Good afternoon. My name is Robin White. I am the senior program and policy director at the Academy for Educational Development’s National Institute for Work and Learning. I have been engaged in the design, delivery, and evaluation of career preparation programs for nearly 20 years.

Between 2000 and 2004, I served as co-director and lead author for an evaluation commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education as part of the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Vocational Education (NAVE). This evaluation, conducted with colleagues at AED and Westat, Inc., included written surveys of state vocational education and Tech-Prep administrators, telephone interviews with state vocational administrators, and case studies at the state and local levels. This evaluation focused primarily on implementation of the new Perkins funding and accountability provisions. However, my colleagues and I expanded the scope of our study at the request of NAVE staff to include a broader look at how Tech-Prep definitions and implementation strategies relate to measurements of participation and outcomes. More detailed information will be available in our forthcoming report, The Structure and Challenges of Vocational Funding and Accountability Systems.

I am honored to be here today to describe the findings of this study and the possible implications of these results for policy, specifically the reauthorization of the Perkins legislation.

First funded in 1990 under Perkins II, Tech-Prep programs are supposed to link secondary and postsecondary education to provide a "seamless career pathway." Articulation agreements were identified in the legislation as the vehicle through which secondary and postsecondary institutions would collaborate to offer a non-duplicative sequence of courses leading to a degree or certificate in a technical field. Both academic and vocational courses were to be included and "integrated" to provide students with applied learning experiences that would engage their interests and enhance their skills. Tech-Prep funding was to be distributed only to consortia composed of districts, area vocational schools, and postsecondary institutions, among others.

The 1990 legislation specified that Tech-Prep programs were to include two or four years of secondary education and two years of higher education or apprenticeship following high school graduation. The 1998 Perkins legislation (Perkins III) eliminated the two-year cap on the postsecondary component, calling instead for programs that consist of at least two years of secondary education and at least two years of postsecondary education or apprenticeship, and explicitly encouraged the development of Tech-Prep programs that link secondary schools and two-year postsecondary institutions with four-year institutions to offer 2+2+2 programs.

While survey results focused primarily on states’ mechanisms for allocating Tech-Prep funds and definitions of Tech-Prep programs and students, case studies and telephone interviews offered opportunities to explore how Tech-Prep was actually implemented in specific states and consortia and how Tech-Prep implementation was affected by the Perkins III funding and accountability provisions. Taken together, these data suggest that Tech-Prep is essentially a catch-all term used to describe a wide array of activities, initiatives, and efforts—most of which appeared to fall considerably short, in one or more respects, of the statutory definition of a Tech-Prep program.

Tech-Prep programs that followed a distinct cohort of students through a four- or six-year sequence of instruction were scarce. The absence of viable mechanisms for tracking high school Tech-Prep students into community colleges by area of vocational study was a major impediment to defining a seamless 2+2 career pathway and therefore to documenting student outcomes. A majority of state survey respondents indicated that they required local consortia to use specific approaches and definitions that should result in well-defined Tech-Prep sequences, but site visits and telephone interviews produced few examples where this actually occurred.

Tech-Prep reporting was generally inadequate at both the secondary and postsecondary levels. Although states typically defined secondary Tech-Prep students in terms of enrollment in or completion of articulated vocational courses or program sequences, many still struggled with the concept of what exactly constitutes a postsecondary Tech-Prep student. Even where definitions were in place at both levels, many consortia were unable to count the number of students who met the definitions. Case studies and telephone interviews suggested that the fundamental problems in defining, counting, and tracking Tech-Prep students resulted in flawed reporting on the full range of Tech-Prep student outcomes.

Although most states reported having a definition of a Tech-Prep student, the study team found little evidence to support widespread use of these definitions or alignment with the statutory intent. Definitions of what it means to participate in Tech-Prep appeared to vary within states and even within consortia, and the application of the definitions sometimes failed to distinguish Tech-Prep students from other vocational students. In states with loose definitions of Tech-Prep, high schools sometimes identified 60 to 100 percent of their vocational students as Tech-Prep participants, regardless of whether they were enrolled in programs with formal articulation agreements and clear course sequences. In survey responses, 19 states reported that students who took or completed one or more vocational courses, whether articulated or not, met the criteria for Tech-Prep classification. Another eight states reported that all vocational students were considered Tech-Prep, while one state indicated that all secondary students who had not chosen College-Prep were considered Tech Prep. Two states avoided the issue of criteria by counting all secondary students as Tech-Prep.

Definitions of postsecondary Tech-Prep students were even more problematic, as state and local administrators readily conceded that they were applied inconsistently. Either implicitly or explicitly, most states defined postsecondary Tech-Prep participation in terms of continuation of an articulated program of study begun at the secondary level. Such definitions posed significant reporting challenges when consortium officials were unable to track individual participants from high school into specific vocational programs at postsecondary institutions. For example, one case study state used secondary Perkins follow-up studies to identify students who took articulated courses in high school and subsequently enrolled in community college, but the postsecondary institutions could not determine if these students were enrolled in the same vocational program. A postsecondary administrator in another state reported that the state’s definition of a postsecondary Tech-Prep completer allowed the college to count all students who completed an articulated occupational program at the college level, regardless of whether they took courses in these programs while in high school.

In some instances, development of articulation agreements appeared to have taken priority over implementation of coherent 2+2 or 2+4 programs. Articulation agreements were one of the few common threads that ran through most Tech-Prep programs the study team examined. Although many of these agreements outlined well-defined four- or six-year sequences on paper, available evidence suggests that less emphasis was placed on the development and delivery of viable programs. One state Perkins administrator reported that "local folks are a lot more focused on articulation in general than either a 2+2 or 2+2+2 model." In two case study states, local consortium directors tended to define success by the number or breadth of articulation agreements in place, rather than the availability of coherent programs of academic and vocational courses around a career theme or the number of students who actually used these articulation agreements to complete a four- or six-year sequence.

The number of Tech-Prep students who actually received articulated credit at the postsecondary level appears to be quite low. The reasons given for this included: requirements that a student complete additional courses or score at a certain level on placement tests in order to have the credits appear on the postsecondary transcript; the length of time elapsed between high school completion and college enrollment; and policies that required students to identify the collegiate level courses they completed in high school and make formal requests for articulated credits.

In many of the local communities in case study states, Tech-Prep programs operated primarily at the high school level, with only theoretical links to the community college. The programs were defined by articulation agreements that were rarely used by participating students to gain advanced standing, if and when they entered postsecondary institutions. Secondary and postsecondary "partners" were typically connected by only a funding stream and, sometimes, a Tech-Prep coordinator. In some states, the federal Tech-Prep funds were allocated separately to secondary and postsecondary institutions, which created very little incentive for cross-level collaboration. Most states and consortia found it extraordinarily difficult to track secondary Tech-Prep students into postsecondary institutions. As a result, some states considered students who had completed the secondary level courses in a Tech-Prep sequence to be "completers"—a notion that contradicts the statutory stipulation that Tech-Prep programs include at least two years of education or training at the postsecondary level.

Because true 2+2 or 2+4 programs of study were scarce, Tech-Prep efforts frequently overlapped those of regular vocational education. The study team found that many states have worked to develop articulated course sequences for vocational education outside the context of Tech-Prep. As noted previously, state and local reporting on Tech-Prep participation and outcomes frequently failed to distinguish Tech Prep students and programs from other aspects of vocational education. Finally, the reported uses of Tech-Prep funds—typically for equipment, supplies, salaries, and the start-up of new programs—were quite similar to those reported for Perkins Title I (basic) grants. Noting the constant need to update equipment, one local administrator cited Tech-Prep funds as "the only discretionary money we get for vocational education."

There was little consistency across states with regard to Tech-Prep funding procedures. Perkins III gives states considerable flexibility in how they distribute Tech-Prep funds to local programs. Not all states awarded funds to consortia as defined by Perkins III. A few states provided Tech-Prep funds separately to both secondary and postsecondary programs, while others distributed funds to community colleges, regions, or statewide consortia. In some states that funded consortia that brought together secondary and postsecondary partners, the partnerships appeared to be consortia in name only.

Most states used a formula to allocate grants to local consortia or schools, either alone or in combination with a competitive application process. However, only two states reported using poverty-related data as a basis for Tech-Prep allocations—a sharp contrast to the heavy weight accorded to poverty indicators in the distribution of Perkins Title I (basic) grants.

More than ten years after the initial authorization of Tech-Prep, there are few reliable data available on the number of students who participate in Tech-Prep or who have completed four- or six-year Tech-Prep sequences. Most Tech-Prep programs have yet to realize the legislative vision of a seamless career pathway beginning in a student’s junior year in high school and culminating in a postsecondary degree or certificate in a technical field. None of those interviewed for our study reported the existence of reliable mechanisms for tracking high school Tech-Prep students into community colleges or baccalaureate institutions. Instead of documenting a distinctive cohort of students who have completed an articulated sequence of academic and vocational courses, Tech-Prep administrators have focused largely, if not exclusively, on creating articulation agreements (or related options such as dual and concurrent enrollment) that allow secondary students to earn college credits while still in high school. To date, there is little or no evidence linking this proliferation of articulation agreements to students’ completion of four- or six-year Tech-Prep sequences of instruction—and little evidence that these sequences exist beyond the form of written agreements.

While many of you, and many of us in the field, would like to know whether Tech-Prep is effective in improving student outcomes, it seems premature to be asking that question. At this point, based on our and other evaluations, Tech-Prep remains so loosely implemented that studies examining the outcomes of students considered "in Tech-Prep" would be very difficult to interpret. Moreover, the results could not be generalized beyond the individual local program or state on which the analysis is based, because the school, consortium, or state next door could be using its Tech-Prep funds in a vastly different way.

In light of these findings, in the forthcoming report the AED research team suggests that federal policy makers might consider:

• Requiring states and consortia to document rates of student completion of four- and six-year Tech-Prep sequences, which would necessarily entail stronger adherence to the statutory definition of a Tech-Prep program.
• Investing in the development of software and other mechanisms to facilitate tracking secondary Tech-Prep students into postsecondary institutions.
• Eliminating Tech-Prep as a separate title in forthcoming Perkins reauthorization and reallocating Tech-Prep funding to a wider range of vocational education reform initiatives at the state and local levels.