is a coalition eort with community
organizations involved? Knowing that students are very interested
in climate change and environmental racism, how do we involve
students in their own school communities as advocates?
e Freedom School was intentionally designed to build con-
nection and coalition between Black- and brown-led environ-
mental justice organizations, our students, and our members
throughout the city. For instance, on a eld trip to the South Side’s
Altgeld Gardens community, students met with Cheryl Johnson, the
daughter of the late Hazel Johnson, who is known as the mother of
the modern environmental justice movement.
21
Altgeld Gardens
has been referred to as the Toxic Doughnut, in large part because
of the steel manufacturing that used to be in the area.
22
It’s a public
housing community with almost entirely Black families, and there’s
a Black-led organization, People for Community Recovery (which
Hazel founded and Cheryl now leads), advocating for the corpora-
tions that polluted the area to now clean it up. In addition, they
are demanding restitution for the families who have suered. For
students, it was striking to grasp how a community that has been
repeatedly poisoned for decades is standing up for itself.
Along with studying
environmental challenges,
we wanted students to
reconnect with nature, even
in our urban environment.
We did a camping trip in Big
Marsh Park, a relatively new
addition to the Chicago Park
District system. Big Marsh
rst opened in 2016 and was
erected out of the rubble
of the industrial dumping
ground in the Lake Calumet area that used to house the nation’s
largest steel factories. It is now an incredible urban wildlife oasis
where students hiked, biked, engaged in birding, and listened to
dozens of coyotes howl throughout the night. It was also the rst
camping trip for 15 of the 20 participants. e students really had a
memorable experience that reinforced the importance of preserv-
ing and conserving nature, including by converting to green energy.
To help develop their plans for greening their school facili-
ties, students interviewed district ocials who walked the group
through a school building so students could gain insights into the
challenges of renovating and greening our facilities, which aver-
age 82 years old.
23
To prepare for this walkthrough, students read
a Chicago Tribune article stating that 70 percent of schools had at
least one water fountain that tested positive for lead.
24
ey used
that information to ask the district ocials pointed questions.
Our 2023 Freedom School was just a proof of concept. In
the summer of 2024, we’d like to expand from two weeks to six
weeks of youth programming so students can engage in deeper
explorations, such as doing assessments of their school buildings
and comparing communities with newer infrastructure to those
that have been allowed to deteriorate. We’d like students to gain
hands-on skills in infrastructure by examining HVAC systems,
paint (especially peeling lead paint), and plumbing. Equally
important, we’d like them to gain skills in meeting with commu-
nity organizations, especially those that have been doing this work
for a long time in frontline communities like Altgeld Gardens.
Ultimately, our Freedom School will be a strong pipeline for
youth leaders who can build coalitions, conduct needed research,
and be advocates for the green, anti-racist vision we share. And the
more I reect on what our initial Freedom School accomplished, the
Community
challenges are
opportunities to
build coalitions
around shared goals.
52 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
more I think back to that AP economics class in Granite City. ose
students are facing the same fundamental economic and environ-
mental crises playing out in Chicago’s most polluted areas. For the
CTU, our experience with the Freedom School was transformational
because it gave us insights into how we could build CTE pipelines
and fortify our labor tables. It also served as a model for building
regional solidarity across rural and urban counties. Imagine not just
a Freedom School in Chicago each summer, but Freedom Schools
all across Illinois sharing the goal of creating green, healthy, sustain-
able, anti-racist schools that prepare youth for good green jobs and
community activism. Fortunately, our state oers a Freedom School
grant
25
that’s fairly easy to win. So while this is just a vision at the
moment, it’s one that many of our locals could realize.
Imagining a Brighter Future for Granite City
It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the health of democracy
and the planet itself may depend on our ability to bridge the urban-
rural divides within our states and across the country for the sake of
winning green, sustainable community schools and infrastructure.
e combined threats to Granite City’s economy and environ-
ment present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to form a coalition-
based eort to convert to green schools, clean up polluted areas,
and look ahead to a just transition to greener, cleaner jobs. But
Granite City can’t form the type of strong coalition needed without
being able to build across communities—including across unions
and racial divides, and across longtime and new residents—and
to see past our dierences.
In Chicago, the CTU’s base of strength is the incredible rela-
tionships with our students and their parents and other care-
givers, relatives, and neighbors. When there are challenges in a
community—like Granite City’s steel mill announcing plans to
transfer 1,000 jobs out of state—that’s an opportunity for us as the
teachers union to expand our base by connecting to the aected
students, families, and unions. It’s also an opportunity to expand
our thinking. When we form new coalitions, we anchor them in
new, shared conceptions of improved conditions. Keeping what
we have is not inspirational or adequate.
Educators in Granite City could accomplish a great deal by
adopting this mindset. With climate change dominating young
people’s concerns in national polls,
26
with community health in
Granite City at risk from industrial pollution, and with the threat
of losing up to 1,000 good-paying union jobs, the only path for-
ward may be to develop a new vision for a just transition to greener,
cleaner, good-paying union jobs. Imagine partnering with the state
of Illinois and putting pressure on the next owner of the steel mills
to do right by the workers and their communities. Instead of letting
the owners transfer jobs and pollute another community, a broad,
strong Granite City coalition could make oers that are appealing.
For example, it might be hard to quickly reduce the factory’s direct
environmental impact, but the next owner can sponsor and help
apply for a government grant for new electric school buses. It could
start actually paying local property taxes into the adjacent school
districts, instead of taking subsidies that deprive the schools of
essential resources.
27
Both Granite City and Madison County have
endured over a century of contamination without seeing tax ben-
ets accrue to schools or communities. Additionally, despite the
fact that Madison also sits next to the plant, it does not receive any
of the property tax revenue to support schools or services. A win for
the community would be to force US Steel’s successor to become a
great community partner instead of a cut-and-run avatar for capital
ight. But that’s just one idea from an outsider.
As we build bridges across locals, it’s important to focus on
sharing strategies and tactics—like building diverse coalitions
to rally around shared goals—and keeping the goal setting local.
Learning more about Granite City, and nearby Madison, in the
months after my visit, I saw more and more opportunities for
coalition-based progress.
Getting to Know Madison County
Madison County, which includes Granite City, trends conserva-
tive in its voting history; Trump won by 15 points in 2020. In 2022,
Madison County voters gave Republican candidates a clean sweep
of the seven key oces at the state level.
28
However, an amend-
ment of the state constitution on the ballot to establish the right
to collective bargaining and union organizing, the Workers’ Rights
Amendment, passed the county by a solid 55 percent majority.
29
is support for unionization shows an opportunity to turn the
tide politically. e Workers’ Rights Amendment’s success suggests
that there is an alternate path to motivating the Democratic base
while simultaneously providing movement infrastructure to grow it.
In contrast to Granite City, neighboring Madison (a small town
of about 3,000 people split between Madison and St. Clair coun-
ties) has a majority Black population and is also a much more
reliable base of support for Democrats. Currently, both teacher
union locals are working with the steelworkers to stop the dein-
dustrialization of the area. is could evolve into a broad, diverse
coalition of all union members in the region—including educa-
tors—and their networks, such as students whose family members
fear deindustrialization and restaurant owners and workers who
depend on customers with good-paying jobs.
Whereas manufacturing jobs are often associated with urban
America, they constitute 15 percent of rural earnings—far more
than the 9 percent of urban earnings nationally.
30
As one labor
scholar explains, “there are more factory workers than farmers
in rural America. And many of these rural factories employ a
racially diverse workforce.”
31
at’s true in Granite City—and it
gives Granite City another strength to build on. According to Dan
Simmons, president of United Steelworkers Local 1899 in Granite
City, 60 percent of his members are white men, 25 percent are
Black men, and the remaining 15 represent other groups. (ere
are very few women of any race working in the mill.) Simmons
described steelwork as providing a standard of living that is a
“little better o than the surrounding industry.”
32
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 53
Wanting to better understand the challenges and opportuni-
ties in Granite City, I spoke to him at length, listened to his ideas,
and tossed out ideas based on the CTU’s coalition-based work.
Simmons has consistently welcomed the possibility of a teacher
and steelworker coalition to hold the company owners—and the
state—accountable to the needs of the larger community. e
local teacher unions, along with the Illinois Federation of Teach-
ers, and the United Steelworkers plan on issuing a letter to the
company and Governor J.B. Pritzker calling on them to protect the
workers by providing guarantees of a just transition and nancial
support to ensure their families, the schools, and all taxing bodies
are held harmless by the proteering of the steel corporations.
As I got to know Madison County, one factor that could inhibit
such a diverse coalition stood out: where diverse communities
had, and had not, formed. My initial experience in the dispropor-
tionately white AP economics class alerted me to this concern,
then other indicators soon came into view.
When Noud, the Granite City Federation of Teachers president,
grew up in Granite City, it was an overwhelmingly white working-
class community with a wide range of high-paying unionized jobs.
Now he and his fellow teachers are facing a rapidly changing stu-
dent body who are living and learning in a very dierent context,
both economically and culturally. e school system is projected
to be over 40 percent students of color in the next year, while over
98 percent of the teachers are white.
33
is is concerning given
the well-established research showing the benets of a diverse
teaching force, and particularly of students having teachers who
share their racial and cultural background.
34
And, the climate and
culture of the high school has received low marks by students and
sta in the state’s school climate surveys.
35
According to a recent study by the Chicago Tribune and Pro-
Publica, Granite City has a signicant number of students ticketed
and ned in the state for disciplinary violations, 70 in all.
36
e
district has not released data to the media breaking down those
numbers based on racial demographics. However, it’s likely to
follow school suspension and expulsion data. e percentage of
students of color in the district has gone from 29 in 2018 to 36
in 2022,
37
whereas the percentage of students with in- or out-of-
school suspensions who are of color has risen from 44 percent in
2015 to 55 percent in the 2021–22 school year, according to the
Illinois State Board of Education.
38
So, as Granite City has become
more diverse, the percentage of disciplinary infractions has fallen
even more disproportionately on students of color.
But the situation is far from bleak. As Noud and I discussed these
challenges, he emphasized that the community has become resil-
ient from prior periods of plant closures, though he also fears they
may share the fate of other rust-belt communities, such as loss of tax
revenue, property values, and population. Still, he said, “ese are
diculties at times, but … our faculty and sta are focused [on] and
geared towards giving our students the best education we can.”
39
Imagining a Way Forward
Reecting on this conversation, I came back to one of the CTU’s
key lessons from coalition building in Chicago: keeping what we
have is not inspirational. Imagine diversifying Granite City’s edu-
cators, ensuring they reect the student body and their diverse
families—many of whom make up the workforce at the steel mill
and surrounding retail stores. is would greatly strengthen the
potential for developing a strong coalition across Madison County
and, in my opinion, is the only way to achieve a shared goal,
whether that goal is merely to save 1,000 to 1,400 jobs or to make
a just transition to green schools, green jobs, reduced pollution,
and a healthier, more connected community.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far to find local expertise in
diversifying the educator workforce. Madison, the small, predomi-
nantly Black town, is succeeding in this work. According to Madison
Federation of Teachers President Joshua Webster, his local has under-
taken an eort to diversify the teacher ranks of their schools through
partnerships. And the district has been very supportive because four
out of ve administrators are African American. Webster’s local has
partnered with several of the local teacher preparation programs,
including Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Harris-Stowe
State University, and McKendree University. ey also work directly
with a statewide program, Grow Your Own, to increase the number of
Black and Latine student graduates pursuing careers in education. As
one of the few Black teacher union presidents in the state, this is one
of his top priorities—though he still has a long way to go. Currently, 90
percent of the students are Black and only 35 percent of the teachers
are Black.
40
But crucially, students do see themselves among their
teachers, making Web-
ster’s efforts to grow the
number of Black teachers
in their districts so critical.
Thankfully, Webster
says, “ese administra-
tors know that students’
environment and home
life goes hand in hand
with education.”
41
at’s why they supported having white educa-
tors participate in the IFT’s trauma training; it helped them better
understand, communicate with, and empathize with Madison’s
students. Imagine what this training could do for Granite City.
And imagine the goodwill Granite City educators could build if
they proposed a diversication plan that focused on the changing
student body while respecting the hard work of the existing teach-
ers. For instance, they could demand a diverse teacher training
pipeline, showing the forward thinking necessary to build trust
and condence with future coalition partners while allowing the
change to happen through normal vacancies.
42
Given how I’ve seen work with partners grow and expand in Chi-
cago, I was not surprised to learn that Webster’s local has also been
actively involved in shifting the political landscape of the county.
“By working with local clergy and civil rights organizations, … our
When coalitions are
large, diverse, and
determined, they win.
54 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
local has been instrumental in
registering voters, canvassing,
and getting out the vote,” Web-
ster said.
43
He has also devel-
oped strong relationships with
statewide legislators and local
politicians through our IFT
eld service director (a staer
who supports local leaders
with contract negotiations,
grievances, and community
partnerships). Webster sees
this activity as central to
building a diverse educator
workforce in the future, along
with maintaining and growing pro-labor policies for the region. Such
coalition forces will be increasingly necessary to combat existential
threats that face unions and the larger community on the horizon—
like those that face steelworkers in the area.
44
Webster’s work in Madison is a great foundation for a much
larger regional coalition. Imagine Webster, Noud, and Simmons
mapping out which communities they can each bring to the table—
not just their members, families, neighbors, and students but also
everyone who voted for the Workers’ Rights Amendment. And
imagine that broad, diverse, strong table negotiating its own new
vision for their region. Now that’s inspirational.
T
here are times when this work feels impossible, and there
are setbacks. But the CTU’s work over the last decade has
shown me that when coalitions are large, diverse, and
determined, they win.
45
Sometimes quickly, sometimes
with protracted struggle. ey win.
is is true in rural areas too. Consider McDowell County, West
Virginia. In the early 2000s, the loss of unionized coal jobs upended
a solidly middle-class standard of living. Families faced sky-high
unemployment, crushing drug abuse, and diminished life expec-
tancy. In 2011, AFT President Randi Weingarten and former West
Virginia rst lady Gayle Manchin developed a project called Recon-
necting McDowell to address economic dislocation and poverty
through a broad coalition of alliances and policies. Today, over
125 national, state, and local partners have helped establish free
broadband for all schools, dental care for families, enhanced clini-
cal interventions for students, and aordable housing for teachers.
As a result, high school graduation rates and academic outcomes
have improved.
46
McDowell demonstrates that places like Granite
City, according to Weingarten, “can thrive again, that all children
regardless of demography or geography can thrive.”
47
As in Chicago and Granite City, McDowell County has a history of
industrial pollution. For McDowell, a critical problem is water qual-
ity after decades of coal mine operators neglecting their obligation
to protect waterways.
48
But now, thanks to a partnership between
Reconnecting McDowell and the West Virginia Department of
Environmental Protection’s Project Water Education Today, fourth-
graders in McDowell are learning about how to be good stewards of
their local waterways. Visiting a riverside park, they studied aquatic
life under microscopes and went into a soil tunnel to see the water’s
impact.
49
is is not (yet) as elaborate as the CTU’s Freedom School—
but it’s a start, and one that Granite City could readily adapt.
While Reconnecting McDowell is a particularly ambitious
project, much can be accomplished with just a handful of part-
ners. For example, when the AFT learned that the semiconductor
manufacturer Micron is building a new plant in Syracuse, New
York, it spurred a partnership with local school systems and teach-
ers unions. Now, there’s a collaborative eort underway to prepare
students for engineering and technical careers at Micron—and to
oer professional development to teachers to teach this innova-
tive content.* With the Biden administration passing the CHIPS
and Science Act,
50
the Ination Reduction Act,
51
and the Infra-
structure Investment and Jobs Act,
52
these opportunities will grow
exponentially if we take advantage of them.
Teachers in Granite City and Madison, and steelworkers in
both towns, are facing crises that they can turn into opportunities.
Demographic changes, deindustrialization, and generations of
pollution can become the catalyst for people to band together and
ght for a just transition to green schools and green jobs for all.
is work begins with us.
By living next to, growing up with, and developing deep rela-
tionships with students and families their entire careers, teachers
occupy a key intersection for hope and transformation. Solidarity
may not be enough to surmount the considerable obstacles on the
horizon, but nothing short of a multiracial coalition can address
the current challenges.
I was raised by labor lawyers who were active in the union
movement, working to make a more just society. I don’t believe
that any progress will be made in isolation. To address racial and
economic inequities, to ensure LGBTQIA+ students and families
feel safe and have equal rights, to oer opportunity to all, we have
to work together. We have to form coalitions and launch cam-
paigns that stretch beyond our comfort zones and our traditional
communities. at’s how movements grow.
There is a longstanding critique of teachers unions as being
more concerned about adults than students. at’s not true. We
bargain for the common good. We’re trying to advance the interests
of young people, from securing basic classroom supplies to expand-
ing CTE for green jobs. Still, if we’re not explicitly doing things as
unions alongside young people, it will be easier for anti-union
extremists to separate us from our base—to separate educators
from their students and communities.
In Madison County, if it’s just the teachers union presidents of
two locals ghting a giant industrial behemoth, they’ll lose. If it’s
every member of those teachers unions, the young people in their
classrooms and their families, and the steelworkers, then they’ll
have a large community that feels empowered and understands
their agency—and they’ll win.
I can’t think of a single movement that was able to reach its
heights without student involvement. We saw that with the civil
rights movement, and now we’re seeing it with eorts to win more
environmental justice. I think young people are the conscience of
the country. And I think Dr. King put it best regarding the Children’s
March in 1963: young people are not just receptacles that are inu-
enced by adults; children have their own beliefs, ideas, and needs.
53
Like King, we must have the courage to let them lead. ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/potter.
The health of
democracy and the
planet may depend
on our ability to
bridge urban-rural
divides and win
green, sustainable
infrastructure.
*To learn more about this partnership, turn to “Advancing Tech Dreams” on page 21.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 55
ILLINOIS FEDERATION OF TEACHERS ANTIRACISM ORGANIZING GUIDE
Advancing Antiracism Work in Your Union
2021
How to Bring Antiracism to Life
in Teachers Unions and Beyond
Fostering educational justice coalitions,
with parents and community organizations
deeply embedded in Black, Latine, and
Indigenous communities, has been central
to the Chicago Teachers Union’s success, so
I was highly motivated to help the Illinois
Federation of Teachers (IFT) develop its 2021
Antiracism Organizing Guide (available for
free at go.aft.org/ixj). Occasionally, union
members who are new to coalition building
will ask why we have to focus on antiracism.
While the civics teacher in me prefers to
challenge white supremacy and our roots
as a settler colonist society—from stealing
Indigenous lands to enslaving people to
redlining—the IFT’s guide is easy to use and
direct. As it explains:
[Antiracist work] is imperative to us win-
ning. Race baiting has always been used
as a strategy to divide workers and push
anti-labor, corporate interests. Racial
solidarity is our strategy to build power
and dismantle oppressive systems that
exploit working people.
1
I hope everyone will embrace antiracist
work in order to, as the guide says, “create
a world where we can all live fully in our
humanity.”
2
The union movement was
built upon the need for “Black and white
to unite and ght,”
3
and it can only grow
through a similar approach.
Along with offering examples of how
several IFT locals—including the Chicago
Teachers Union and Granite City Federation
of Teachers—are advancing antiracism, the
guide shares several ways to bring antira-
cism into standard union processes and
practices. The box below provides excerpts
from page 5 of the guide to show some
of the ways that all teachers unions could
engage in this work.
Antiracist work starts with examining
the many systems, policies, and
practices of a workplace and union.
Are they producing racist outcomes?
Do they center the needs of the
most marginalized, excluded, and
exploited?
• Recruitment, hiring, retention,
and promotion
What processes are used to
recruit and hire candidates? Is the
candidate pool diverse? Are there
internal systems to ensure that
there is intentional outreach to
historically marginalized groups?
Are there support systems in place
for diverse candidates to succeed
and thrive in your workplace?
Are BIPOC [Black, Indigenous,
and people of color] members
disproportionately assigned to less
desirable work that is compensated
at a lower rate?
• Union leadership
Does the leadership of your
local/council/chapter reect the
diversity of your membership? The
community you serve? Are there
opportunities for engagement and
participation for all members? Are
the contributions and participation
of all members welcomed and
valued? How does the local/council/
chapter encourage or discourage
the engagement and participation
of underrepresented groups?
• Curricula
Do students see themselves in
positive and afrming ways within
the curricula? Do they have an
opportunity to “see” and learn
about other cultures and their
contributions to society? Do the
curricula encourage students to
critique and challenge systems?
Does it encourage students to ask
questions or just answer questions?
• Discipline policies and
procedures
» Students: Are Black students,
students with disabilities, or
queer students disciplined more
frequently or more harshly
than their peers? Do students
have more access to police than
to social workers, counselors,
or psychologists? What about
dress codes: Does the district
discourage certain hairstyles
and styles of dress that are
commonly associated with
nonwhite cultures?
» Members: Are folks of color
or LGBTQIA+ folks disciplined
more frequently/harshly? Does
the code of “professional dress”
adhere to white standards?
Do certain rules impact
marginalized staff more than
others? Are rules fairly applied?
• Class/student assignments
Are Black and brown teachers
more often assigned “those kids”?
Do Black and brown teachers have
less access to teaching higher-level
courses (i.e., Advanced Placement
and honors)? Are Black and brown
students underrepresented in
Advanced Placement and honors
courses and overrepresented in
remedial courses? How is student
placement in these courses
determined?
Teachers unions that engage and act
upon these ideas—as well as the others that
are offered in the IFT’s guide—will be well
prepared to help build the broad, diverse,
and antiracist coalitions that are necessary
to meet our students’ needs.
–J. P.
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/
potter_sb.
56 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Climate Justice for All
Pursuing a Just Transition in the Education Sector
By Todd E. Vachon
O
n Sunday, October 28, 2012, teachers across the North-
east were glued to their television sets to watch the lat-
est weather forecast about the approaching hurricane.
Schools would be closed Monday. Emergencies were
declared, line crews were summoned, shelters were prepared,
and command centers were opened. New York City made the
unprecedented decision to stop all subway service.
As feared, Superstorm Sandy arrived with a vengeance the next
evening, knocking out power for eight million people across 17
states, destroying countless homes, rendering the NYC subway
system nonoperational, and closing all 1,750 of the city’s schools
for a week. Dozens of damaged schools remained shuttered even
longer, forcing students to share buildings with other schools,
sometimes in distant boroughs of the city. Over 100 deaths were
attributed to the storm, including at least one teacher. As with
previous extreme storms such as Hurricane Katrina that hit the
Gulf Coast in 2005 or later storms like Hurricane Maria that rav-
aged Puerto Rico in 2017, it was the working class and poor—the
frontline communities—who were hit rst and worst.
Todd E. Vachon is an assistant professor of labor studies and employment
relations at Rutgers University, the director of the Labor Education Action
Research Network, and the author of Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor
and the Struggle for Climate Justice. He is also an American Federation of
Teachers New Jersey vice president for higher education.
Nine years later, New York and New Jersey were devastated again
by Hurricane Ida while still continuing to shore up infrastructure
ruined by Sandy. e National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration places the total cost of Superstorm Sandy at over $70 bil-
lion
1
—possibly the costliest to ever hit the region, making it the
most economically devastating event to hit New York City since the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
While individual weather events like Sandy cannot be directly
attributed to climate change, their likelihood, frequency, and
intensity are all increased by climate change. As the Earth warms,
storms that used to happen once a century are now happening
more frequently, and the impacts on students, teachers, and com-
munities are devastating.
2
is article explores some of the causes
of the climate crisis, including its relationship to social and eco-
nomic inequality, and what educators can do—and many already
are doing—through their unions to promote climate justice and
equity in their schools and communities. Perhaps your local
union will be the next to take bold climate action and become a
part of the solution by helping to forge your own local Green New
Deal and joining the national eort.
The Problem: Dual Crises of Ecology and Inequality
e world is in the midst of two simultaneous and interconnected
crises: a crisis of ecology and a crisis of inequality. Climate change
is negatively aecting human health and quality of life and is dis-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ISABEL ESPANOL
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 57
proportionately impacting marginalized populations. At the same
time, socioeconomic inequality has increased dramatically. e top
1 percent of earners now take home 22 percent of all income in the
United States, the top 10 percent own 70 percent of all wealth, and
real wages for American workers have been stagnant for decades.
3
ese economic disparities are amplied along the lines of race,
gender, and citizenship status.
Climate change is caused predominantly by the burning of
fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal, which emit greenhouse
gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere, causing the planet to warm.
4
As the planet warms, local climates are altered, leading to more
frequent and intense storms, more wildfires and droughts,
accelerated melting of arctic ice, rising sea levels, and the mass
extinction of species that cannot adapt rapidly enough to the
rate of climatic change.
Rising economic inequality is due to a variety of factors, includ-
ing declining unionization; tax cuts for the super-rich; labor
market deregulation; the replacement of full-time, permanent
jobs with part-time and temporary work; a weak social safety net
for working families; and the increased nancialization of the US
economy.
5
All of these factors accelerated around 1980 with the
rise of free market fundamentalist (aka neoliberal) leadership in
the federal government.
6
Rising inequality* has been associated
with increased social and health problems, lower life expectan-
cies, decreased child well-being, a decline in trust in public insti-
tutions—including schools and governments—and an erosion of
support for democracy itself.
7
The figure below illustrates the simultaneous rise of GHG
emissions and income inequality between 1950 and 2018. Global
emissions increased more than sixfold during this period, from
just under 6,000 million metric tons of
carbon dioxide (MMTCO₂) in 1950 to
36,000 MMTCO₂ in 2018.
8
At the same
time, the share of all income earned by
the top 1 percent of earners in the United
States more than doubled from a low of
9 percent in 1978 to over 22 percent in
2018.
9
According to Oxfam, the world’s
top 26 billionaires now own as much as
the poorest 3.8 billion people on Earth,
and the richest 10 percent of humans are
responsible for nearly half of all carbon
emissions caused by consumption.
10
In addition to consuming consider-
ably more than the average person,
many billionaires derive their wealth
directly from owning fossil fuel corpo-
rations, many of which have funded
climate change denialism to prop up
their corporate prots.
11
Billionaires of
all backgrounds also invest heavily in
nancial instruments that promote the
extraction, production, transportation,
and consumption of fossil fuels. A 2022 report from Oxfam nds
the investments of just 125 billionaires produce 393 MMTCO₂
emissions every year.
12
at’s equal to the total emissions gener-
ated by the country of France. On average, one billionaire’s invest-
ments’ annual emissions are a million times higher than a person
in the poorest 90 percent of the world’s population.
13
Many of these same billionaires have also spent large sums of
money combating union drives as well as inuencing politics to
weaken labor protections. In other words, many of the top contribu-
tors to the climate crisis are also the strongest anti-union forces and
promoters of policies such as “right-to-work” laws, which reduce
worker power, suppress wages, and increase income inequality.
14
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 10.1 percent of US
workers are currently represented by a union—down from a high of
35 percent in 1953. e number is even lower when looking at the
private sector, which has a unionization rate of just 6.1 percent.
15
Much of the decline has been due to the erosion of jobs in the once
highly unionized manufacturing industry and the massive increase
of employment in industries that are not highly unionized due to
weak labor laws and vigorous anti-union campaigns by hostile
employers, as we have seen with Amazon and Starbucks.
16
At the same time, as a result of the legacy of racism and discrim-
inatory hiring practices, workers from historically marginalized
communities, particularly Black and Latinx workers, have been
systematically deprived of opportunities to share in the prosperity
generated by the fossil fuel economy. Adding insult to injury, these
same workers have disproportionately borne the burden of the
pollution created by the fossil fuel and other toxic industries.
17
For
example, a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences nds that air pollution exposure in the United States
*To learn more about the societal costs of rising
inequality, see “Greater Equality: The Hidden Key to
Better Health and Higher Scores” in the Spring 2011
issue of American Educator: go.aft.org/sck.
Rising Greenhouse Gas Emissions and
Income Inequality, 1950–2018
SOURCE: FIGURE CREATED BY TODD E. VACHON BASED ON DATA FROM “CO2 EMISSIONS” BY HANNAH RITCHIE AND MAX ROSER AND
“STRIKING IT RICHER” BY EMMANUEL SAEZ. SEE ENDNOTE 8 FOR DETAILS.
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
1950
1953
1956
1959
1962
1965
1968
1971
1974
1977
1980
1983
1986
1989
1992
1995
1998
2001
2004
2007
2010
2013
2016
Top 1% Income Share, USA
Global Carbon Emissions, MMTCO
2
Year
58 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
is disproportionately caused by
the non-Hispanic white majority
but disproportionately inhaled
by Black and Hispanic minori-
ties.
18
On average, non-Hispanic
white people experience a
“pollution advantage” of about
17 percent less air pollution
exposure than is caused by their
consumption, while Black and
Hispanic people, on average,
bear a “pollution burden” of 56
percent and 63 percent excess
exposure, respectively.
Students, educators, schools, and universities are not immune
to the consequences of unchecked climate change and runaway
inequality. A study from the National Bureau of Economic
Research found that a 1-degree-Fahrenheit hotter school year
reduces that year’s learning by 1 percent and that hot school
days disproportionately impact students of color, accounting for
roughly 5 percent of the racial achievement gap.
19
Each fall, dur-
ing the height of hurricane season, extreme weather increasingly
disrupts back-to-school plans across the country, with closures
aecting more than 1.1 million students in 2021.
20
In 2022, the
US Government Accountability Oce released a report on the
impacts of weather and climate disasters on schools, finding
that over one-half of public school districts—representing over
two-thirds of all students across the country—are in counties that
experienced presidentially declared major disasters from 2017 to
2019. Recent research in the journal Scientic Reports nds that
school closures due to wildres in California generate signicant
negative impacts on academic performance among students.
21
e connection between the increasing number of hot days and
disaster-related school closures and lost learning are just two
examples of how climate change is already aecting education.
22
e impacts of unmitigated climate change also cause severe
damage to educational infrastructure. A 2017 report by the Pew
Charitable Trusts found that nearly 6,500 public schools are in
counties with a high risk of ooding, and a study in the journal
Nature found that the nation’s ood risk will jump 26 percent in the
next 30 years.
23
An assessment by the Center for Integrative Environ-
mental Research at the University of Maryland nds that extreme
weather events, such as flooding and wildfires, place immense
strain on public sector budgets at the state and local levels.
24
Such
budgetary constraints put considerable stress on school budgets
and create signicant challenges for unions going into bargaining
over wages, hours, and working conditions for their members.
Between Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the West Coast wildres
of 2022, there were over 200 “billion-dollar weather and climate
disasters,” totaling over $1.8 trillion in damages.
25
As disasters
become more frequent and more forceful, there is an increased
understanding that the impacts are unequal. Schools and com-
munities across America have testied to the ways disasters com-
pound, cumulatively increasing inequality and disadvantage. e
good news is that there is an important role that students, educa-
tors, our local unions, and community allies can play in addressing
the dual crises of climate change and inequality.
The Solution: A Just Transition
e extreme inequality and poverty in our very wealthy society
are morally reprehensible. ey are also the result of decades of
intentional policy decisions that have concentrated income, wealth,
and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, who then use
that money and power to further expand their money and power.
In short, the current rules of the game are not designed to ensure
the greatest good for the greatest number of Americans, but rather
to ensure the greatest prots for the wealthiest and most powerful
Americans. Reversing this trend and centering the common good—
putting all people’s economic, social, mental, and physical health
before corporate prots—will require signicant changes to the
way our economy operates. Confronting the climate crisis oers
a potential pathway for making some of the important changes in
our economy that are needed to recenter the lives and well-being
of people. We can right economic wrongs and create good jobs with
fair wages and benets while “going green,” but only if we now make
intentional policy decisions that focus on equity, inclusion, and
justice.
e concept of a “just transition” attempts to do just that by
reducing fossil fuel dependence while simultaneously investing
in communities and people by creating good job opportunities
that oer living wages, health and retirement benets, opportuni-
ties for promotion, and union representation for displaced and
historically marginalized workers. e idea originates from the
work of the late American labor and environmental health and
safety activist Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic
Workers union.
26
Broken into its constituent parts, “transition”
refers to “the passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to
another,” and “just,” in this usage, is the root word for “justice,”
meaning “acting or being in conformity with what is morally
upright or good.”
27
In other words, a just transition combines the
often-conicting projects of economic transition and the pursuit
of social justice into one unied endeavor.
When confronting the problem of climate change, the potential
for injustice is great, particularly if decisions are made solely by
economic elites and grounded in the logic of neoliberal capital-
ism. is logic of unregulated free markets has led to the accu-
mulation of wealth at the top while working- and middle-class
families struggle, and it is at the root of the false choice between
having good jobs or having a healthy environment that many
blue-collar workers are confronted with.
28
e same logic has led
to the construction and operation of polluting facilities in poor
Climate disasters
cumulatively
increase inequality
in schools and
communities.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 59
and predominantly nonwhite communities across the United
States, while historically excluding the very same populations
from access to the job opportunities within or only oering the
most dangerous occupations to local workers of color.
e very notion of a just transition challenges the powerful
neoliberal ideology that has dominated US governance since
the late 1970s. It instead oers a vision of economic democracy,
including public investments to account for the full social costs
and benets of environmental and economic policies to create the
most just—not necessarily the most protable—outcome for all.
Instead of oering a false choice between good jobs and a healthy
environment, a just transition puts people before prots by pursu-
ing both clean air and good jobs at the same time. e education
sector has a large role to play in creating a just transition, not only
through teaching and learning but also by transforming our facili-
ties and operations to address climate change and in the process
creating good career pipelines and reducing inequalities.
As educators, we have a responsibility as the stewards of the
next generation to help ensure that we pass along a livable climate
with a fair economy to our students and all future generations. It
is for this reason that the AFT has adopted several resolutions on
climate change in recent years, including “A Just Transition to a
Peaceful and Sustainable Economy” (2017),
29
“In Support of Green
New Deal” (2020),
30
and “Divest from Fossil Fuels and Reinvest in
Workers and Communities” (2022).
31
Nationally, at the state level,
and locally, the AFT, in partnership with student activists and com-
munity groups, has been a leader on confronting the climate crisis,
but still more can and should be done to promote a truly just transi-
tion. I spoke with a dozen educators and students from around the
United States who have been engaging in this work through their
unions and in their schools and universities. ese conversations
inform the recommendations outlined below.
Pursuing a Just Transition in the Education Sector
Like all sectors, public schools, colleges, and universities have
played their part in contributing to climate change. According
to the Aspen Institute, there are nearly 100,000 public preK–12
schools in the United States. ey occupy two million acres of
land and emit 78 MMTCO₂ annually
32
at a cost of about $8 bil-
lion per year for energy. Our public school buildings are about
50 years old, on average, and far too many operate outdated and
inefficient HVAC equipment, have poor insulation, and have
electrical and plumbing systems in desperate need of repair.
33
While the problem is widespread, it is even more pronounced
in low-income communities and communities of color.
34
Public
schools also operate the largest mass transit eet in the coun-
try with nearly 480,000 school buses on the road.
35
ere are an
additional 6,000 two-year and four-year public higher education
institutions throughout the United States that are also in need of
energy eciency improvements.
36
Given their environmental impact, schools, colleges, and uni-
versities are an excellent place to begin forging a just transition
through investments in green schools that would reduce GHG
emissions and pollution exposure while creating good jobs that
can address systemic inequalities along the lines of race, class,
and gender. is involves installing renewable energy genera-
tion and storage systems, renovating existing school buildings to
improve eciencies, constructing new green buildings, securing
strong labor standards, ensuring an open and democratic process
for all stakeholders, and requiring local and preferential hiring
to ensure that local communities and displaced workers benet
from the jobs that are created in the process.
Constructing Healthy Green Schools
So what are the elements of healthy green schools? Green school
projects include installation of solar panels or other renewable
energy sources; improving heating, cooling, and ventilation sys-
tems (e.g., installing heat pumps); constructing new energy ecient
buildings or making retrots to existing buildings (e.g., new doors,
windows, and insulation); installing battery storage for renewably
generated electricity; creating microgrids that can support com-
munities during power outages; modernizing lighting; switching
from diesel to electric vehicle eets; automating building systems
(including smart thermostats and sensors for lights and faucets);
and creating more green spaces.
37
These investments not only
reduce the carbon footprint of schools but also save money on
energy costs and reduce unhealthy pollution.
38
These sorts of investments
are not cheap. To cover the costs
of these investments, Repre-
sentative Jamaal Bowman and
Senator Ed Markey have intro-
duced Green New Deal (GND)
for Public Schools legislation
that would invest $1.6 trillion
over 10 years to fund green
upgrades—but that bill is not
yet passed.
39
Thankfully, the
Ination Reduction Act (IRA),
which was passed in 2022,
oers many incentives for local
schools to make these upgrades
now while we continue to ght
for GND for education.
40
In particular, the AFT and other non-
prots lobbied for the inclusion of “direct pay” incentives in the
bill that allow tax-exempt entities such as local governments,
school districts, universities, nonprots, and unions to receive
direct rebates, in lieu of tax credits, from the federal government
to cover a signicant percent of the cost of green school projects.
e IRA incentives are like grants equal to at least 6 percent
and up to 60 percent of any renewable energy project’s cost. How-
ever, unlike regular grants, there is no competitive application
process. If a school district makes an appropriate investment, the
IRS will wire them money. e credits are applicable to the cost
for fuel cells, solar systems, small windmills, qualied oshore
wind, geothermal heat pumps, and energy storage. Projects that
pay the local prevailing wage and hire apprentices from locally
approved apprenticeship programs qualify for a 30 percent credit.
Projects that meet the domestic content requirement earn an
additional 10 percent credit. Projects in energy communities
41
or
low-income communities can earn up to an additional 10 percent
credit each.
42
With direct pay, schools, colleges, and universities can own
their clean power and maximize their cost benets in the long run
by keeping 100 percent of the savings. e rebate can be used to
pay o huge portions of the project immediately, and the utility
Confronting the
climate crisis offers
a pathway to
recenter the lives
and well-being
of people.
60 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
cost savings from self-generation of electricity in the long run can
be used to pay o the balance.
e important thing to note about green school projects is that
they must be initiated locally, through local budgeting processes,
including bonding discussions, municipal capital budgets, and
referenda. Education unions are strategically positioned to lead
in this eort. In many cases, they already are—as we’ll see below.
Confronting Social and Economic Inequality
Combating the dual crises of ecology and inequality requires pri-
oritizing environmental and climate justice to secure an equitable
distribution of environmental burdens and benets. For example,
lead in public water supplies is a tremendous health hazard to
students and residents in frontline communities from Newark,
New Jersey, to Flint, Michigan, and beyond.
43
In these communi-
ties, workers and commu-
nity activists can together
advocate for the repair or
replacement of poisoned
water pipelines and demand
the cleanup of the ground-
water and aquifers that feed
those pipelines. Education
unions and community
members can also demand
the electrication of vehicles
to reduce student and worker
exposure to asthma-causing
particulate matter pollution
and reduce GHG emissions.
Creating more green spaces in urban communities or con-
structing bike paths or walking trails can reduce auto traffic
around schools, colleges, and universities. Community-owned
solar, microgrids, battery storage, and resilience hubs are key
ingredients to equitable climate resilience. When the regional
power company’s grid goes down, schools, colleges, and universi-
ties, as local anchor institutions, can provide a safe space—known
as a resilience hub—for the provision of potable water, electricity
for charging medical and communication devices, refrigeration
for medications, and other vital services needed to save lives
during climate catastrophes such as hurricanes. ese facilities
are most eective when the solar power is “islanded” within a
microgrid, meaning it can be stored and used locally rather than
being transmitted onto the regular electrical grid (which is how
net-metering works in many states and localities).
44
Climate equity also means pursuing labor justice and ensuring
that the new jobs created are good jobs, providing opportunities
not only for workers from historically marginalized communities
but also for those displaced from the fossil fuel industry.
As noted above, the IRA promotes strong labor standards by
providing additional incentives for projects that oer prevailing
wages, take apprentices from qualied apprenticeship programs,
and use domestically manufactured materials. Prevailing wages
take labor costs out of competition in the construction bidding
process, giving high-road union employers a better chance of
securing contracts to retrofit old schools or build new green
schools. Apprenticeships create a career pathway into well-paying
jobs without the burden of debt that most students accrue pursu-
ing college degrees. Sourcing building materials from domestic
manufacturers also helps to support local manufacturing job
opportunities. AFT locals, in partnership with construction and
manufacturing unions and other community partners, can use
all of these tools to ensure good jobs are created in the process of
greening our nation’s schools.
Perhaps most importantly, to truly advance equity and justice
through a just transition plan, all voices must be equally included
in decision-making. Social and economic justice campaigners
operate under the simple principle that “Nothing about us,
without us, is for us.” It means that decisions that signicantly
impact people’s lives cannot be fair and just without rst listen-
ing to those people and empowering them to participate in the
decision-making process.
Teaching Climate Justice
As teachers, we know the power of education. rough our lessons
in preK–12 schools, colleges, and universities, we are uniquely
positioned to develop, engage, and prepare the next generation
to be equipped to address climate change and to succeed in the
green economy of the future. As the Aspen Institute’s K12 Climate
Action Plan states, “Educators across subject areas in school and
in out-of-school programs can support teaching and learning on
sustainability, the environment, green jobs, and climate change
and empower students with agency to advance solutions.”
45
How-
ever, as Betsy Drinan of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) climate
justice committee said to me, “It’s not just that greenhouse gases
warm the planet and that causes these changes. It’s also the his-
tory of energy use that caused all this inequality and the impacts
of climate change cause further inequality.”
46
at is why developing and teaching climate justice curriculum,
as opposed to just climate change curriculum, is an important piece
of a just transition. e Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has already
begun developing content with a strong focus on climate justice
and equity.
47
e BTU is considering doing the same. As Betsy told
me, how we address climate change can either reduce or exacer-
bate inequality. Some key questions for educators and students,
she said, are: “Who has the power in these decisions? How are they
using that power? And who are they keeping out of those decisions?
at is what will determine the outcome.”
48
Ayesha Qazi-Lampert
from the CTU climate justice committee agreed and added that
“climate literacy is also an organizing tool; the education reveals
inequities that inspire eorts for change—it’s kind of a cycle.”
49
A good starting point for interested teachers is Aaron Karp’s
“Educating for Climate Activism, Autonomy, and System Change,”
which lays out a curriculum model that contains ve content areas
that aim to analyze the major forces that give rise to today’s exis-
tential problems and their solutions: ecological systems, energy
sources and technology, economic institutions, power structures
and politics, and social movement–driven societal change.
50
e model envisions the development of literacy in each area,
including their interconnections, and could be used to guide cur-
riculum development for educators as well as courses in teacher
education.
Investing in Career and Technical Education
A just transition to a more sustainable and equitable future is
going to require a massive inux of skilled workers to do all of
A just transition
puts people before
prots by pursuing
both clean air
and good jobs at
the same time.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 61
the new jobs, especially in the skilled trades initially, but in other
technical occupations thereafter. An investment in career and
technical education (CTE) is an investment in the future, espe-
cially when it is infused throughout the entire school curriculum,
dismantling the false disconnect that has often existed between
academic learning and skills training. Incorporating CTE into all
areas of the curriculum can create an important link between the
world of school and the world of work that can motivate students
to continue their education while giving them the knowledge and
exible skills that will make it possible for them to adapt to the
jobs of the future.
A great example of this approach can be seen in the Peoria
Public Schools system in Illinois. In 2015, the Peoria Federation
of Teachers and the Greater Peoria Works campaign utilized funds
from the Illinois Federation of Teachers and from an AFT Innova-
tion Fund grant supporting the Promising Pathways initiative to
modernize CTE programs.
51
Among the dozen new CTE programs
oering industry-recognized credentials, Peoria created a two-
year renewable energy training program. And when the school
installed solar panels on the roof of the building, the program
worked closely with the installers to integrate the process into the
curriculum with students learning everything from solar installa-
tion techniques to the monitoring of energy use and generation.
Investing in CTE like Peoria and other school districts have done
allows students to learn and prepare for good jobs. Scaling success-
ful programs so as many students as possible can take advantage of
them, and move on to success in careers and life, is an important
step in ensuring a just transition.
Making It All Happen
Forging a just transition in education with healthy green schools
and social and economic justice requires grassroots organizing
and power building. Some important steps include forming local
union climate justice committees, building strong partnerships
with students and community groups, bargaining for the com-
mon good, and holding decision makers accountable. ese local
eorts can also be coordinated nationally for maximum impact
across the entirety of the education sector.
Form Local Union Climate Justice Committees
As democratic organizations, unions rely on membership resolu-
tions to lay out positions on issues and on committees to push
forward plans of action on those issues. e same is true with
climate justice work. In my
own research, I have found that
most teacher-initiated climate
action currently underway
around the country is being
led by members of unions that
have adopted climate resolu-
tions and formed local union
climate justice committees to
advance the unions’ work on
the issue.
52
Forming a climate
justice committee does two
things. First, it ensures that the
issue of climate justice remains on the union’s agenda. Second,
it creates a space for interested members to engage with the issue
within their union and help to drive the union’s climate work at
the grassroots level. It is dicult to overstate how important a
climate justice committee is for any union that wants to begin
engaging in climate justice work. e more such local committees
that exist, the more local unions there will be pushing a climate
justice agenda within their school district, college, or university,
amplifying the positive impact.
Partner with Students, Community Allies,
and Other Unions to Push for Change
To win a just transition for education, our local unions must forge
deep partnerships with student activists, environmentalists, envi-
ronmental and climate justice groups, parent/caregiver organiza-
tions, and other unions in dierent industries. Many education
unions have already been engaging in this work, including United
Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which has more than a dozen com-
munity partners with whom it is making climate justice demands
at school board meetings and in bargaining.
College and university professors from local unions around the
country have joined with students in climate strikes demanding
an end to fossil fuel use by universities. In the summer and fall of
2019, after passing a local union Green New Deal resolution, the
American Association of University Professors (AAUP)-AFT local
at Rutgers University in New Jersey worked closely with student
groups and community partners to organize a massive climate
strike. As James Boyle, a student who helped organize the strike,
said, “We need to acknowledge that climate change involves lim-
its,” especially when it comes to energy consumption and waste
generation.
53
On September 20, 2019, faculty, sta, students, and
community members rallied and marched together, demanded,
and ultimately won commitments from the university in the follow-
ing months to divest from fossil fuels and develop a strong climate
action plan with timelines and targets for phasing out fossil fuel
use. e coalition also emphasized the importance of using local
union labor to do the construction work involved in the transition.
ree years later, faculty, students, and community members came
together again for a second climate action, demanding the uni-
versity move more rapidly to transitioning away from fossil fuels
and installing community solar and resilience hubs. Following the
action, student leader Alexa Haris said of the coalition, “We need to
talk about what other actions we can pursue, such as camping out
on university property, holding sit-ins, and attending city council
meetings and university board of governors meetings.”
54
Education unions
are strategically
positioned to
lead in green
school efforts.
62 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
In addition to helping to
organize the climate strikes
and winning fossil fuel
divestment, members of the
Rutgers AAUP-AFT climate
justice committee were also
involved in designing the
university’s climate action
plan, which calls for achiev-
ing carbon neutrality by
2040. To help achieve this
goal, union members have
been organizing with envi-
ronmental justice and com-
munity groups in Newark,
Camden, and New Brunswick to educate the public about the
benets of community solar and advocating for the university to
open up its rooftops and parking lots to accommodate it. Other
members of the climate justice committee have partnered with
environmental organizations to oppose dangerous and polluting
fossil fuel projects such as the proposed liquid natural gas export
terminal in Gibbstown. As climate justice committee member
Jovanna Rosen said in an op-ed opposing the project: “Our fac-
ulty and graduate worker union at Rutgers believes in ‘bargain-
ing for the common good,’ [which is] a labor strategy that builds
community-union partnerships to achieve a more equitable and
sustainable future.”
55
Other unions, especially in the building trades, are vital part-
ners when pursuing green school initiatives. Recently, educa-
tors in Washington state worked with the local building trades
unions to successfully win support for increased funding for
school retrots.
56
Nationally, through the Climate Jobs National
Resource Center (CJNRC), and in many states, educators and
construction trades unions have been working together to win
support for green infrastructure projects, including schools.
For example, Climate Jobs Illinois, a state aliate of the CJNRC
with 14 member unions, has a community-driven Carbon Free
Healthy Schools campaign to invest in Illinois’s public schools
through energy eciency upgrades and solar power systems.
These healthy schools will save school districts millions in
energy costs, decrease emissions that contribute to climate
change, oer opportunities for more CTE programs in green
energy, and create thousands of union jobs.
57
At the national level, the AFT and the United Auto Workers
are calling on school districts to electrify the nation’s school bus
eet.
58
Cities and counties can use seed money provided by the
2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to accelerate the
rollout of union-built electric school buses. There are about
half a million yellow school buses operating across the United
States, generating more than ve million tons of GHG emissions
every year
59
and emitting pollutants that increase the likelihood
of asthma and other respiratory conditions among students,
drivers, and community members—especially in low-income
communities that have suered disproportionately from envi-
ronmental injustice.
60
At a press conference about the eort, AFT
President Randi Weingarten set forth a vision of children riding
on union-built and union-driven electric buses, arriving safely at
union-taught schools.
e key to strong partnerships like these is trust, and build-
ing trust takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight or after just
one meeting. Local unions pursuing climate justice that do not
already have existing relationships with community partners
should begin to open up dialogue as soon as possible. And while
forming a coalition in itself can lead to tangible gains, winning
truly transformative changes requires transformative coalitions
that involve radical power sharing and democracy, as is the case
in bargaining-for-the-common-good campaigns.
Bargain for the Common Good
Bargaining for the common good is an innovative way of building
community-labor alignments to jointly shape bargaining cam-
paigns that advance the mutual interests of workers and com-
munities alike. At their heart, these campaigns seek to confront
structural inequalities—not simply to agree on a union contract. A
bargaining-for-the-common-good approach starts with teachers
unions, students, and local community groups working together
to develop and articulate a set of demands that serve the interests
of students, workers, and the communities where they live and
work. Importantly, all stakeholders should have an equal voice
in proposing and developing common good proposals.
Some possible demands could be emissions reduction targets,
energy eciency investments, solar panel installations, and the
creation of resilience hubs at public universities, colleges, and
preK–12 schools. Other demands include divestment of public
pensions and endowments from fossil fuel companies and rein-
vestment of those funds into socially responsible investments,
as the AFT has resolved to do nationally.
61
Expansion of public
transportation options, including the free provision of mass transit
to students or employees, and monetary or other incentives for
workers who walk, bike, or use public transportation to commute
to and from school are also possible demands. Public school
teachers can also ght for climate justice to become a core part of
the public school curriculum, as the Chicago Teachers Union has
been doing, and for green energy CTE programs to be available to
all high school students.
Hitting on many of these demands, UTLA, in partnership with
students and several community organizations, developed and
successfully negotiated a memorandum of understanding (as
part of its contract bargaining) titled “Healthy, Green Public
Schools.”
62
e memorandum, Arlene Inouye (then UTLA’s bar-
gaining co-chair and secretary, now retired) told me, includes
climate literacy curricula; a green jobs study; a green school
plan, including conversion to union-made electric buses and
union-installed renewable energy systems; and clean water, free
from lead and other toxins. Reecting on the process and pro-
posals that came from it, Arlene said, “it’s been very important
that we continue to grow the coalition and continue to expand
our common good demands…. We’re nding dierent angles to
keep pushing the envelope.”
63
Hold Decision Makers Accountable
Without clearly dened targets and an enforcement mechanism,
green school plans are simply promises that can be broken when
economic or political structures shift. To ensure that educational
institutions are following through on their goals, unions can
demand the formation of joint labor-management-community
Winning
transformative
changes requires
transformative
coalitions.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024 63
committees on reducing GHG emissions.
64
Such committees
can be tasked with assessing the employer’s emissions prole
and developing climate action plans to reduce GHG emissions
and promote climate justice, including the creation of resilience
hubs and career opportunities for local community members.
Instead of relying on politicians who may be too fearful to
establish enforceable targets or take bold action, workers and
community partners can persuade or, if need be, force their
employers to do so.
Along these lines, the Boston Teachers Union has begun
discussions with the city’s school board and City Hall regarding
Mayor Michelle Wu’s plan for a Green New Deal for Boston Public
Schools. “Our main focus,” Betsy Drinan of the BTU told me, “is
to get the union a seat at the table and involved in the planning
for what the Green New Deal for Boston Public Schools is about,
what it looks like, and to make sure that school communities have
input into that planning.”
65
e goal, she said, is to have regular
monthly meetings. Local education unions around the country
can take similar steps to spearhead the process of greening our
nation’s schools now.
Coordinate Efforts Across Localities
e impact of local eorts can be amplied when undertaken in
concert with other localities making similar demands. One way
to help coordinate local eorts is to become involved with the
national AFT climate and environmental justice caucus.* Just as
climate justice committees create a space within local unions for
members to work on climate justice issues, the national caucus
provides a space within the national union for local union climate
justice committee members to share information—including best
practices, challenges, and wins—and to potentially coordinate
their eorts across political jurisdictions, learning from each oth-
er’s eorts. e caucus also helps advance the work of the national
AFT climate task force by oering creative ideas and solutions and
organizing horizontally across locals.
e Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) has also been con-
vening a cross-union Educators Climate Action Network with AFT
and National Education Association members participating. e
network emerged after conversations by education union activists
at both the Labor Notes Conference and the national AFT conven-
tion in the summer of 2022. e network of over 100 union educa-
tors from across the country convenes monthly and is open to all
education union members interested in tackling climate change
and promoting climate justice.
†
Conclusion
In my experience, most educators, students, and school employ-
ees fully understand and are very concerned about the threat
of climate catastrophe. As David Hughes, a member of the AFT
national climate task force, said, “We as teachers represent truth,
and we have to act in accordance with the truth.... We have knowl-
edge, we’re teaching knowledge, and we’re generating knowledge
about a catastrophe that’s incredibly important for everyone.
We’ve got to use whatever mechanism we can to implement the
logical change that follows from that knowledge.”
66
Together with students and
community partners, education
unions can ght for and win a
just transition that addresses
not only the climate crisis, but
also the inequality crisis. As
anchor institutions in their
communities, with large swaths
of public land, buildings, park-
ing lots, and roof space, edu-
cational institutions are ideal
sites for renewable energy
generation and resilience hubs.
e good jobs that are created
in the process, with strong labor
standards and local hiring provisions, will contribute to forging a
just transition to a more sustainable and equitable future. And the
expansion of CTE and the incorporation of climate justice curricu-
lum into schools will equip future workers as well as citizens with
the skills and knowledge needed for a green sustainable economy.
As with all major societal change, it begins by organizing and
building power, then exerting inuence on decision makers to
advance an agenda that promotes equity.
Many education unions are already beginning this work, start-
ing at the local level and coordinating nationally, but the potential
for transformative change has only just begun to be tapped. e
Ination Reduction Act has an unlimited pot of money for invest-
ing in green schools, but it is only possible if we initiate the eorts
locally and take advantage of the federal incentives. Passage of
Bowman and Markey’s Green New Deal for Public Schools leg-
islation would further supercharge these investments. As Ayesha
Qazi-Lampert from the CTU climate justice committee told me,
“It’s at the national level. It’s originating from below, too. If it’s just
one without the other, it may or may not succeed. But if you’ve got
both ends of the spectrum pushing in, you got a lot better chance
of succeeding.”
67
Will your local union be the next to join the eort and help
advance a Green New Deal for education from below? ☐
For the endnotes, see aft.org/ae/spring2024/vachon.
We can win a
just transition
that addresses
the climate and
inequality crises.
*Get involved with the AFT’s national climate and environmental justice caucus
through this form: go.aft.org/b6z.
†
Learn more, including how to get involved, by contacting the LNS at
labor4sustainability.org/contact-us.
64 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SPRING 2024
Become an OSHA-
Authorized Trainer
Through the AFT, career and technical
educators can become authorized
OSHA (Occupational Safety and
Health Administration) trainers to
offer their students OSHA’s 10-hour
and 30-hour courses on health, safety,
and rights in the workplace. With
these courses, students earn their
OSHA 10 or 30 cards and are prepared
for jobs in construction or general
industry (e.g., culinary, cosmetology,
auto, technology, health services,
etc.). For details, see the SML resource
“Build a Workforce
Development
Program in Your
District,” which is
available at go.aft.
org/apz.
Sparking Career Exploration
For more than 60 resources related to
career and technical education, check out
Share My Lesson’s “Career Exploration”
collection (go.aft.org/3m7). AFT staff
member Megan Ortmeyer provides a great
overview of the collection (go.aft.org/d4q),
from children learning about STEM careers
with Ada Twist, Scientist, to teens creating
career portfolios and preparing for appren-
ticeships. Here, we focus on three resources
for secondary students to learn about the
endless possibilities before them.
Career Girls
As an SML partner, Career Girls has shared
more than 800 resources! What makes its
approach to career exploration unique
are short, high-quality videos featuring
female professionals across a huge range
of careers. From engineering to perform-
ing arts, nance, molecular biology, the
judiciary—pretty much any eld you can
think of—Career Girls provides an insider’s
look. In addition, there are videos discuss-
ing related topics like the importance of
studying math, overcoming obstacles, and
choosing friends who are positive and sup-
portive. Check it out at go.aft.org/g5r.
Career Village
As a teenager—and even as an educator—
it can be hard to nd answers to career
questions. “What does a typical day as a
food scientist look like?” “Should I become
a paralegal before going to law school?”
“What are difculties you face as an archi-
tectural manager?” These are a few of the
real questions asked—and answered!—on
Career Village. Over 130,000 professionals
volunteer on Career Village to answer
students’ questions, and the whole archive
is searchable. This SML resource (go.aft.org/
st5) introduces students to Career Village
and gets them started asking questions.
STEM Careers Coalition
The STEM Careers Coalition brings together
a variety of industry partners with Discov-
ery Education to introduce students to
STEM careers, with a focus on showing that
STEM professionals are problem solvers
working in exciting elds from bat conser-
vation to welding. While this SML resource
(go.aft.org/pxn) shows students what it’s
like to be a facilities engineer and a geolo-
gist, the STEM Careers Coalition website
has dozens more careers to explore.
Do you have resources you’d like to
share? SML makes it easy! And if you have
ideas or requests, reach out to content@
sharemylesson.com.
–THE SHARE MY LESSON TEAM
sharemylesson
By Educators, For Educators
Safeguard your
retirement by
insuring your future
care needs.
Request a free quote
today: aft-ltc.or
Access affordable long-term care coverage through the AFT’s discounted lon-term
care insurance program with Back Nine Planning. AFT members and their families
benefit from expert guidance and exclusive rates not available to the broader public.
Non-Prot Org.
U.S. Postage
PAID
Washington, D.C.
Permit No. 3826
AFTvotes
Be a part of AFTvotes 2024. It’s fun! It’s easy! And it matters.
You’re invited!
AFTvotes 2024
WHAT: Be part of our fast-growing, nationwide activists’ group of educators working to get out the vote.
WHY: To build on the progress we’ve made with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Together, we
are: Winning historic investments in public education at every level, with a vefold increase for
community schools. Investing in the resources and staff our students need to thrive post-pandemic.
Fighting for better pay and more respect for educators and school staff. Expanding school meals.
Preventing gun violence. Making school buildings safer and healthier. Tackling the crushing
burden of student debt. Protecting academic freedom.
WHO: YOU. Your family. Your colleagues. Your friends. Like-minded,
engaged people in your community and across the country.
WHEN: All the way to Election Day—Tuesday, Nov. 5.
WHERE: In your neighborhood, in your community or
right from your own cellphone.
RSVP here
Tell us what you think at AFTvotes.org.
Help shape our AFTvotes campaign by taking our
four-minute member survey.
Get involved at AFTvotes.org.
Activities and actions for every schedule and interest,
whether you have a day or an hour.
AFT educators and school staff are all in for
Joe Biden! But he’ll need all of us to win.
