DURING THE LATE 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the U.S. economy was seen as not competitive with respect to other major industrial countries, concerns were voiced about the quality of the public education system. Critics of public education linked the quality of public schools to the perceived economic problems of the day and argued that improving the quality of schools was critical to future economic competitiveness. Spurred by reports such as A Nation at Risk (Gardner 1983), states and federal legislators then sought to fix what was perceived to be a poorly performing education system. Different educational reforms have focused on increasing the number of rigorous academic courses required for graduation and introducing changes in work-related education. This presumed relationship between educational quality and national economic performance has since been challenged (see National Research Council 1999), but many education reformers continue to make this case. Those reforms included measures to increase participation of high school students in career and technical education (CTE), to better prepare students for the world of work, and to ensure that students were well prepared for educational and economic attainment. Toward this end the federal government initiated in the early 1990s a wave of CTE reforms that set forth national guidelines and provided funding for program and systems change with the general purpose of improving the quality of high school preparation for careers. We are now at a time when the federal government is proposing a substantial change in CTE legislation, changes premised in part on assumptions about the lack of progress made under previous legislation. In this chapter we report on the extent to which, at the end of the twentieth century, students in this country were enrolled in career and technical education and in school-to-work (STW) activities of various kinds: career-major (CM), Tech Prep (TP), and specific work-based STW activities, including cooperative education, job shadowing, mentoring, school-based enterprise, and apprenticeships or internships. We also examine the extent to which career majors, Tech Prep, and specific work-based learning STW activities have become a part of the schooling of all adolescents. Copyright © 2007 by Russell Sage Foundation.
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