Karen Ferguson's Profile

retooling all existing industry sectors (check out

Right now, the primary struggles with green development seem to come from: (1)
actually understanding what “green” is and (2) knowing which industries people
need to be prepared for.

In more recent times we have seen the mortgage bubble burst, and a lot of
people are wary of any sort of fast trend full of great promises.

As a result, many are more willing to take a wait-and-see attitude before they
start investing public resources toward something new.

some leaders in workforce development are concerned that more traditional skill
trades within the manufacturing and construction fields are being deemphasized
by community colleges looking for federal dollars to support newfangled programs

Our general observation here is that there is a certain level of tension between
“national policies” and what can be thought of as “regional interests.” This
tension seems to arise from how a national policy initiative would or could
impinge on the economic interests of a region

Colleges and universities may soon be providing student data for an extensive
interconnected system of state databases (i.e. a national student database).

there was some thought that a national student database system was prohibited in
the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008

The movement toward statewide databases with unique student identifiers, rooted
in the standards-and-testing movement of the 1990s, has grown significantly in
this decade under the federal No Child Left Behind law and is getting a fresh
push this year from the Obama administration. Federal officials want to link
student test scores to teacher files to help evaluate instruction. They also
envision systems that track students from pre-kindergarten through college, to
help raise college completion rates.

But a larger concern, Guidera said, is that states often lack "a strategic,
thoughtful way of connecting information and using it to answer questions."

When the alignment is complete, all like postsecondary technical education
programs in Kansas will have the same CIP codes with consistent exit points,
program lengths and stackable industry-based credentials

The alignment doesn’t mean instructors will lose their freedom to design
courses. Teachers not only deliver course material as they wish, they develop
their own unique lesson plans, learning activities and assessment tasks, Johnson
says.