INDIANAPOLIS – Harvard University’s Creating Pathways to Prosperity Conference will feature Project Lead The Way’s Chief Engagement Officer, David Dimmett, as a panelist Monday. The event is a direction-setting conference, a follow-up to the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s 2011 report calling for a national effort to get millions of young Americans onto a realistic path to employability. Project Lead The Way (PLTW) is featured on the panel titled “Creating World-Class Curricula for 9-14 Career Education Programs.”
“Critics continually complain that too many CTE courses and programs lack the rigor needed to prepare students for the 21st century workforce,” said conference organizers. “Yet, even the most strident skeptics concede that the U.S. does have some world-class programs of study. This workshop will examine several of these exemplary programs in an effort to develop strategies for upgrading our national CTE curricula.”
PLTW’s engineering and biomedical sciences curricular programs for students in grades 6-12, and soon to be K-12, are used in over 4,700 schools in all 50 states. PLTW programs of study are continuously recognized for their rigor, relevance, and record of preparing students for post-secondary and career readiness in STEM fields. The U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Research invited PLTW’s President and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Vince Bertram to testify at their hearing on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) last week. Fortune 500 companies such as Chevron, Toyota, and Lockheed Martin are partnering with PLTW to increase program access for America’s students.
“The country’s top business, education, and policy leaders recognize we have a crisis in STEM education, and they are increasingly seeing Project Lead The Way as a scalable solution,” Dimmett said. “PLTW is a model program for delivering applied and relevant opportunities for students. PLTW’s engineering and biomedical sciences pathways prepare students for a full range of post-secondary opportunities. We are proud to present at the Pathways to Prosperity Conference.”
The 2011 Harvard Graduate School of Education Pathways to Prosperity report said this about PLTW: “In recent years, we’ve witnessed the emergence of a growing number of rigorous, high-quality national models that demonstrate what career and technical education can achieve in the 21st century. Take Project Lead The Way…This approach is clearly engaging students. Some 80 percent of those who complete the program say they will study engineering, technology, or computer science in college, and their retention rate in these courses is higher than that of students who did not complete PLTW.”
To view the full 2011 report, click here.