This week, negotiations on the spending levels for the FY 2024 appropriations bills continued with no updates as the March 1 and 8 deadlines loom. CTE Month is well underway though, with several Representatives and Senators sharing messages of support. The Senate has also passed its 2024 CTE Month Resolution! Remember to ask your representatives to cosponsor the House version of the resolution, introduced last week!  

• Senate Passes Resolution Recognizing Career & Technical Education Month: This week, the Senate passed its resolution to recognize February as National CTE Month. A counterpart House resolution was introduced last week.  
   
• Sens. Kaine & Young Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Boost Student Success and Career Readiness: This week, co-chairs of the Senate CTE Caucus reintroduced the Assisting Community Colleges in Educating Skilled Students (ACCESS) to Careers Act. This bipartisan legislation seeks to increase dual enrollment, work-based learning opportunities and student support services. 
   
• Foxx Celebrates National CTE Month: Chairwoman Foxx of the House Education and the Workforce Committee spoke on the House Floor, recognizing and celebrating February as National CTE Month. 
   
• Department Of Education Announces Resources to Assist with FAFSA: The Dept. of Education released a FAFSA College Support Strategy to help schools and students complete the new FAFSA quicker and easier, despite the technical and system difficulties encountered earlier in its launch.  

From Setback to Success: Meeting Comebackers Where They Are: The California Competes organization recently published a report as a guide for helping institutions support and recruit more comebacker students: individuals who left college with no credential and later returned to and completed postsecondary education. In California alone, over 6 million adults have participated in postsecondary education but have yet to earn a credential. Researchers spoke with over 52 adult learners who dropped out, reenrolled and went on to earn a degree.

The following list details some key strategies that institutions can employ to help these students:

• Remove reenrollment barriers by providing priority registration status upon return, offering credit for prior learning and forgiving institutional debt.
• Provide ongoing support initiatives like adult-focused advising, accessible online resources and communities of support with other comebackers.
• Adapt to shifting student needs by offering increased access to shortened-term programs and fully online courses.
• Conduct outreach to students who stopped out of college about the reenrollment process, use inclusive marketing materials and provide more academic probation flexibility.

How States and Systems Can Support Practitioner Efforts to Strengthen Dual Enrollment: The Community College Research Center recently published a report in conjunction with the College in High School Alliance that provides evidence-based recommendations for states and systems on how to strengthen dual enrollment (DE). Experts provide insights into three areas of DE improvement: increasing access, strengthening on-ramps to postsecondary education and building strong partnerships.

Some top insights and recommendations are below:

• Set statewide DE goals and provide easy-to-use public data platforms for practitioners to track recent progress.
• Reform eligibility requirements for DE to reduce barriers to participation, including shifting away from placement testing to high school grades to increase access.
• Reduce tuition and non-tuition costs for low-income families through public funding and emphasize the potential cost savings of DE toward postsecondary tuition.
• Prioritize open access to navigational supports to increase postsecondary-going motivation, especially for underrepresented students.

Strategies to Advise Students on Multiple Postsecondary Pathways: A recently published report by the Education Strategy Group in collaboration with the Walton Family Foundation provided insights to practitioners on how to support multiple postsecondary pathways and information for students and families to help them understand the full suite of career pathways that can lead to success after graduation.

Researchers identified key challenges of data, capacity and partnerships. They also provided the following recommendations:

• Employ technology for disseminating messages at scale and for increasing capacity to individualized supports to communicate with students and families where they are.
• Directly engage students to ensure that messaging resonates with real-world learners.
• Re-conceptualize who can serve as an advisor to students and provide training.
• Incorporate and analyze data on local labor market opportunities, needs and student outcomes to ensure high-quality advising.

Both the House and Senate were in session this week, but progress continues to be slow on key pieces of legislation. The Senate is still negotiating a national security supplemental bill, which is expected to be released soon. The House passed a bipartisan bill to extend a number of business tax cuts and expand the Child Tax Credit, but it faces an uncertain future in the Senate. On the appropriations front, congressional leaders have reportedly agreed on how to divide the overall allocation among the 12 subcommittees so that work on final bills can begin, although those allocations have not been made public. This week also marks the start of CTE Month, celebrated in the bipartisan resolution that Reps. Thompson and Bonamici, co-chairs of the CTE Caucus, introduced on Thursday, and the similar one that will be introduced in the Senate soon! Don’t forget to ask your Members of Congress to co-sponsor these resolutions. 

• Thompson, Bonamici Recognize February as Career and Technical Education Month: On February 1, Reps. Thompson and Bonamici, co-chairs of the CTE Caucus, introduced the bipartisan 2024 CTE Month Resolution,  recognizing February as National CTE Month. 
    
• Diversifying the CTE Educator Workforce This week, ACTE and Advance CTE released a report titled, “State and Local Strategies for Diversifying the CTE Educator Workforce.” It examines common challenges in diversifying the educator workforce and practices to overcome these challenges.  
   
• More Workforce Funding Expected for Community Colleges from Energy Department The U.S. Department of Energy plans to release $24 million in grant funding for community colleges, trade unions and labor management partnerships to establish Industrial Assessment Centers to expand workforce pathways. Be on the lookout for applications later this spring.  
   
• Colleges Won’t Get FAFSA Data Until March, Delaying Aid Offers: This week, the Department of Education announced a delay in data transfer from the FAFSA to schools. This delay could impact student access to federal student loans, work study and Pell Grants for low-income students. Congruently, the Dept. Of Education announced earlier this week they had received over 3 million FAFSA forms that had been submitted successfully. 
   
• House Education and the Workforce Committee Approves College Cost Reduction Bill: This week, the House Education and the Workforce Committee approved the partisan H.R. 6951, the College Cost Reduction Act, by a vote of 22-19. The bill focuses on price transparency, college accountability for student debt repayment, and a new funding approach based on student outcomes. House Democrats released their own plan to improve access to postsecondary education as a counter proposal to the bill.      

The co-chairs of the House CTE Caucus, Reps. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA) and Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), are once again leading the House’s annual CTE Month resolution marking February as CTE Month. These representatives are currently circulating a “Dear Colleague” letter asking their colleagues to cosponsor the resolution.  

CLICK HERE to ask your Representative to cosponsor this year’s CTE Month resolution. 

The resolution raises awareness about the many benefits associated with high-quality CTE programs. By requesting support for the resolution, you are continuing to elevate the benefits of CTE to policymakers at a critical time for CTE advocacy. Please contact your representative today! If you have a direct contact in your representative’s office, we urge you to call or email them directly. 

*If you haven’t responded to last week’s alert and asked your Senators to sign on to the similar Senate CTE Month resolution, please click here to reach out to them as well!

ACTE has released CTE: Developing the Aerospace and Defense Workforce, the latest in our revamped series of Sector Sheets describing CTE’s role in growing the workforce for vital industry sectors. The Sector Sheet series is published with support from ACTE's long-time partner Pearson.  

These revised Sector Sheets include job opportunities in each sector and descriptions of how CTE prepares learners for the workforce in each sector, all in a new format featuring more streamlined text and additional graphics to make these advocacy tools even more effective. 

This Sector Sheet describes how CTE supports the aerospace and defense workforce, which employs more than 2.2 million people nationwide and supports commercial, military and national defense activities. It also shares information on occupations, earnings and credentials that enable individuals to enter and progress within fields such as commercial aerospace, cyber systems and unmanned systems. Finally, the Sector Sheet demonstrates the importance of CTE in developing this workforce by describing how CTE prepares learners through courses, industry credentials, work-based learning, career and technical student organizations and more. 

As we move forward with the revamped Sector Sheets, both the newer and older Sector Sheets will remain available on the ACTE Sector Sheet webpage for download and use. We encourage you to share these tools with students, families, counselors, policymakers and others to spread the message about CTE and its benefits for learners and the workforce.  

While 51% of secondary CTE concentrators were learners of color in 2021–22, only 13% of CTE educators in public schools were people of color in 2020–21. Today, ACTE and Advance CTE released a new report, State and Local Strategies for Diversifying the CTE Educator Workforce (full report and executive summary), that presents common challenges to diversifying the educator workforce, identifies promising practices in the field to overcome these challenges, and provides actionable strategies and recommendations to assist state and local CTE leaders in strategically planning and developing policies and practices to increase diversity in the CTE workforce.

A companion resource, Recruiting Diverse Educators: A Database of Organizations Representing Underserved Populations, presents a contact list of organizations that serve minority populations, including industry professionals, learners, and current and future educators of color. The list offers a starting point for local, regional and state CTE leaders looking to develop the educator pipeline and recruit educators from under-represented populations to teach in CTE. 

This work was generously funded by the Joyce Foundation. 

ACTE and Advance CTE will be hosting an in-person preconference workshop on this topic on May 1, 2024, at the ACTE Region I conference in New York City. You do not need to register for the entire conference to take part!

This week, the Biden-Harris Administration announced winners of Perkins Innovation grant funding and released the National Educational Technology Plan. In Congress, the Innovation Act, endorsed by ACTE, was reintroduced, offering further support to student success. Unfortunately, there’s still no progress to report on the twelve spending bills that Congress needs to pass in order to keep the government open past early March. 

• Young, Hassan, Braun, Kaine Reintroduce Innovation Zone (IZ) Act: The Innovation Zone (IZ) Act would reform the Experimental Sites Initiative authorized under the Higher Education Act. The bill, endorsed by ACTE, would help educational institutions better understand how to support students and pursue innovative strategies to ensure their success. 
   
• Biden-Harris Administration Announces $25M in Grant Awards for Career Connected High Schools: The Biden-Harris administration announced 19 new grant award winners through the Perkins Innovation and Modernization, Career Connected High Schools (CCHS) grant program.  
   
• Upcoming Webinar: 2023 State CTE Policy Year in Review: Advance CTE and ACTE will host a joint webinar on February 21, “2023 State CTE Policy Year in Review,” to discuss national trends and innovative legislation that will impact the millions of CTE students and educators. Registration information can be found on the CTE Policy Watch Blog.    
   
• Research Roundup: Community College and Workforce Development Trends: Several new reports have been published addressing funding levels for community colleges, the role of the community college system and the current practice of career navigation. More information on each report is available on the CTE Policy Watch Blog. 
   
• ACTE member Catherine Walker nominated as finalist for CCSSO National Teacher of the Year: Catherine Walker, a CTE teacher from Alaska and ACTE member was nominated by the Council of Chief State Schools Officers as a finalist for their National Teacher of the Year award.  
   
• Department of Education released the 2024 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP): NEPT frames three divides limiting the transformational potential of educational technology to support teaching and learning including: Digital Use, Design and Access.  Read more at https://tech.ed.gov/netp/.