One of the challenges inherent in promoting Career and Technical Education (CTE) as a viable pathway to stable, idle-class jobs is the history of racial discrimination that has permeated the field.
Back in the day, what was then called vocational education often served as a dumping ground for students perceived by the system as unqualified for higher education. While autobody and woodworking classes could lead some kids into decent jobs, those classes tended to be filled with low-income kids and kids of color. More affluent kids rarely darkened the doorways of the shop classes.
As we all know, CTE has experienced something of a renaissance over the past decade or so. As people have come to realize that viable pathways to good careers exist without a four-year-college degree, one would hope that the CTE-as-dumping-ground ethos would have faded.
After all, there are good careers available in a wide range of fields, including the construction trades. All of those jobs, however, require a higher degree of skill, knowledge and training than used to be the case a few decades ago. All kids deserve access to those opportunities.
Unfortunately, a new, in-depth reporting project by the Hechinger Report and the Associated Press has found that across the country, CTE classes tend to be divided between those that offer pipelines to good careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields like computer engineering, and those that offer more dead-end prospects, like hospitality.
It will come as no big surprise that Hechinger and AP found that most of the students in the lower-level CTE offerings are kids of color, while those in the more promising career-oriented STEM classes are mostly white kids.
“The CTE classes students take in high school don’t necessarily shape which careers they choose,” the article says. “Still, Prudence Carter, dean of University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, said the findings fit into a larger pattern of Black and Latino students being denied equal opportunities in school, which has implications for their social mobility and economic equality.”
According to the article,the median annual salary for cooks is $27,500 annually, while chefs and head cooks earn $56,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, the typical engineer makes $100,000. For computer programmers, annual earnings are $92,000.
This tracking inside CTE has to stop. There is no good reason for it, other than long-held biases that continue to permeate systems throughout our society.