Libs vs. Vocs

“It’s often either vocational training or liberal arts,” Gallagher said. “But if you look at what employers want, it’s both, and I think that’s often lost in the dialogue today.” 

This is a quotation from an article published on the PBS Newshour site in 2021.  

Essentially, the quotation says two key things: 

• A four-year liberal arts degree still has a purpose. High school education alone is not commonly enough to have developed the essential literacy, communication, and critical/higher thinking skills (including the ability to apply scientific approaches to problems and use math literacy, like statistics, for data analysis) necessary to be competitive in today’s job market (I’m talking jobs that reach beyond minimum wage).  
• The issue for years has been that a liberal arts education doesn’t give you a specific technical skill. With a specific tech skill, you are more desirable, and therefore more hirable, right out of the gate. Career and technical skills that are traditionally outside of a liberal art education are increasingly in high demand. And yet, these days the type of vocational/technical work being asked of people still requires the fundamentals of liberal arts learning: strong literacy, communication and critical/higher thinking skills.

Students need to learn from both. But here’s the problem: 

Many public education systems have overly compartmentalized liberal arts (General Education) learning from specific skill learning (Career and Technical Education). They coexist in schools, but often don’t play together well. Essentially, General Education classrooms are jealous of the funding and tech CTE classrooms get, and CTE departments justify not wanting to play in the same sandbox as Gen Ed to protect their own turf. Examples are: 

• Perkins Grant – This is federal dollars that go to CTE departments. There are specific rules around how Perkins Grant money is used. But Perkins Grant funds are frequently used as a catch-all justification where anything CTE cannot be touched by general education. Here language from the law that is often leaned on: ““An inventory record will be maintained for all equipment purchased whole or in part with federal funds. All such equipment will be available for use by students in the approved Career and Technical Education program for which purchased.” 
• CTE defends its turf because it wants to create and protect jobs (there are many more general education teachers than CTE teachers, let’s say 10 to 1 as a ballpark), which then further justifies its existence. 

To be fair, it goes both ways too. CTE courses that potentially would draw away students from a gen ed course could also then cause that gen ed course to be reduced because student counts create dollars which then justify FTE allotment. 

This protectionist mindset crushes important opportunities for our kids. 

The challenge of CTE and general ed is they often behave like they are set against each other when they need to be much better aligned in an interdisciplinary fashion. The current and future workforce need requires a stripping down of the compartmentalization of gen ed and CTE. There needs to be interdisciplinary mindsets, practices and systems wherein core subject area competencies are demonstrated in tandem with career and technical skills.  
Examples:  

1. A gen ed ELA class could be working closely with a CTE course to develop digital communications and projects. 
2. A gen ed math class could be working closely with a CTE culinary/agriculture class to develop food production at scale.  
3. A music class could be working closely with a CTE course to produce music. 
4. A science class could be working closely with a CTE coding class to develop simulations.  

In any of these examples you can turn the learning of two (typically) 50-minutes a day classes and then layer and reinforce much deeper learning into 100 minutes. You get double by putting career/technical learning with liberal arts learning. Moreover, you gain expertise of two instructors, as CTE teachers often lack depth in pedagogy because they frequently come straight from industry, and gen ed teachers often lack the technical skills to create technically rich project-based lessons.*   

The options are limitless. We need to create and accelerate the opportunities for authentic learning that bridges liberal arts competencies and career and technical skills. This requires a shift in protectionist thinking of school district departments and courses. That is not an easy shift, but it’s ripe for exploration. It’s an achievable way to deepen and accelerate our kids’ learning while also ensuring they are globally competitive.  


*Another avenue is through developing better interdisciplinary design between gen ed competencies embedded into CTE courses. Many CTE frameworks can be better designed to be more credit flexible, meaning that they can count as a CTE credit as well as a core subject credit (like ELA, math, etc.). However, in doing this, true intentionality at the core competency must be greatly emphasized, and not fall second fiddle to the technical skill, and vice versa. This also requires a teacher with the ability to competently meet both the liberal arts and vocational worlds. Many CTE courses, if unpacked and re-designed, could be much more inclusive of the core competencies. 
Examples of this include: 

• Rewriting CTE photography/videography frameworks to include enough standards for a science credit (the study of light and technology behind the art). 
  
• A CTE publishing framework to be much more inclusive of ELA reading and writing standards.  
  
• I personally wrote a CTE drone course framework for the district that met general education science and art standards.