If your son or daughter seems to be drifting along through high school and doesn’t seem engaged in academics, it might be the school and not the student.
A new report by the Community Service Society (CSS) demonstrates how Career and Technical Education (CTE) schools benefit New York City’s Black and Latino kids. Titled “Challenging Traditional Expectations: How New York City’s CTE High Schools Are Helping Students Graduate,” the report (authored by CSS Director of Youth Policy Lazar Treschan and CSS Policy Analyst Apurva Mehrotra) concluded that on average, students of CTE schools graduate at a rate higher than New York City public high school students in general, despite having lower rates of college readiness than non-CTE students. The report also shows that graduation rates for Black and Latino men outside of CTE schools are just 52 percent, but in CTE high schools, the graduation rates are 63 and 66 percent respectively.
“Students in CTE schools had slightly lower scores on the state-mandated examinations in mathematics and the English language arts (ELA) taken during the eighth grade,” read the report. “These tests are scored on a scale from 1 to 4.99. Students are classified as Level 1, well below proficient, if their score is between 1 and 1.99; Level 2, below proficient, if their score is between 2 and 2.99; Level 3, proficient, if their score is between 3 and 3.99; and Level 4, exceeding proficiency, if their score is between 4 and 4.99. The average math/ELA test score of students in our sample was 3.02.”
Among CTE schools, the best graduation rates came from students enrolled in CTE schools that have been created since 2003. Students in newer CTE schools are 18 percentage points more likely to graduate than comparable students in non-CTE schools. Attending a CTE school is also associated with significantly higher graduation rates for Blacks and Latinos, and for males in particular. However, in terms of test scores going into high school, CTE students rank lower than their peers elsewhere in the city.
“On average, students in CTE schools have eighth-grade test scores that are lower—by 0.06 in ELA and 0.07 in math—than students in non-CTE schools,” states the report. “Looking deeper, CTE schools attract more students at and just below the middle of the test score distribution. Similar shares of students from CTE and non-CTE schools are at the lowest level of proficiency in eighth grade, but CTE schools have far fewer students who exceed proficiency standards in eighth grade.”
David Jones talked about the importance of CTE for Black and Latino students and the importance of students seeing a light at the end of the tunnel come graduation day.
“Things have changed since I was coming through in the 1950s and 1960s,” Jones told the AmNews. “The nature of certain work has become so highly technical that unless you have some specific training in it, it’s very difficult. That’s why Aviation High School has been one of the leaders. Industries, like engineering, can be so technical they can’t just have anybody working on complex machines that hundreds of people’s lives depend on. “
Jones told the AmNews how even when presented with the idea of community college, most of the families they surveyed didn’t have the resources (or even a checking account) to pay for the relatively meager tuition when compared to four-year institutions. He also talked about how even jobs at Starbucks require some college and security guard work doesn’t come with benefits, though something in a technical trade might lead to a fulfilling career.
“Knowing that if I finish this course there are job opportunities as an apprentice and intern in an industry which has high payoff is just fascinating,” said Jones. “And I think that’s what keeps young people excited about what they’re doing instead of just drifting along to an uncertain future.”
Black and Latino students make up a significant share of the population of CTE schools more than they do across New York City high schools in general. Black students are a bigger presence at CTE schools, where they represent close to 40 percent of the population (compared to 30.7 percent of all public high school students). The report also shows that Latinos make up a bigger share of students (43.2 percent) at CTE schools than they do at all high school students (38.9 percent). White and Asian high school students are less represented at CTE schools (16.2 percent combined) than across New York City high school in general (29.6 percent).
Benjamin Grossman is the principal of the Bronx Academy for Software Engineering and has seen firsthand how CTE can benefit students who might have been lost in an average New York City high school.
“A huge amount,” Grossman told the AmNews. “You would think a software engineering school would attract an elite, mass crowd. In fact, a quarter of our students are special education students. Over 65 percent of our kids struggled or are well below standards for reading and writing. What has happened is that we’ve drawn a crowd of students interested in contextualized learning.”
Grossman gave the AmNews a few examples of how contextualized learning works. “It’s about problem solving, and it leads to every discipline,” he said. “We put our kids through things we call ‘challenges.’ In physics, they had to build a vehicle demonstrating [Isaac] Newton’s second law of motion. In history, we had them build a tool kit for early man. It gives our teachers the ability to develop curricula that are totally about context and problem solving.”
Despite the many benefits of CTE, Jones is well aware of the dangers of leading Black and Latinos into trade jobs as the cure-all. He understands that’s it’s not a one-size-fits-all and harkened back to his own experiences as a students to demonstrate that point.
“Entrepreneurs have made breakthroughs in the community, but the trouble is scale,” Jones told the AmNews. “We have a system that deals with 1 million people marching through who are Black and Latino. In that group, if I get 1,000 to become entrepreneurs, it still doesn’t deal with the overall push. It doesn’t provide the kind of energy that being able to make a major breakthrough would.
“I still remember the guidance counselors when I was young,” continued Jones. “When I said I got admitted to college, they asked me, ‘What’s your trade gonna be?’ That was normal back then.”
He said that once people have an economic platform and get over the fact that they can leave home and provide for their families, then they can think about branching out. “But now I can have an economic backstop that allows me to take night courses and maybe transfer these skills into something else,” said Jones.
Grossman believes that CTE schools are helping young people with more than just a specific trade. When asked about students having a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel through a trade-specific school, he said his school is more than that. He said that his school can help kids who want to be drama majors and English majors as well.
“I remember what it was like to be 14, and I had no idea what I wanted to be,” said Grossman. “We’re not preparing kids to fulfill one career track. We see it as one lens of the world for the kids to explore.”
It’s not the mountaintop. It’s not the remedy, but it’s a start.