Implementing Programs of Study: An Interview with Rich Katt

by Catherine Kirby
 
UPDATE: Illinois has developed six guiding principles and associated design elements to serve as a framework for implementing programs of study that involve career and technical education (CTE). The first guiding principle is leadership, organization and support. What do you believe are the most essential qualities leaders must have and what are the actions they must take in order to effectively lead the implementation of Perkins IV and programs of study?

Mr. Katt: I’ve reviewed your principles and design elements and find they make sense. They’re very similar to where Nebraska’s at and some of the components that we’ve identified that are essential to the success of our whole transformation of CTE and building the state system. One of the things that was so important for us early on was to have a compelling vision, so we created our career education model. That little wheel with all the colors in it is huge for us! It has become our identity . . . the compelling vision that says we are about workforce development and careers for all Nebraska students. We then took it to others who had to convey the vision to other groups so they were armed with something identifiable, clear and consistent. Providing that to our leaders was huge; they had a common language and we had a common framework that we were trying to convey. From that point on, we looked for people who were good communicators, who had some credibility in different ways.

Some of our best partners were actually main street business people in small towns that are struggling with a workforce supply – just as much as some of the major corporations in Omaha. We targeted both directions to look for good communicators, people who had some knowledge and integrity, who could stand up and talk about the realities of Nebraska’s economic situation. So I don’t know if there was any essential quality other than a real understanding of the vision and that [workforce development] is not something that any one entity can solve by itself. It requires a partnership between business and industry, economic workforce development, and education. We framed it from that perspective.
 
UPDATE: Did you have a strategy for groups that you talked to?

Mr. Katt: Early on we started working with the Omaha Chamber of Commerce and built a strong alliance; [Omaha is] the largest city in Nebraska. That chamber is very, very good at what they do. We asked them “How do we do this?” and “How do we sell this message?” They helped refine the message to make sure it was appealing to business and industry and to make it about their future and survival. We also have regional economic development councils in some parts of the state and they’ve been big partners as well.
 
UPDATE: How did you reach out to leaders at the secondary level – the principals and superintendents whose attention is largely focused on NCLB?

Mr. Katt: Our state staff identified key players who we knew were credible, had strong leadership abilities because they obviously have good schools and who were interested in developing the whole student – broader goals than the NCLB and AYP etc. In other words, we hand-picked our first group of secondary administrators and engaged them up front. When we held the statewide, 2-day brainstorming meeting, called “FutureForce Nebraska,” in December of 2006, we made sure we invited those “good thinker” types of administrators to be a part of that conversation. They also helped us develop and refine the message. (See http://www.nde.state.ne.us/nce/FFSynthesis.pdf) for a synthesis of the event.) Amazingly, they went back to their schools and they pushed this thing further. A good example is Grand Island, NE, a high school of about 2,100 students in an increasingly diverse community. The administrators knew they had a lot of challenges, but they saw CTE as one of the ways they were going to keep students, especially the growing Hispanic population, engaged in school. It really was an effort to get students to think [of career goals] bigger than just the meat packing industry which is dominant in that particular city. The administrators reorganized their entire school around our six major career fields. They caught the vision and they carried it out. Looking at that school’s catalogue, you can see it is broken down to where all the courses are listed by areas of interest in the career fields (See http://www.gips.org/senior/counseling1/course-offerings).That is an example of hand picking our first line of people that we knew we wanted success with and then growing them by giving them some ownership in the development of this whole process.

Also, I looked for groups and organizations that we could partner with, such as the Nebraska Council of School Administrators. Another is the Council of Greater Nebraska Schools, a group of school administrators who are very progressive. Size-wise, they are the next tier below our largest districts in Omaha and Lincoln. This group of administrators was looking for some school reform or redesign concepts. I invited myself into their fold and got them talking about programs of study. Actually, our DOE staff did a couple of seminars for them.

Another major secondary group we’ve worked with from day one is school counselors because we believe they are gate keepers in many ways. We knew we were either going to threaten them or they were going to be our partners. We didn’t want this to look like one more thing that would be added to their already overfilled plates. We had 300 counselors attend a 2-day academy supported with some Perkins’ dollars. The bulk of the program was around helping [counselors] understand what a program of study is, how to help students with programs of study in a career counseling context, and about how to help them transition between secondary and postsecondary. So, again we looked for the leaders in that organization and the state counseling board of their professional organization, inviting them to become a part of some of our conversations. Counselors now feel like they’ve got a new home and it’s with us in CTE!
 
UPDATE: How did you reach out to your six community colleges about programs of study?

Mr. Katt: Two ways. One was to the Chief Executive Officers and the Presidents of each of those community colleges. Dean Folkers, the Assistant State Director is my partner here; we try to go at least once or twice a year to one of their meetings just to say “Here’s where we’re going and here’s what things look like.” And “We really appreciate our partnership.” We’ve done more work with the Chief Instructional Officers, trying to help them understand what we’re trying to do to build that alignment piece. It’s all about communication, collaboration, and building a relationship with them. It’s helped. A lot of it is because they want to make this as seamless as possible for young people too. It’s to their benefit if a student sees the connectivity to their community college.

One thing that drove the inclusive approach we took to leading this initiative is one of my sources of frustration of working in state government for a number of years: the isolation within government where we each build walls around our own little turf. It’s ridiculous in a state our size that we do not have more collaboration across state government or even knowledge of what other agencies are doing. So that was the impetus around FutureForce Nebraska. [Leaders responsible for allocating funds and organizing people] have got to start maximizing resources because none of us has enough money to do what we need to do – or enough people. It’s been very good, but not without its little battles. But we’re surviving and things are going well. If we can’t model the way, it’s a bit hypocritical for us to sit here at the state office telling the locals to start working together, when we go about our business as if we didn’t have any other partners in the world.
 
UPDATE: The next principle is about access, equity and opportunity. What are the issues you deal with in Nebraska that are related to these populations in providing equal access to what Perkins has to offer, as well as any effective practices have you seen?

Mr. Katt: We have two initiatives related to access and opportunity we’re working on right now – one is just finishing up. Our agency’s special education department just completed a massive study of the quality of services provided and so forth. We became involved with that and added a few questions to their study related to career and technical education. The initial results came back very positive – that we have open accessibility to our programs and that special populations experience success in career and technical education in the state. We needed to validate that’s what really going on out there.

Within our agency, we have what we call our transitions team. It’s a couple of people from the special education department, a couple of us from CTE, and a couple of people from vocational rehabilitation. We meet every other month or so to talk about what we’re each doing and how we can better help young people by working together. The communication has been very good. I would encourage Illinois to begin those conversations if you haven’t already. When the folks who monitor and work with those programs know about what we’re trying to do, then they’re better able to be advocates when they go out and work with the schools. That’s paid some dividends for us.

Frankly, we struggle a little with the outcomes for nontraditional students. We’re trying to do everything we can do but, bottom line, our data has flat lined. We don’t have a lot of money to spend and want to get the biggest bang for the buck that we can. So, we took a step back this year and instead of spending money on projects, we funded a research study and should have the final results by the end of December. Although it is a preliminary finding, we’re learning that our current efforts occur too late in [students’ career exploration] process. Even in talking to the young people, we’ve learned that we had better be at the elementary and middle school level if we’re going to change stereotypes and attitudes about “what I can and cannot be.” We’re trying to approach what we do from a research perspective so we have some kind of an evaluation of what we’re doing to better provide schools that are struggling with very specific strategies to choose from that are proven to work. Probably by next spring we should have a pretty decent little handbook or website of strategies for special populations.
 
UPDATE: Do you have any specific outreach programs for adult students returning to postsecondary, because they fall under that ‘special populations’ category too?

Mr. Katt: Yes, we have some. All of our postsecondary colleges work with some aspects of adult students’ transition to occupational programs. The adult student was a part of the nontraditional study and their issues were discussed at both secondary and postsecondary in-services. Our partnership with vocational rehabilitation is involved with the adult sector as well. That sharing of information has been important. Once we identify some strategies that work at the postsecondary for those adults, we’ll have it in a form that we can share with other community colleges.
 
UPDATE: Principle three is about alignment and transition. While much of this work was started under previous versions of Perkins, what are the major challenges we face under Perkins IV and what are some promising strategies in meeting these challenges?

Mr. Katt: We’ve done a lot of work in this area. We created what we call the Partnerships for Innovation. Because Nebraska is not a huge state, our Perkins resources are limited. We don’t have that much money to spend on state-wide leadership and administration activities. So we looked at how we were going to create state-wide articulation agreements and how we were going to focus on curriculum alignment between secondary and postsecondary. We knew we needed more resources so we approached all our Perkins consortiums and our stand alone schools and community colleges about the idea of forming a state-wide consortium. They agreed, and everybody puts 10% of their money back into this consortium. That consortium then hired an executive director. She’s a former tech prep coordinator for us, but she is now doing the bulk of the work in helping us with curriculum alignment workshops. We’re really focusing on dual credit opportunities for students – but also emphasizing curriculum alignment between secondary and postsecondary. The good thing is that all the community colleges have adopted that career education model, organizing things accordingly or they have a transition piece that says “Here are all of our programs – here’s how they fit in this wheel and what it looks like.” It helps us as we start to think about the alignment. We started in finance; we’re working in transportation distribution; and we’re working in information technology, education and training, and health sciences. So, we’re taking it cluster by cluster.
 
UPDATE: How did you determine those clusters?

Mr. Katt: : Primarily based on employment opportunities, and it’s been very successful. Agriculture is one we’ll be gearing up on. We didn’t take it up initially because we have a vacancy here on our staff and we put that on the back burner. It’s now coming up because we have some new initiatives in the Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources Cluster. We have all the community colleges in play. When we pull these sessions together, we invite the universities, both public and private, 2- and 4-year institutions who offer curriculum in that given area to come and if they want to align, great! We know that Perkins money can only be spent at the community college level. Interestingly enough, we have a variety of people who are more than willing to help us take a look at the ability to create dual credit opportunities and to align curriculum. In fact, some of the private institutions are far more aggressive about it. It makes sense because it’s good marketing for them. We have the University of Nebraska and Creighton aboard as well as College of Saint Mary and Hastings College – you name it, we have them. One of the first pathways we developed was in the Finance cluster; we looked at Accounting. We now have an Intro to College Accounting course (a dual credit course) that’s accepted at a variety of those institutions. We were a little surprised that we had that kind of collaboration, but again, it’s what’s good for students.

There are also issues that we don’t have solved. One of those is how we transcript credit. That’s huge. Under the old tech prep system it was mostly up to the student to remember that they had articulated credit someplace. Well, as we all know, that didn’t work very well. We’ve got to create a system of transcripted credit that somehow tracks with the student as they [transition to college]. We’ve also identified some issues around teacher certification qualifications. We have some hurdles there that we are just beginning to identify that are also policy issues. One huge hurdle is who pays for dual credit. We have no state system of support for dual credit. Then it comes down to becoming a socio-economic issue where those that can afford to pay get the dual credit and those that can’t afford it take the same class but don’t get the credit. We’re really working on trying to fix that one.
 
UPDATE: You said at the beginning of your response to this question, something about a statewide curriculum and alignment. Have you accomplished that?

Mr. Katt: So far we have Introduction to Business and College Accounting. We’re working on Medical Terminology right now. We’ve got an Introduction to Education that’s in the process of being developed and, of course, is being based on the knowledge and skills from the States’ Career Cluster Initiative. Everyone agrees that the students who take this course are exposed to the same set of knowledge and skills. So far they’re basing it on trust and [we know] that isn’t going to last. We’re working through “What does this look like?” One of the suggestions has been: If the high school student can pass the same test at the end of the course that a postsecondary student would pass at the college level, there should be no question about awarding dual credit for that. For some of those courses we’ve agreed upon what the knowledge and skills should be or what the student should know and be able to do; now it’s the validation part of it. We’re looking at how we can tie into our technical skill attainment requirements under Perkins. If we can use the fact that the test is developed by the postsecondary, then can it count as a third party test for a secondary student? We don’t know the answer to that.

Another example of curriculum alignment was when we began thinking how to prepare our young people for careers in logistics. Most people don’t even know what that is. So, we got all the community colleges together, private colleges and so forth. We had such a hodge-podge of courses at the postsecondary level; our first step was to get alignment there. We had the same thing with medical terminology – two community colleges teach that from a health informatics perspective and the other four teach it as a pre-requisite to moving into radiation technology or surgical technology. So, my point is that all the work is not about secondary course alignment; it’s also about some alignment at the postsecondary level. A student shouldn’t have to worry whether a midterm course taken at one college will be accepted at another. We truly want alignment to be statewide. So far the colleges are working with us, but it’s slow going at the postsecondary level.
 
UPDATE: Principle 4 is about enhanced curriculum and instruction. What does a program of study under Perkins IV look like at the curriculum level?

Mr. Katt: Our staff started this process knowing that programs of study were going to become a reality and developed the process over the last year and a half. We rethought our curriculum, made some strong recommendations about courses that should not be offered any more at the high school level and others that should be offered in their place. Nebraska is a local-control state. We do not have state mandated or approved curriculum, but the Nebraska Department of Education puts out a curriculum guide that schools respond to, and it’s the most commonly found curriculum in the state. The courses have code numbers on them (and schools can always add their own if they have courses that are unique). We’ve reworked that so it’s now based on the Nebraska clusters model. That went out in November to all of our schools for [their use in planning] the coming year. Our staff now is doing a lot of in-service with our teachers to support the curriculum guide helping them determine the types of courses that should be in each cluster.

[This effort is also supported by] the curriculum alignment workshops. For example, as we look at moving away from Auto Mechanics I and turning that into an Introduction to Transportation Distribution and Logistics, faculty need support so they can make the conversion and help students get a broader picture of the cluster – of what’s out there in the larger cluster beyond what they would learn in an auto class. After students have the introductory course, they move into their course sequence within a program of study. Those programs of study are the ones we’re working on in the curriculum alignment workshops to tie into the postsecondary arena and to make sure that we have the curriculum aligned. It is really reshaping a lot of curriculum. Ratcheting it up a bit in terms of rigor was one of our intentions. Another was to eliminate a lot of our courses. We had some “hobby” type courses out there – maybe really popular with the students but didn’t offer a solid career preparatory component to them in one of the career cluster areas, and we’ve recommended those courses go away.
 
UPDATE: You can recommend that they go away – but how does that actually happen?

Mr. Katt: Amazingly, it has. Part of it can be attributed to the work we’ve done with school administrators to help them understand the vision that [Perkins IV and programs of study] are about student preparation for their career and postsecondary education. While a fun hobby photography course may be really popular in the school, refocusing it around more of a commercial photography kind of a course will apply to the art/audio-visual kind of a pathway – [faculty] understand that. It’s gone better than I’d ever thought. It’s not 100%. I’d love to tell you that every school has jumped on the band wagon, but they haven’t. But our goal, by the time we get this system built – I’m thinking by the time Perkins IV is over – we might be close.
 
UPDATE: Principle 5 is about professional preparation and development. This includes teacher education. What efforts have you made in Nebraska to not only recruit new teachers to CTE areas, which is a problem nationwide, but also ensure that they are learning the pedagogical methods that engage students and impact learning outcomes?

Mr. Katt: For the last 5 years, we’ve gotten all our teacher educators in CTE together in Lincoln once a year for what we call the “Teacher Education Forum”. We invite all colleges that prepare CTE teachers and pay for their professors to come in for a day. We have almost 100% attendance. All of the colleges are always represented and we have almost 100% attendance from the faculty. It gives us a chance to share with them what it is we’re trying to accomplish, how we need their help, and what we expect out of the pre-service candidates that come out of their programs in terms of understanding our system. We spend the morning talking about the big picture of CTE in Nebraska. Then in the afternoon, the professors break off by discipline to talk specifically about what their needs are and so forth. It pays benefits.
 
UPDATE: Do you support this activity with Perkins funds?

Mr. Katt: It does come out of Perkins. It’s been phenomenal; it gives us a chance to have a face-to-face audience with all of them hearing the same message in the morning and a chance for the disciplines to talk in the afternoon. Plus, it gives our consultants here at the DOE a chance to say “Here’s the new curriculum. How do we work together to make sure all teacher candidates have the knowledge and skills in place to deliver the curriculum?”
 
UPDATE: Is there any similar effort made for the English and the math or science faculty?

Mr. Katt: We have had a variety of professional development opportunities where we bring in cross curricular teams of CTE and academic teachers. We did one on technical writing, one on math, and one on reading. We’re currently doing a lot of work around problem-based, case-based learning, on how to develop those scenarios. As we do those across the state, we’re requiring that the team that comes is both academic and CTE teachers working together from both secondary and postsecondary institutions. We’ve had a lot of success with that requirement. I’ll never forget the first year we did one around reading and one of our large schools called me to say “Why in the world would you want to send CTE teachers to a reading workshop?” I thought to myself, “If I need to explain this, we have more problems [than I thought].” So, we just talked about the whole concept of technical reading. Well, they had never thought about that and how essential it is that everybody be teaching reading skills and reinforcing reading within the classroom. The person said, “Oh yes, that’s kind of a good idea.”
 
UPDATE: What kinds of different offerings in the professional development area does the state put on for teachers in training?
Mr. Katt: A couple of things work for us. We try to make sure that we have access to undergraduates. One is because of this good working relationship with teacher education, our staff has an opportunity to go into typically the methods class at each of those institutions at least once a semester and make a presentation and talk about where things are going. I usually have the chance to visit with a couple of the classes here at the University since I’m here in Lincoln. We also invite teacher candidates, especially as they are getting ready to student teach, to be part of that workshop we hold in June that I already mentioned. We typically have 30-35 attend; we don’t charge them anything, they just have to pay their own expenses to get there. It’s a good way to get them hooked into professional development and coming to the conference and understanding the value of it.
All of this professional development is partly possible because I have a staff of 16 professionals – bigger than a lot of states. Omaha or Lincoln can provide that kind of professional development when they get all their teachers together from all 8 high schools – but for our many small rural schools, that’s very difficult. It’s always been our philosophy here that the best way to spend Perkins money is to do some state-wide or regional kinds of activities where we can bring those teachers together, so they can get the same kind of experience that a group of Chicago teachers or Omaha teachers might get just because they’ve got their own resources.
 
UPDATE: The final principle is program improvement and accountability. What have you done in that area, and does your state have a longitudinal data system?

Mr. Katt: We do have a new state-wide longitudinal data system. We’re just into it and now are experiencing the reality of “We thought this was going to be easy, but it’s taking more work.” Once we get the system up and running it will be easier. Right now the grant that we’re working with is only K-12. We have applied for grant number 2 from the USDE which will help us bridge it into the postsecondary world. Road blocks that we’ve run into include FERPA; that continues to be a challenge. I was in Washington recently at a meeting where they talked about some new FERPA guidelines and that the Feds recognize there are some issues in tracking student outcomes from secondary to postsecondary. The US Department of Education had indicated that they had an in-service training around the new FERPA guidelines and that they were going to make that available to secondary and postsecondary people on a webinar. I don’t know when that’s going to come.

But for what we have done: for the last couple of years we’ve had data summits where we’d invite both secondary and postsecondary, a representative from each of the Perkins consortia, each of our stand-alone schools and from each postsecondary – to come together. We spent the morning talking about the big picture. In the afternoon we split secondary and postsecondary so we got down into more what this is all about. We’re going to continue this summit for the next couple of years, now that we have much higher quality data because of the longitudinal data system. We’re going to put more emphasis on how [locals use data] and what they need to be using it for in terms of driving programming decisions and so forth. One of the things that we’ve talked about lightly is the sanctions referred to in Perkins IV, which have never been in there in the same way in the past. We want to avoid [sanctions] at all costs and the only way to avoid them is by working together to make sure that schools meet the established benchmarks and nobody falls below that 90% range for 3 years. [We need to clearly convey] that there are consequences now [at the Federal level] where there didn’t used to be. 
 
Katt’s Advice on Programs of Study:
1. Create a compelling vision
2. Adopt a common language and framework
3. Engage partners who help communicate the plan
4. Hand-pick schools and support their success
5. Recognize counselors who are key gatekeepers
6. Tear down walls; share resources
7. Use data to determine student access and educational needs and outcomes
8. Reach consensus on cluster-level knowledge and skills
9. Refocus CTE curriculum on college and career preparation, not “hobby” courses
10. Convene CTE teacher educators and offer a variety of professional development for partners
11. Conduct data summits and encourage use of data to make local decisions
 
Editor's Note: In addition to serving as the State Director for Nebraska Career Education since 2001, Rich Katt’s current duties also include coordination of education activities with Nebraska Workforce Development and Economic Development. He is currently serving as co-chair of the FutureForce Nebraska project to prepare a trained workforce for the targeted industries as identified by the state’s Department of Economic Development. He has been involved in education for over 30 years as a secondary instructor, Nebraska FFA Executive Director, and State Director for Agriculture Education. He is a past national president of the National Association of State Directors of Career and Technical Education consortium and of the National Association of Supervisors of Agricultural Education, and was awarded the Outstanding Supervisor/Manager Award from the Nebraska Department of Education in 2001. He can be reached at Rich.Katt@nebraska.gov.