There is still much work to be done to help our students secure good-paying jobs and achieve their ultimate goals, and in Congress, I'll continue to support Career and Technical Education programs.
The public education landscape is enriched by having many options - neighborhood public schools, magnet schools, community schools, schools that focus on career and technical education, and even charter schools.
To learn a vocation, you also have to learn the frauds it practices and the promises it breaks.
Wisconsin is very proud of the career and technical college system that we have back home.
A high school diploma will no longer be sufficient. But that post secondary education does not have to be a four-year university or a four-year college. It can be career technical education, vocational education, community college.
Career Education is one of the largest global providers in the higher education sector. We are projecting to be over $1.1 billion in revenue in 2003, which puts us number one in our sector for onsite education and number two for online education in terms of revenue.
Our task is to educate our children's whole being so they can face the future and make something of it. To achieve this we need to balance education for careers with education for twenty-first century life.
They already know all about brands... but what 16- and 17-year-olds won't necessarily have is experience of the world of work. The more that businesses get involved with schools, the better, because businesses sometimes complain that students don't have what they require to succeed in work.
If you had asked me growing up what a stylist does or what a magazine editor does, I would have had no clue - how do you research something like that when you are a first-born child of an immigrant who only grew up knowing doctor, engineer, and lawyer as careers?
It is a mistake to separate learning for work and for community and personal development.
We are looking for ways to decrease the dropout rate. I am pretty sure, if we eliminate career and technical education, we are going to increase the dropout rate.
Occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed."
Working with a Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, I introduced a bill to strengthen our nation's career and technical education programs and more closely align them with the needs of local businesses and industries.
My son Chris said he was 12 years old before he knew what I did for a living.
