Equity in CTE at a Time of Racial Justice

I remember vividly the day that I discovered I was White. I was a small child sitting in front of an old black and white television set perched on wobbly metal legs.  The TV was a large square box with two “rabbit ears” or antenna that helped to get a picture on the fuzzy screen. I don’t recall what I was watching, but I do recall sitting on the floor alone in our living room and experiencing a powerful feeling of fear as I asked myself, “Am I a Black person or a White person?” I had no idea, but suddenly it was important for me to know.

I remember lifting my small, chubby hands to my eyes to consider their color, and experiencing the sense of relief at what I saw. I was White. That isolated memory related to the race of my four-year-old self connected to an emotional experience that was powerful enough to pin it forever in my mind.

Many years later, I read the book American Family by Barbara Waugh and Stacy Cusulos. Waugh and Cusulos adopted two African American children. The book tells their story and the unexpected cultural and racial biases they experienced. One particularly powerful story was that of their six-year-old son, sobbing in his bed at bedtime. The women went in to his room to find out the cause. He cried uncontrollably, “I don’t want to be Black.” The image, so beautifully and powerfully told was so sad. I wondered as I read about the little boy and his lovely family if he knew any more than I did about race at that young age.

Lately concerns about White racism and Critical Race Theory have been in the news and connected to parent and public fears of perpetuating racism or exposing White children to sense of guilt and shame.  This discussion is not new. In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as “the doll tests” to study the racial beliefs of African-American children[1]. Children between the ages of three and seven were given four dolls, identical except for color. They were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they preferred. A majority of the children preferred the White doll and assigned characteristics that were more positive to it. The study was repeated in 2020 with slight modifications and, again, the Black dolls were the least favored, even among Black children[2]. Parents were shocked as both White and Black parents worked hard to send a different message to their children: one of equality and value of all people. Despite our best efforts, why does this cultural bias persist and how does it connect to CTE?

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is another example of how our history has created cultural biases that still linger today. Initially, career education was for boys only and was viewed as an option for low performing students incapable of going to college. Once girls were admitted to “trade” schools, careers were identified as “male or female.” [3] Historically, jobs were identified as for women or men in newspaper advertisements and job descriptions. The Vocational Education Amendments of 1976 changed that by providing equal opportunities for women and girls, but access alone did not instantly change people’s beliefs or biases about jobs based on their gender.

One of the four constructs of the STEM Equity Initiative’s NEIR© model is “Normalizing.” I talk about it a lot when trying to explain why girls do not go into carpentry, manufacturing, or engineering. There has never been research or any evidence that shows career choices are genetically based. Instead, all the indicators point to exposure to careers at an early age and the development of comfort from exposure with smells, hands-on activities, tools, spaces, and role models that over time makes going to college and career choices easy. Cultural biases are embedded from an early age and are connected in a million ways to what we say and do, often without awareness. We send and receive cultural biases through a multitude of micro-messages that may go unnoticed by parents and the public. It is hard to correct what you cannot see, which is why we need to open discussions and improve communication to create greater awareness of the negative influence of micro-inequities and the power of micro-affirmations to improve equity and equality.

Today, CTE provides a very different set of career options than a few decades ago. The connection to high tech, high demand, and high skill jobs is ever increasing. Work force shortages and high entry level and lifelong wages have made many CTE career options attractive to students with high academic qualifications, while remaining accessible to students with greater educational needs.

Changing bias connected to old blue-collar professions is not as easy as simply educating people with one presentation, website, or brochure. Waiting until high school to talk to parents is too late. Bias is embedded in the smells (working with engine oil is male; working with human waste is female), cultural beliefs (women care for children, the sick or the elderly; men care for people in danger) and normal experiences from childhood. Unintended beliefs and biases permeate our culture, but they don’t have to forever. With mindful and intentional focus on eliminating biases, be they related to race or gendered-careers, we can slowly shift the culture and normalize it to benefit all people. We need to normalize our beliefs about the value of all people in order to create a world where every child can smile at their hands, and every child can grow up to enter a great CTE program.

 [1] https://www.naacpldf.org/brown-vs-board/significance-doll-test/

[2] https://theconversation.com/what-i-learned-when-i-recreated-the-famous-doll-test-that-looked-at-how-black-kids-see-race-153780

[3] https://www.acteonline.org/history-of-cte/