Announcing the Ford PAS and Ford NGL Thought Leader Series
This month's topic:
Earning respect for Career Academies — and keeping it
By Hans Meeder, President, Meeder Consulting Group
In this Thought Leader installment, we're going to talk about respect – how to earn it and keep it.
During the years I've worked with high school redesign that incorporates career and themed academies, I've heard a concern that has been raised countless times: "How do we get the respect we deserve? We need a good marketing campaign."
Those of us who are working to design and launch a new form of relevant and rigorous education—the career academy—are understandably frustrated when our work is perceived as old-style vocational education. If we just had a stronger marketing and outreach effort, and more support from the central office, wouldn't that help improve our image?
I certainly am a big believer in good branding and marketing, and the truth is, most education leaders spend far too little time thinking about branding and marketing. But to earn and keep the image you might be promoting, there are some key things you need to consider. They are:
Recognize the limits of the brand
In visiting each of the 50 states during the last eight years, I've seen at least 50 different labels for variations of reforms in high school (including career pathways, career academies, school-to-work, school-to-career(s), institutes of study and major areas of interest, etc.) In fact, in the same state, it is not uncommon to see significant variations of activity using the same label, or several similar reforms all using different labels. The result: CONFUSION.
In each case, leaders invested a lot of time and serious debate about the best label to affix to the effort, based on some local experience and often to avoid the negative repercussion of a previously failed effort. Frankly, the label is like an empty vessel, because most local officials, parents, students, and even teachers and administrators, have a highly localized experience and definition of educational terms. The average education advocate or consumer doesn't know that career academies have existed in some form for 40-plus years. They don't know that what is called an Institute of Study in the local district actually meets a national definition of what is called a career academy.
So if the program label is an empty vessel (and is new to the community), the real meaning that develops is a result of what you pour into that vessel. If you pour high-quality programming into the label Career Academy, that term will develop a positive reputation—even if that label is damaged goods in another state.
But if you pour warmed-over, low-skilled vocational education into the label Career Academy, the term will develop a negative reputation and it will be extremely difficult to restore credibility to that term. So, recognize that labels are a starting point, but can vary widely from place to place.
Insist on program quality
Any of us who have spent time watching infomercials for this or that gadget or an amazing beauty product know how compelling marketing campaigns can be. But for those of us who occasionally buy these products, we know the claims almost always outshine the actual results. Most of the infomercial products come and go…but a few products and innovations really take hold. The products that succeed are the ones that get repeat buyers—the ones that truly deliver the value they promised to the customer.
So in education, the most important question to ask is: Does our high school redesign solution actually deliver the value we promise to the key consumers in education? Is it helping students be better engaged and prepared? Are teachers feeling more productive and respected as professionals? Are administrators seeing their schools become places of learning and accomplishment? And for our community partners, are there benefits that accrue to the broader community of employers, families and elected leaders?
Career academies, when they are developed with care and implemented according to the best-known standards of practice, can deliver on these promises of positive impacts.
So, the first place to start is with the design standards of a quality career academy and community engagement strategy. In 2004, several national organizations banded together to create Career Academies National Standards of Practice. These standards were then adopted by the National Career Academy Coalition, and then further adapted by individual districts. In our recent case study about Volusia County School District, this Ford PAS NGL leadership community created very rigorous external review criteria that separate individual career academies into gold, silver and bronze performance levels. If an academy doesn't move itself up from the bronze level within three years, it loses its designation as a career academy, and becomes designated as a more pedestrian CTE program of study.
Ford NGL has also developed the 12 Best Practices, which build on top of the national standards, paying close attention to building the broad community support and school system supports necessary to sustain and expand the district's career academy strategy.
Ultimately, positive public perception about career academies can only be sustained around a quality and constantly improving product.
Design toward your target customer
Defining the brand means you know who your ideal customer is. In establishing any business, you must determine your market niche. Are you Wal-Mart positioning yourself solely on the basis of price, or are you Target positioning yourself on both style and value?
Old-style voc-ed was aligned with the industrial economy of the 1940s and 1950s, and knew its customer well—the non-college-bound student who wanted to do practical work with his or her hands.
In the 1990s, vocational and technical education tried to re-brand itself as new Career and Technical Education. Ideally, CTE is about preparing students for a range of careers, not just for an entry-level, non-college job. But that rebranding effort remains a challenge, because some CTE programs still seemed targeted only toward two-year college programs and immediate job entry after high school.
Designing the Career Academy model is even more complicated because our knowledge-based economy is more diverse and more complex. The new Career Clusters structure helps us think about families of jobs within an occupational cluster, and to consider many jobs within that cluster, some that require bachelor's degrees and higher, some that require two-year associate's degrees and some that require certifications or intensive on-the-job training.
The old-style industrial-approach to CTE was about training front-line workers who more or less carried out processes and procedures that were well established by the management level. In today's flatter management style, workers need a mix of technical competence, but also more in the way of teamwork skills, paying attention to customer needs, business processes, entrepreneurship and innovation around processes and procedures. CTE courses need to teach students to think more like company owners than front-line workers.
Career Academies also need to intentionally position themselves as preparing students for postsecondary education, using a generous definition of postsecondary that includes four-year degrees, two-year degrees and other certifications. In designing the program, there needs to be ample attention to and preparation for the higher-level leadership and executive-level jobs in the profession. To transform the image, the program itself needs to teach the skills, knowledge and attributes that leaders need to develop, not aim at just the front-line worker.
So career academies must include CTE courses that have intentionally targeted a range of educational aspirations and leadership roles within a firm. If the curriculum of the CTE course in a career academy hasn't been significant rewritten and re-targeted in the last five years, it probably is still aimed at two-year college degrees or even lower levels.
One administrator told me recently he advised some school leaders on their development of career academies. Before the consultation, the district was thinking of career academies as a "second-chance" strategy for struggling students. This experienced career academy leader advised them to design the academies with the upper-performing, "college-bound" students in mind and market the program as a strategy to help those students. Without this type of active design and marketing, the two-track mentality of "college-bound" and "non-college-bound" would return to its dominant position.
Lead with your strongest suit
Another key component to avoiding being labeled as old-style vocational education is to lead with your strongest suit. Yes, our economy needs good electricians and plumbers, and we pay them very well for their skilled work. Yes, we need cosmetologists and culinary students and pay them well. But a thriving U.S. economy also needs more youths who can apply innovation through technology and science, supported by strong mathematical reasoning. Programs in the STEM arena (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), such as engineering, biomedical and environmental sciences should be promoted as flagship programs in your portfolio of career academies.
Another candidate set of flagship academies are those that are not associated with the traditional vocational, career-specific; these could be programs like digital media, the fine arts, and law and public service. These types of academies send a clear signal that something new is afoot—education that offers a new way of integrating rigor and relevance that is good for the already high-performing student, as well as the middle-achieving student.
Does this mean that career academies are antithetical to anything that resembles more traditional vocational programs? Not necessarily. It is probably fine to continue offering construction arts, transportation maintenance and repairs, and hospitality and tourism. But there should also be an ample supply of high-end STEM-related options, non-career-themed options, and all academies should have a leadership/ownership perspective clearly embedded in the CTE courses.
One challenge will be to decide if it makes sense to continue offering more traditional CTE courses in the district, at the same time the district is promoting career academies. It may be possible to maintain both approaches as long as there is a bright line between regular CTE and the new career academies. But all CTE programs need to be consistently updated with innovation and leadership content.
Protect the brand
The brand is only as good as what the public believes that brand represents. Branding is essential to the continued success of many companies. For example, Disney, Coach and Louis Vuitton each spend enormous amounts of energy to stop the pirating of their brands. That's why serious reformers must vigilantly "protect the brand." Within a region or on a statewide basis, the term career academies (or whatever term is chosen) needs to consistently mean education that is rigorous, relevant, targeting to range of leadership levels and postsecondary options, and integrated across the CTE and academic curriculum. This brand needs to be clearly defined AND upheld through quality controls and external evaluation mechanisms, similar to the approach mentioned earlier that was adopted by the Volusia District.
The danger of diluting the brand
I was in one state recently where a school was proudly announcing it was submitting a grant to create "career academies." However, when I looked closely at the application, I realized they were really proposing a CTE program of study, one that would articulate between high school and postsecondary. The close connection between high school and postsecondary was good, but the term they were giving the effort "career academy" entirely lacked the cross-curricular and academic/CTE integration components of what the national standards for career academies talk about.
In an adjoining district, the term career academy had the definition more closely associated with the national standards of practice. But even in that setting, there was no serious attention to the scheduling issue, ensuring that students were in a majority of classes with other "academy" students. Unless leaders step forward soon to establish standards to protect the Career Academy label, they may soon lose the chance to have a favorable meaning established for the brand. Without attention to the meaning and implementation of real career academies, the label "career academy" will soon be perceived as just the newest remake of old-style voc-ed.
So, career academy advocates and leaders are on good footing to create a powerful brand, whatever specific label they choose to attach to the local incarnation of the career academy model. Maintain a healthy understanding of the limits of the brand, but absolutely insist on program quality to give real meaning to your brand. As you design your academy, ensure that it is targeted toward high levels of postsecondary education and leadership levels within its associated career field. Define the overall brand by marketing and publicizing your STEM-related and themed academies that are less career-specific. And finally, protect the brand by adopting clear standards of practice and external review.
Through consistent attention to these five priorities, you can build a powerful, attractive brand for your local and state efforts around career academies. Not only can career academies mark a departure from industrial-age vocational education, they can mark a departure from stale, stultifying and abstracted academic courses that do not engage students, even the bright students who already aspire to college. In fact, Career Academies can mark the way toward a new form of high school education that fuses the best of career-themed and academic education.
Previous Thought Leader Essays:
Supporting Career Academies is smart business, not charity
By Richard K. Delano, Ford Motor Company Fund Advisory Council
Outlining the financial benefits and positive outcomes of career academies and demonstrating how they more than justify the investments in building a career academy network.
By Richard K. Delano, Ford Motor Company Fund Advisory Council
Reinventing the Workforce and Bolstering the Economy through Career Academies and More Relevant High Schools
By Cheryl Carrier, Program Director, 21st Century Education Programs, Ford Motor Company Fund