Degrees and Dollars
By PAUL KRUGMAN. The Washington Post, Published: March 6, 2011. It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.” But what everyone knows is wrong. The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers. Learn more...
Web Tables—Public High School Teachers of Career and Technical Education in 2007-08 Description
National Center for Education Statistics. February 2011. These Web Tables describe public school teachers of grades 9–12 during the 2007–08 school year, looking specifically at teachers whose primary teaching assignment was in career and technical education (CTE). Teachers are examined by their demographic and professional characteristics, the location and types of schools in which they taught, the characteristics of their students, and their main teaching assignment. The data are from the 2007–08 administration of the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey. Learn more...
Postsecondary and Labor Force Transitions Among Public High School Career and Technical Education Participants
National Center for Education Statistics. January 2011. This set of Issue Tables provides information on the transition of high school career and technical education (CTE) participants into postsecondary education and the labor market during the first 2 years after their high school graduation, from 2004 to 2006. Data are drawn from the Education Longitudinal Study, the most recent NCES longitudinal survey that followed students through and out of high school. Learn more…
Career and Professional Academy Enrollment and Performance Report, 2009-10
Florida Department of Education, Career and Adult Education. In 2009-10, the third year of implementation of the Florida Career and Professional Education Act, school districts registered 838 academies, representing all 67 of Florida's school districts. This study found the following regarding enrollment patterns and student academic performance: (a) Schools with at least one registered academy earned, on average, higher school grades than schools with no academies, reversing the skew toward lower performing schools found in 2007-08 and 2008-09, (b) the most frequent career cluster represented by academies was arts, A/V technology, and communication with 143 registered academies followed by health sciences with 128 academies, (c), academy students were most likely to be tenth-graders compared to the general high school population, which is over-represented by ninth-graders, (d) among the 102,430 students enrolled in career and professional academies, 8,629 or 8.4 percent, were reported as earning one or more approved industry certifications during the academic year, (e) academy students, particularly freshmen, had, on average, higher cumulative grade point averages than non-academy high school students, (f) academy students were less likely to be chronically absent, drop out, or be subjected to disciplinary actions than non-academy students, (g) academy students were more likely to take Advanced Placement or dual enrollment courses and academy graduates were more likely to be eligible for Bright Futures scholarships than their non-academy counterparts, and (h) the 2008-09 cohort of academy graduates was more likely to have enrolled in postsecondary education and be found employed in the fall of 2009. Learn more…
