A Midsummer's Bill: 3 Take-Aways from the House Perkins Bill

Last week, as most of us were counting down the days to the July 4th weekend, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce was working hard. On June 28th, the committee released the “Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act”, a bipartisan bill to reauthorize the Perkins Act. It is scheduled for markup tomorrow morning.

For the most part, the bill contains few surprises and is more tweak than overhaul. At under a hundred pages it is also refreshingly clear and concise. A number of organizations have submitted excellent suggestions for improving the bill (see National Skills Coalition and CLASP).  Below, I’ve laid out the most promising, the most disappointing, and the most worrisome features of the bill.

Better alignment with the public workforce system: As most people expected, the bill creates much stronger alignment between our CTE and workforce development systems at the federal, state, and local level. The bill borrows a number of definitions from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) including career pathways, sector partnerships, out-of-school youth, and in-demand occupations, among others. It also adopts WIOA employment and earnings performance metrics for postsecondary CTE programs and makes it easier for states to engage in combined planning with their WIOA partners.

The close alignment with WIOA is the biggest strength of the legislation and reflects a rare and welcome point of consensus among Republicans and Democrats. The shared definitions, metrics, and planning processes will support greater collaboration between state and local programs. Given their limited resources and complementary missions, facilitating closer coordination between the country’s CTE and workforce development systems is good public policy – and well-supported in this bill.

A missed opportunity for strengthening CTE pathways to college: While the bill pays a lot of attention to WIOA, it devotes much less attention to connections between CTE and higher education. Under the current law, local areas are required to establish at least one CTE “program of study” that starts in high school and connects to a college level certificate or degree program. Many advocates were hoping that the next version of the law to would strengthen and expand that requirement to include all, or at least most, high school CTE programs. But while “programs of study” and “career pathways” are both defined and mentioned throughout the bill, there are no provisions requiring states or local areas to build more programs that start in high school and extend into postsecondary. 

This feels like a missed opportunity. Over the last two decades, CTE leaders and advocates have worked hard to dispel the notion that high school CTE is a dead-end for students. In fact, efforts to better connect secondary and postsecondary CTE provided much of the impetus for increasing the academic rigor of CTE programs and contributed to the growth of early college high schools and dual enrollment strategies, reforms that have all generated positive outcomes for CTE students. While the House bill does not undo any of those reforms, it fails to build on their momentum. States and local areas that are already developing high school to college pathways for CTE students will no doubt continue to do so. But for students in areas that have not built those connections, this bill does little to ensure they will have access to them in the future.

Making federal-state cooperation even more difficult: One of the more surprising features of the House bill is the focus on reducing “Secretarial authority.”  Surprising, that is, to anyone not involved in the reauthorization of ESEA, which included a bruising (and on-going) battle over the scope of the Secretary of Education’s authority. In the case of Perkins, the House bill aims to eliminate the requirement that states negotiate their annual performance goals with the Secretary of Education (as represented by officials from the U.S. Department of Education). And it prevents the Secretary from withholding funds from a state that does not meet certain performance targets. Instead, the Department will simply have to approve or disapprove a state’s proposed goals. And improvement plans for under-performing states will be overseen by state leaders, not federal officials.

There are two reasons to be concerned about the proposed changes. First, the current Perkins program already has a very flexible accountability system that allows states wide discretion in defining program quality and outcomes. States negotiate their own performance targets and set many of the rules around how those metrics are defined and measured. This is not a program drowning in federal oversight. 

But it is a program with a $1 billion+ annual budget and the federal government does have a responsibility to taxpayers to make sure those dollars are well spent. This is the second reason to be concerned about the proposed changes to the law. While the switch from “negotiating” to “approving” annual performance goals may seem more like wordplay than a serious, substantive change, there are important differences between negotiation and up or down approval processes. The former is an iterative process that occurs prior to any final decision. Negotiation generates opportunities for dialogue and, ideally, builds trust and mutual understanding along the way. Approval processes, by contrast, are high stakes events that can be easily politicized and/or quickly devolve into unhealthy and unhelpful standoffs. Approval processes are more like referendums than negotiations and are particularly ill suited for making decisions around complex programs or processes. If you doubt it, consider Brexit.

Effective accountability systems are hard to develop and even harder to maintain. But a goal for policymakers should be to design processes that build opportunities for key stakeholders to communicate, learn, and reach agreement on shared goals and needs for improvement. While I have no doubt that the current process between ED and the states for negotiating performance goals falls far, far short of that ideal, I also know that moving to a system based on yes/no decisions will make those processes even more polarizing and unpleasant for everyone involved. It will also do  relatively little to reduce the federal role - just make it more invasive and awkward than it already is.

There are a lot of other changes in the House bill, almost all positive. It includes groups not considered in previous versions, like youth who have aged out of foster care, the homeless, and young people in juvenile justice facilities. The proposal also includes a new competitive grant program to support innovative approaches to CTE and increases the state set aside from ten to fifteen percent, giving states more leeway to test new approaches, invest in professional development, and target resources toward high need areas or populations. Overall, it's a bill with many more good features than bad. And with any luck, it will come through the markup process with a bit more attention to strengthening high school to college pathways for CTE students, and a bit less attention on the Secretary of Education. Fingers crossed.