Career and Technical Education (CTE) has strong potential in rural schools to serve as a student empowerment and community revitalization powerhouse. Because of their embeddedness, rural schools have long been the foundation of their local economy and society, and CTE offers a direct tie that links school to community through student professional development. Despite this incredibly important role that rural schools and CTE programs play, CTE remains vastly undersupported in rural Illinois. This happens in part because of inequitable funding practices that limit the capacity of rural schools to support “elective” programs like CTE. Just as impactful though, are widespread misconceptions and the lack of priority given to CTE at all levels.
In order for CTE and rural schools to fully serve students and communities alike, CTE must be better understood, valued, and elevated in policy and practice. This task begins with understanding what the real impacts of CTE are in a rural community. There is ample anecdotal evidence cheering the positive impacts of robust CTE programming, but far fewer efforts have attempted to systematically investigate and understand those impacts.
As the first step in identifying those positive impacts, the Rural IL CTE Project and Association of Illinois Rural and Small Schools worked with Drs. Ken Wallace and Laura Ptak of Wallace Educational Consulting to conduct a case study on the economic impacts of rural CTE programming. Through connections made by AIRSS and the Rural IL CTE Project, Drs. Wallace and Ptak undertook four, in-depth field research operations around the state of Illinois to understand how exemplary rural CTE efforts impact their local communities.
After engaging with school leaders, educators, and community stakeholders in four district rural Illinois school communities, AIRSS is excited to share the full summary of findings and recommendations in a white paper titled: The Role and Economic Effects of Career and Technical Education (CTE) in Rural Illinois Communities. This informative report presents local demographic data and narrative analysis from each of the case schools. These insights were coded and analyzed to produce a set of recommendations on developing impactful rural CTE programs. The health of the local school is typically a harbinger of the future health of the town, and this report finds that strong CTE programming is one avenue through which rural schools strengthen students, community, and the district.