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From @Amy Ko on the CSforAllWashington Slack Channel

• National Career Clusters launched in 2002, creating educational groupings of CTE programs. Intended to guide students toward careers. Structured Perkins funding.
• Starting in 2022, org called Advance CTE revamped career clusters, released final framework in Oct 2024. Goal was to align to industry and college career pathways.
• Now 14 career clusters, and a bunch of subclusters, focused on "high skill, high wage, in demand jobs".
• Revisions:
  • "STEM" is no longer a career cluster.
  • IT (which contained CS) is now called "digital technology," and structured as a "crosscutting cluster," which means its integrated into all of the other career clusters (agriculture, financial services, health care, etc.), rather than standing alone.
  • Digital Technology now includes Data Science, AI, IT, Networks + Cybersecurity, Software, Unmanned Vehicle Technology, and Web + Cloud.
  • Advanced manufacturing was expanded to include Robotics.
• Any state that receives Perkins 5 funding is now required to align with the new Career Clusters. Requires revamp of all course codes and the Perkins report sent to federal government annually. If they don't, no Perkins funding.
• State's drive implementation of this. It will take time; intended to be 1.5-2 years, but that was supposed to start last year. ODE and OSPI are supposed to lead. Alignment is supposed to be done by Fall 2025.
• The primary impact would be changing the incentives and organization of how CS is situated, framed, and organized within course offerings. Impacts school leaders' choices of what is offered and how it is described.

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Lawrence Tanimoto
Treasurer/Advocacy Lead, CSTA Washington
Winner, Men's and Women's Brackets
2024 CSTA Chapter Leaders March Madness Challenge
Bellevue, WA
K-12 Teacher CTE (retired)
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About two years ago, I did an ad-hoc study on CS courses within CTE:  https://cranidores.org/cs-ed-within-cte-dashboards-washington-2021/ using a data set published by OSPI on CTE courses.

I should revisit this with newer data and better knowledge of the data sources that I now have.

In Washington, most CS classes come under Business and Marketing - and only a few under STEM - this is why so many Business and Marketing teachers are recruited to teach CS and bring that viewpoint to their CS classes.   And within OSPI, the BaM  supervisor tracks almost all CS courses from a CTE standpoint.

So it will be interesting to see how these new career clusters affect the categorization of CS courses within CTE.

A chart that I shared at the ECEP meeting is a snapshot from one of the dashboards on CS for All Washington - Data.   It shows how CTE credentials are the primary means for CS teachers and the prevalence of Conditional/Limited CTE certs held by many CS teachers.

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Lawrence Tanimoto
Treasurer/Advocacy Lead, CSTA Washington
Winner, Men's and Women's Brackets
2024 CSTA Chapter Leaders March Madness Challenge
Bellevue, WA
K-12 Teacher CTE (retired)
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