I am still not convinced that the transition of language of vocational education to career and technical education was a necessary or wise move. My marketing background tells me that a company should be very careful about changing its brand because if you are not careful, you may lose your identification in the minds of your customers. I suppose that is just what the leadership in the then American Vocational Association wanted to do as it changed its name to the Association of Career and Technical Education. (I still have trouble saying ACTE.) I remember there was all kinds of reasons put forward about the name change but it always came down to the so called "bad reputation" voced had as an educational program. By changing the name they hoped to leave the bad reputation behind and a new positive identification would take its place. My feeling then and now is that CTE's reputation is no better than voced's. If I am correct it proves the point that just renaming a product does not change it's reputation in the minds of the public. You have to change the product and promote it like hell to make it something new.
Before all this happened I thought vocational education was well understood and had been well respected as an important educational program. It was only over the previous six or seven years that people began to question its value. But then they were questioning the value of all public education. A contributing factor was that it also began to be a place to put students who were not performing, without regard to the desire of the student or the content of the curriculum.
So is CTE any different that voced today?
If you look at the definitions of voced and CTE you will only find that CTE has made the following meaningful changes:
Does not name the individual areas of study.
Drops the "pre-baccalaureate" limitation.
Drops the student organization criteria.
Other than that I don't see that one definition is any better than the other. After all, vocational education included preparing students for work and other related occupations. I am not convinced that the changes listed above required a complete name change.
To what degree has this change helped federal funding? Not much. The current administration has done its best to zero out the budget.
Has the change really contributed to an increase in reputation? I haven't seen that either.
Has it slowed the decrease in the number of teacher education institutions? Not at all.
Has it increased the number of new members joining the Association. No.
Has it increased the number of attendees to the annual conference? No . . . it almost killed it.
I am not saying that this change caused the problems we are experiencing in our filed. There are other contributing factors that I hope to discuss in the future. It just has not helped.
