Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) Assistant Secretary Brenda Dann-Messier unveiled the Department’s latest blueprint, Investing in America’s Future: Transforming Career and Technical Education, for the reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act.
The Perkins program was last reauthorized in 2006, with big bipartisan support. That legislation sought to make career and technical education programs more academically rigorous.
Through a $1 billion investment in the Obama Administration’s FY 2013 budget, the Administration’s blueprint for reauthorizing the Perkins Act hopes to transform the Perkins program in four key areas: alignment, collaboration, accountability, and innovation.
Already, Senate Democrats overseeing education are cheering the plan; yet various education stakeholder groups have expressed serious concerns that the details related to the plan’s key areas could have adverse effects on CTE programs—the proposal to award funds to consortia of LEAs and postsecondary institutions on a competitive basis, for example, could result in decreased, inequitable student access to high-quality CTE programs.
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Here are some resources you might find useful: The full blueprint is available here, along with a summary here, and the Department of Education’s press release here. The American Association of School Administrators (AASA) posted an initial analysis/response here, and a response from The Association of Career and Technical Education (ACTE) and The National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education (NASDCTEc) is here. The Department of Education will be hosting a webinar on the blueprint on Wednesday, 4/25, at 3p.m. ET. Join the webinar here; if a password is required, enter the meeting password: OVAE; to hear the discussion, dial in using your telephone, 1-800-857-9754/Pass code: 24009.