Math Course Taking For CTE Concentrators: Evidence from Three Studies of the Impact of a Decade of Education Reform

This paper presents an argument supported by evidence that the positive effects of education reform legislation take time to accumulate, and, given time, have the power to bring about improvement. Specifically, the course-taking patterns in mathematics of CTE students in the years following the 1990 Perkins II Act and 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act clearly show that these students are taking part in an increasing number of higher mathematics courses, while at the same time decreasing the number of lower-level math courses taken ( Levesque, 2003 ). These trends have developed over a number of years, accentuating the necessity of allowing for the passage of time before evaluating whether a particular reform movement has been successful.