The role of career and technical education in the American high school: a student centered analysis

Career and technical education (CTE) is an elective program in American high schools and this paper examines what its role should be. It provides the historical background of CTE, looking at both the internal and external policy context, identifies CTE students and considers how their needs can best be served, uses a policy assessment criteria to evaluate various roles for high school CTE, defines four CTE policy options (integrated CTE, traditional CTE, applied CTE and common academics) based on a review of literature, analyses these four options, and based on the analysis, recommends the integrated model to be the most superior.

This paper is one of a set of eight papers that was commissioned by OVAE to be presented at Preparing America's Future: the High School Symposium held in Washington in April, 2002. Following the Symposium, a further 10 papers were commissioned. Selected papers are indexed from TD/TNC 72.438 to TD/TNC 72.448.

Career and technical education (CTE) is an elective program in American high schools and this paper examines what its role should be. It provides the historical background of CTE, looking at both the internal and external policy context, identifies CTE students and considers how their needs can best be served, uses a policy assessment criteria to evaluate various roles for high school CTE, defines four CTE policy options (integrated CTE, traditional CTE, applied CTE and common academics) based on a review of literature, analyses these four options, and based on the analysis, recommends ...  [+] Show more