There is a transformative economic and educational opportunity potentially taking shape in America right now that will help our students find joy and engagement in their schooling, and provide tens of thousands of good, family sustaining jobs. It will reinvigorate the middle class—coast to coast—if we are strategic enough to take advantage of it quickly.
The opportunity is largely made possible by the work President Joe Biden steered through Congress in his first two years, including the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. These historic investments in semiconductor manufacturing, construction, energy, and health care jobs will reshape our economy.
Our country has not yet made matching investments in education to create the workforce these opportunities require. But if we leverage this federal funding to also invest in career and technical education (CTE) programs through the Perkins Act, the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, we can make significantly more impact by starting earlier, preparing the next generation with professional, practical skills, and offering them opportunities to learn-by-doing, and prepare for jobs in these growing fields.
Career and technical education creates new pathways starting in high school, with readiness programs that provide student hands-on training—and in some cases, a certification or a credential—as part of their academic journey. Our European counterparts—and competitors—rely on it to set students on a path to secure jobs in STEM careers. Moreover, students in CTE programs graduate at phenomenal rates, and are more engaged in and challenged by their schooling in ways every parent, educator, and administrator want to see. Despite this success, total spending on apprenticeships is under $400 million—a ratio of 1,000:1 compared to college.
By allocating new funding and harnessing what is currently available through recent legislative achievements and an experiential learning model, the United States can train students early on, prepare them for life-long careers, and make previously unattainable STEM careers accessible on a scale we haven't seen before in the United States. It is practical and doable, in fact, in a few places, it's already being done—and we must replicate it on a much greater scale.
Consider the AFT's partnership with the New York State United Teachers, the United Federation of Teachers (New York City), Micron Technology, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Together, these entities have committed $4 million to develop the New York Advanced Technology Framework, a plan that will train middle school and high school students for high-tech jobs and careers through a curriculum rich in hands-on experiences and learning systems.
In another indication that partnerships are key to making career and technical education work, Washington, D.C., education leaders recently celebrated a $9.5 million investment from Bloomberg Philanthropies that will go toward a new learning center for health care professions in an underserved area of the city. Not only do students get job training, they learn critical thinking, communication skills, and relationship building, and they are able to connect with employers who need eager young workers.
Representative Ro Khanna's collaborative effort with tech companies, local governments, community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, and Hispanic-serving institutions highlights the importance of STEM careers. The program he helped facilitate with Google provides scholarships, an 18-month tech-training course, a mentor, and guarantees job placement with Google or another tech company upon completion. The program, now in eight locations, has a 90 percent completion record.
That completion rate is par for the course with CTE programs. Ninety-four percent of students who concentrate in CTE graduate from high school, and 72 percent of them go on to college. And career education can be particularly life-changing for the 62 percent of high school students who do not go to college.
But there's another important objective at play too. CTE will be critical to filling the job opportunities at hand so we can keep industry and talent here at home, but it will also shrink the dangerous and deepening socioeconomic, regional, and racial divide in this country. By bringing together workers from urban and rural areas and different educational backgrounds, and uniting them through skills, we are reminding ourselves of our shared humanity and of the universal goal of building a better life, regardless of where you come from and what you look like. These programs help create lifelong, family-sustaining career paths, for sure, but they also help bridge gaps within our communities and promote a stronger, more functional civil society and democracy.
Evidence suggests we are on the precipice of the next industrial revolution, and if we do it right, we can harness it to create opportunity, a stronger middle class, and a healthier democracy.
We must learn from history, and both grow our economy and make it more fair to workers. This means being intentional about educational and career development, starting in high school, identifying school-to-career pathways, partnering with employers, creating paid internships, and offering industry-approved credentials or college credit. If we are intentional, we can set young people on a path to a career or higher education, or both, and create a stronger workforce in the process. We just have to invest in our students as much as we invest in the jobs we want them to fill. To us, that's an investment worth making.
Ro Khanna represents the 17th Congressional District of California, which includes Silicon Valley.
Randi Weingarten is president of the AFT, which represents 1.7 million educators, health care professionals, and public employees.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
