Kimberly Green is the Executive Director of the National Association of State Directors of Career and Technical Education (NASDCTE). In early March Catherine Kirby, UPDATE Editor, conducted this interview with Ms. Green.

UPDATE: Many of our readers are familiar with NASDCTE but others aren’t. Could you summarize what your group does for both secondary and postsecondary career and technical education?

Ms. Green: Our organization was founded back in the early 1900s, when the federal government first started investing in career and technical education, as a means to interface with each state’s contact person in [what was then called] vocational education. Over time, our organization has grown, but we’ve always maintained that focus of serving states. Our core membership is the state directors of career-technical education (CTE) who are employed in the agency that gets the Perkins funding. As an organization, we focus our efforts on advocacy and awareness of CTE with a variety of stakeholders: Congress, employer organizations, trade organizations, other federal agencies, and other education groups. Our priorities primarily focus on CTE’s connections to education reform, workforce development, and economic development and making sure that there’s appropriate policy that supports that mission as well as the resources available to support that mission.

Professional development is a big part of our work both in providing support to individual states and to the whole CTE community through our two national conferences as well as the annual Career Clusters Institute that includes agenda items and focus on both secondary and postsecondary issues. What we’re finding is that while there certainly are some issues that are more a priority for one level of education than another, most of our agenda items are ones that are common across both secondary and postsecondary education. Lastly, we serve by creating products and resources for our members. We do a monthly newsletter, research briefs, and some products in support of the National Career Clusters. All of these align to our core mission of that connection between education reform, workforce development, and economic development.

UPDATE: In fact, your organization was instrumental in creating the 16 career cluster model back in 2002 which many states, including Illinois, have adopted. Please explain the advantages of conceptualizing curricula within this model. For example, are there specific measurable gains made by early adopters of this model and how does it help students, parents, teachers, and counselors make choices?

Ms. Green: I could talk about this for hours. One is that we have seen broad adoption of career clusters as a vehicle to transform what we thought of as (old) vocational education to (new) CTE, so it’s a vehicle for change. It has helped us re-conceptualize CTE, thinking beyond the occupational areas we have traditionally served. Also, it has prompted us to think about how we deliver instruction of content that’s broader, more than job-specific preparation, so that it’s more viable in the 21st century.

Our organization as well as CTE are recognized as being early adopters, responsive to the economy and to change; that is important from a messaging and marketing perspective. We know some early adopter states like Maryland and Oregon have seen measurable gains in their student achievement outcomes, where CTE students are outperforming all other student populations on academic tests. Using career clusters as a transformative tool for CTE to serve more students, integrate more rigorous academics, and encourage more students to go onto postsecondary is being born out in the data that we see for those states. The early adopters are seeing increases in their enrollment because they see CTE as an option that expands possibilities for students, exposing them to a much broader array of career possibilities and a variety of stopping out points along a career pathway. That makes it very attractive to both parents and students. We have also seen some very encouraging information about reducing the need for remediation. The College and Careers Transition Initiative (CCTI) project has some great data that show when you implement a quality career cluster and pathway between secondary and postsecondary education, the alignment of instruction results in greater effectiveness at transition, lowers need for remediation, increases persistence, and improves postsecondary graduation rates, particularly on-time graduation. The data are very encouraging in the places that have adopted it.

UPDATE: Within the current cluster model are 81 career pathways¹ and untold numbers of Programs of Study that could be developed by the state or local providers of CTE. Local recipients of Perkins funds, according to the law, must develop or offer at least one Program of Study. Based on the legislation and from what you know of effective CTE programs, what do you believe are the core components of Programs of Study that will ensure Perkins IV results in more rigorous and relevant CTE programs?

Ms. Green: If you want to, you can look at the language in the law of Perkins IV and what it defines as a Program of Study (POS) and see old “voc ed” in there. It is important that people look at the POS provisions in the context of the entire piece of legislation as a vision of where we’re trying to move CTE toward. When you put all those pieces together, then you see the power of a Program of Study: taking traditional CTE to the next level which involves academic and technical content aligned, supported, and integrated. Implementing Programs of Study involves secondary and postsecondary elements that are streamlined for effective student transition, and embedded in them is seamless transfer of credit, totally portable and in a non-duplicative sequence of instruction. Probably the thing that is most significant in my mind about POS is that we look differently at what is being taught. It’s not about teaching someone for a particular job but rather, from the beginning, exposing students to an entire industry. Over the sequence of instruction the Program of Study narrows like a funnel, giving students more specificity as they make choices of what job they’re interested in, but the starting point is much broader than a traditional CTE sequence. That, to me, is the power of Programs of Study and what is most appropriate for the 21st century workforce.

UPDATE: At the secondary level many CTE courses have been cut to accommodate efforts including curricular strategies aimed to improve NCLB outcomes. With a sometimes limited selection of CTE offerings, what role can Programs of Study play in the larger arena of high school reform?

Ms. Green: Where [students] start in the sequence for a Program of Study is going to be very different depending on the delivery system. For example, in Oklahoma’s POS model, they will get to some content specificity in the high school because they start earlier. But where a student may only be able to take a sequence of two courses, it will be important to think hard about what to do with those two courses. In some cases, the focus will be restricted to a broad level introduction to an industry. More advanced content would come through some dual credit courses or something that’s done in collaboration with the postsecondary institution. In yet other models, students won’t get specific content instruction until they go to a postsecondary institution. You have to consider how many course titles you have to offer within the school’s schedule and you craft a Program of Study that has enough meaning to it that will engage students.

I remember talking to Scott Hess (at the U.S. Department of Education) who started a lot of this work with career clusters. He said, “[Within the Health Science cluster] if you’re only able to provide a sequence of two courses in high school, giving students two courses toward a CNA is not going to help them [as much as] giving students a high quality anatomy and physiology course that prepares them for a variety of postsecondary health occupational programs, especially a course that offers postsecondary credit which will help move students along the spectrum much more quickly.”

UPDATE: Perkins legislation is more prescriptive about what kinds of professional development it requires and how it’s delivered. What kinds of programs should providers of these opportunities create to best support the intent of the law?

Ms. Green: SThe law is more specific in that professional development must meet the requirements that are defined in NCLB which means that it is more than one shot workshops but rather, more sustainable, intensive interventions over a period of time. The way I interpret that is to include an evaluation of the effectiveness of professional development activities, making sure that the people you’re providing it to are gaining the knowledge, implementing it, and there is a feedback loop for improvement. And there is definitely a focus on connection to the accountability indicators – investing and targeting professional development to areas where you’re perhaps not meeting your performance targets.

UPDATE: The new law includes separate core indicators for secondary and postsecondary students. For secondary students, one that has many people asking questions relates to the “attainment of CTE skill proficiencies, including student achievement on technical assessments that are aligned with industry-recognized standards, if available and appropriate.”² This has a lot of people concerned. What can you say about that?

Ms. Green: There are a whole slew of issues around both what exists at the secondary level and the challenges there, as well as what doesn’t exist. Part of the issue is that there aren’t any assessments that align with that broader curriculum and instruction, if that is what is offered at the high school level. Often times you can’t get into enough depth of instruction at the secondary level to be able to have a student be qualified to sit for an industry assessment. Plus, many of them are very expensive and a number of states have restrictions of being able to pay for student participation in the assessments because they are viewed as individually benefiting someone, as opposed to the NCLB assessment that just captures demographic information. What do you do if you have to align a program to an assessment when there is no assessment out there? What do you use in place of it? The cost of constructing a technical assessment system is something that is overwhelming to a lot of states.

A group of folks have been convened by the USDOE to talk about a potential solution for the secondary system. One idea is where a third party organization would create an item bank aligned to the career cluster knowledge and skills statements at the foundation level and the pathway level. States that choose to belong to a consortium could have assessments customized for their Programs of Study drawn from this national item bank. They would still meet the third party assessment requirements that the USDOE is strongly recommending as a valid and reliable requirement of the assessment (as opposed to a teacher developed assessment). It would also allow for alignment to that particular state’s standards that they’ve identified for Programs of Study. This discussion is at the very early stages but is getting a lot of interest from states that want to make the instructional shift to clusters but recognize that they have to have an assessment component to that system.

UPDATE: Related to postsecondary accountability, what do you think are the most significant shifts in the new legislation?

Ms. Green: All of the postsecondary indicators are the same as they were under Perkins III except that there is no longer an academic achievement performance indicator at the postsecondary level. What is different is that the stakes are higher. There is a requirement for negotiation between the state and each eligible institution at the postsecondary level, driving home the idea of using the data to drive change and using the data to institute a performance management system. That’s a significant shift in itself.

On the specific performance indicators, the one that’s received the most air time is technical assessments which we also mentioned earlier related to the secondary level. That comes largely out of the fact that Congress wants some way of demonstrating that its investment in career-technical education is resulting in the attainment of some technical skills. The way they’ve chosen to document that is through a technical assessment of some sort. Probably the thing that is most controversial right now is what that means at the postsecondary level. Clearly, there are industry certificates and credentials; where there is a bit of contention between a lot of the postsecondary communities and the USDOE is whether or not a postsecondary degree should also qualify as a measure of technical skill attainment. Right now the USDOE does not allow for that; it is a separate performance indicator. Certainly, the stakes are higher, and capturing the quality of the data is also a significant focus in the eyes of USDOE with the states and thereby the states with their local grant recipients.

UPDATE: There is a new subsection in Perkins IV related to the possibility of sanctions if 90% of the negotiated state and local performance levels are not met. What do you advise Perkins recipients to understand about the sanctions language in the new law?

Ms. Green: People shouldn’t dismiss the sanctions nor should they run in fear of them. Much like NCLB, the reason sanctions are in there is to make people take note of the accountability system . . . [which] is really about trying to improve programs. I don’t think that the goal is to sanction anyone, but it’s about making people focus on their data, its quality, and using it to make decisions. That has not happened in the past. Locals filed their reports to the state about what they did with their money, the report got sent to Washington, and that was the end of it. [The sanction language] is kind of a hammer, if you will, to make people be more serious about data and accountability. There are plenty of options within the law to try to help people be successful in achieving their targets.

UPDATE: Related to data, many of the indicators require the sharing of information across systems, that many times do not have a common way to identify students. This kind of data tracking is currently beyond the capacity of some states’ systems to accomplish. What provisions are there for states and local systems to gradually increase their capacity to meet these demands?

Ms. Green: The law is silent on this. The USDOE does look at states’ capacity, and there is an expectation that over time they’ll work toward improving the quality of their data by institutionalizing some systems that will help with the sharing of information, but there’s no specific timeline. Many folks have said that they wish that the federal government would, in some way, fund it or be much more specific about this requirement so that they could get beyond some of the in-state hurdles to sharing the data. The lack of resources is one of the big challenges to sharing the data, and there are privacy issues that people have concerns about, but the law is silent on both of those.

UPDATE: Are you aware of any initiatives at the federal level to clear up common interpretations of FERPA, which many local administrators often cite as the reason they cannot, or will not, share student record data?

Ms. Green: The feds would say that FERPA is not the issue, that FERPA is really not a barrier, and that there are states that share records all the time. There are provisions within FERPA that allow for record sharing for the purposes of this sort of accountability. It is probably true that many states’ attorneys general are much more cautious than the FERPA statute requires. Probably more so, the issue in a lot of states is whether or not they have the resources for a student record information system that is common across the learner levels. A lot of states have a student record information system, but it’s only K-12 or it’s only postsecondary, not a lifelong system. Financial resources often tend to be the real answer, but as you inferred, people hide behind privacy issues as a rationale.

UPDATE: One of the exciting things about Perkins IV is that it expands focus to include baccalaureate level education. Although the four-year institutions don’t receive Perkins dollars, what can community colleges do with Perkins funds to promote the law’s intent to encourage more CTE students to consider a baccalaureate degree as part of their career preparation?

Ms. Green: When we were drafting the legislation, the reason that the four-year college piece was put in there was to seriously promote the idea of a comprehensive Program of Study, that when students think about a career it does not end at the end of a two-year degree program. We’re really about promoting life long learning. That means that we need to provide information to students about all of the options along the entire educational spectrum. There are specific provisions in Perkins about having conversations with four-year institutions about transfer, about having four-year institutions at the table when crafting articulation agreements and insuring that the credit that is shared between two-year colleges and high schools can also be shared between two-year colleges and four-year institutions. One of the specific things community colleges can do is make sure that the four-year institutions are at the table when they’re crafting their Programs of Study.

UPDATE: Local uses of Perkins funds have two categories, required and permissive. Of the permissive uses of funds, describe what you believe CTE leaders could do to best improve CTE?

Ms. Green: What first comes to mind is a long conversation that we had during the reauthorization process about whether or not equipment was an allowable use of funds. There was a period of time when Congress had on the table that we could not spend any Perkins money on equipment. Obviously, in the Law, you can use the funds for equipment. However, the reason there was a discussion on eliminating it from the list of uses of funds was a strong interest that we should be targeting our Perkins funds on improving teaching and learning. We have to remember that the focus of Perkins IV is about program improvement and not about sustainability. When a local initiative, or state director for that matter, is looking how to choose the target of Perkins funds, I strongly encourage them to look at what they need to drive innovation in their program to make sure that they’re improving CTE. One lens that should be used is found in the data, seeing where weaknesses are and directing the state or local resources toward those weaknesses – whether it’s professional development, technical assistance, equipment, etc.

If you think about the instructional change that needs to happen to adopt this notion of Programs of Study and clusters, it’s a sea change in what we’re teaching and how we’re collaborating among the learner levels. You would find that this focus on teaching and learning, professional development, and technical assistance is probably an area that will be a priority for most, if not all states. How that will translate at the local level will probably vary a bit, but I think that’s going to be an overarching theme guiding the uses of funds.

UPDATE: Obviously a portion of state leadership funds must be directed to serving the special populations as defined under Perkins.³ What are the challenges for serving these populations and providing them with options for high skill, high demand, or high wage occupations and the attainment of self sufficiency?

Ms. Green: Perkins has always had a historical focus on serving students that fall under the special populations category and this continues under Perkins IV. There are some concerns that Perkins IV is moving CTE into elite status as opposed to serving all students who choose to enter into CTE programs. The focus on special populations is prominent in the accountability measures, requiring disaggregation of data and targeted performance indicators. This focus is to ensure that these students are served equally and are performing as well. In many ways, it’s a sleeper provision that people forget about until they start looking at their data and disaggregating it to make sure that they are serving all populations.

Remember that the law provides for Programs of Study to align to high skill, high demand OR high wage occupations; it could be any one of those three, not necessarily all of those three combined. Many states are looking at alignment of their POS to state economic development needs. While a lot of those needs fall into all three categories, some may only fall into only one of the three.

UPDATE: Many adult students are among the categories of special populations. And there is increased awareness nationally about the need for developing more adult career pathways for those students who enroll in community colleges. What do you have to say about adult services related to Perkins?

Ms. Green: Adults served by the CTE community still have a place within the Perkins Act although I think that the strong prevalence on NCLB throughout Perkins IV trends toward focusing on students transitioning immediately out of high school into postsecondary education. With that said, there are many states that have very strong and vibrant adult CTE populations and they are continuing that focus under Perkins IV. We have seen a number of states look at the progression of the Program of Study being focused on content progression as opposed to grade level progression, so that they can look at a sequence of instruction and determine what students should be able to do as an entry level worker in any given field. That can apply to someone who is an adult re-entering the workforce or it can apply to a high school student transitioning into the work place. There’s a lot of applicability of the work that is created for Programs of Study. It may just be packaged differently for adults, but it’s the same sequence of instruction focused on what is needed to be successful in the workplace, regardless of the age of the student.

UPDATE: In early February it was announced that President Bush’s proposed FY09 budget terminates funding for Perkins which he also recommended in FY06, FY07, and FY08. Even though funding was not eliminated in previous budget years because of Congress, we’ve not seen any increases that could infuse CTE with the resources needed to keep the programs vital and relevant to changes in technology and workforce demands. With the uncertainty that surrounds an election year, what can and should CTE leaders do to ensure a secure future for CTE and improve its current status within the larger context of education?

Ms. Green: There are a lot of economic challenges and workforce challenges facing our country so I think that it’s very important for elected officials at all levels to be aware of the role that CTE can and is playing to support the economic development and workforce development of our nation. That will resonate and have a very powerful impact because every candidate is talking about what we can do to prevent a recession, what we can do to help our economy get back on track. So, making connections to that will be very important.

Our country has focused a lot of resources on NCLB. Perkins comes out of the same bucket that NCLB funding comes out of, as well as special education funding. One of the challenges is that in order to get the increase in Perkins, it’s taken away from someplace else, and that’s been a hard argument to make. As a CTE community, we’ve been very effective at telling anecdotal stories about what we do to support a particular individual and how CTE has changed their life, but the systemic data that tell the story about CTE and Perkins has only begun to percolate up. The more we can get that hard evidence and proof that we’re having an impact, the greater chances we have of being able to get a bigger piece of the pie for CTE.

UPDATE: Finally, what else would you like our readers to know about Perkins IV?

Ms. Green: The one thing that stands out to me is the importance of secondary and postsecondary collaboration. Perkins structurally still keeps the systems separate. There are separate funding formulas, separate uses of funds, and separate accountability measures. And yet, if you think about the vision for Programs of Study and for CTE generally, the responsibility and demand for collaboration between secondary and postsecondary are very evident. There is a great example that I’d like to draw people’s attention to. In Minnesota, they’re trying to get around this duality. To do that, they are requiring that there be a single application at the local level between secondary and postsecondary so they are jointly responsible. It takes some bold change to be able to realize the vision of what secondary and postsecondary collaboration could be in a state or a system. It is certainly an experiment to see how it works, but the idea of shared responsibility and shared planning is something that can definitely be done through the planning process. It would be a good exercise to determine what other incentives states and locals can put in place to promote the sort of collaboration and program improvement innovation messages that Perkins IV represents.

¹ There are pending changes to the titles of some clusters and pathways. New titles will be unveiled at the 6th Annual Career Clusters Institute in June 2008.

² Perkins Act of 2006: The Official Guide, 2006, Association for Career and Technical Education [ACTE], p.20.

³ Special populations as defined in Perkins IV include “individuals with disabilities; individuals from economically disadvantaged families, including foster children; individuals preparing for non-traditional fields; single parents, including single pregnant women; displaced homemakers; and individuals with individuals with limited English proficiency” (ACTE, 2006, p.97).

Kimberly Green is the Executive Director of the National Association of State Directors of Career and Technical Education (NASDCTE). She can be reached at kgreen@careertech.org