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The mission of Hoke County Career and Technical Education is to empower all students to be successful citizens, workers and leaders in a global economy. Our goal is to provide an environment that promotes an attitude and culture of College and Career Readiness through our Career and Technical Education classes.
Our Career and Technical Education (CTE) program aims to prepare students for employment opportunities, advanced education and productive lives. CTE promotes best practices that enhance teachers' efforts to improve student achievement and encourage responsible career choices. We want to meet students' needs, cultivate their abilities and help them realize their aspirations. It is the vision of CTE department that every student completes a pathway in Career Technical Education and receive no less than two industry related certifications during this process.
At the high school, introductory courses are available at grades 9 and 10, with advanced and specialized instruction in 11 and 12. We have Agriculture, Business, Finance, & Marketing, Career Development, Computer Science & Information Technology, Family and Consumer Science and Information Technology, Health Science, and Trade, Technology, Engineering and Industrial classes.
At our middle schools, students are offered exploratory courses in Computer Science, Engineering, Business and Entrepreneurship.
Why is CTE becoming more focused on postsecondary degrees? I thought the whole point of CTE was to let students choose to skip college and go right to work?Two big forces were central in bringing about that shift: New labor-market realities and a troubling past. Let’s take the second one first.
The “tracking” we talked about earlier—where educators classified some students as “not college material” and placed them in voc ed classes—limited students' earnings and social mobility. Equity activists pressed for change, leading to a “college for all” movement that urged all students to attend four-year institutions.
Important changes in the labor market support the need for college, too. A shifting—and increasingly automated—economy offers few jobs for those without some kind of postsecondary training or degree.
Within the last decade, however, low college-completion rates have led to a rethinking of the “college for all” movement. With only about half of college students actually completing bachelor’s degrees, policymakers began calling for a richer set of options for students who didn’t want to go the four-year-college route.
Recognizing these trends, career and technical education reshaped itself as a new kind of pathway: one that includes some form of postsecondary training. That could mean earning certification or credentials in good-paying fields like cybersecurity or robotics, or it could mean getting an associate or bachelor’s degree.
The revamping of CTE means new designs for high school programs, too. The best programs aim to keep the doors to college open by requiring rigorous college-prep classes for CTE students, while also providing them with hands-on learning that lets them apply academics to real-world problems, like designing underwater exploration devices in a marine biology program.
Gewertz, Catherine. (2018, July 31). Career and Technical Education. Education Week.
