Secondary/High School Level Glossary

Area CTE schools provide career/technical education (CTE) part-time to students who receive all or most of their academic instruction at their home high school.

Career academy is a school-within-a-school model in which the curriculumis organized around one or more broad career areas.

Career/technical education (CTE) in high school encompasses non-occupational CTE, which includes family and consumer sciences education (i.e., courses that prepare students for roles outside the paid labor market) and general labor market preparation (i.e., courses that teach general employment skills such as word processing and introductory technology skills); and occupational education, which teaches skills required in specific occupations or occupational clusters.

Credit is a standardized measure used to provide a consistent measure of coursetaking from students' high school transcripts. A credit is equivalent to one Carnegie unit, which is awarded for a class that meets for one period per day for the entire school year, or the equivalent instructional time. It is possible for students to earn less than one Carnegie unit if a class meets less than one period per day for the entire school year.

Enrichment/other credits include credits earned in general skills (e.g., study dynamics, tutorials, service learning); health, physical and recreational education' religion and theology, and military science.

Occupational area and occupational concentrator are related terms. The occupational education component of the career/technical education curriculum is organized into the following 12 (or 20 disaggregated) occupational areas: agriculture and natural resources; business (business finance, business management, business support); communications and design; computer and information sciences; construction and architecture (architecture, construction); consumer and culinary services (consumer services, culinary arts); engineering technologies; health sciences; manufacturing ; marketing; public services (education, library science, protective services, public administration and legal services); and repair and transportation (mechanics and repair, transportation). These occupational areas are based on the 2007 Revision of the Secondary School Taxonomy. An occupational concentrator is a student who earns a minimum number of credits within a specific area of occupational education. Two definitions of concentrator are used here: A student who earns 2.0 or more credits, and a student who earns 3.0 or more credits, in at least one of the 12 broad occupational areas listed above. Archived tables use a different taxonomy (the 1998 Secondary School Taxonomy) and aggregate courses into 11 broad areas, with manufacturing combined with repair and transportation.

Professional license is defined by responses to the following question in the National Education Longitudinal Study, Fourth Follow-up (NELS:88/2000), "Have you received a professional license or professional credential since leaving high school? For example, these might be a real estate or cosmetology license, teacher's certificate or networking engineering credential. Do not consider certificates provided for the completion of academic programs at postsecondary schools."

Work-based learning learning provides supervised learning activities for students that occur in paid or unpaid workplace assignments, and for which course credit is awarded.

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