When I was little, I hated going to the doctor. This is hardly surprising! I was like any other boy of six. Who wants to go get a shot, be poked and prodded by a scary giant in a white coat, then be given (sadly) a cherry-flavored lollipop as a reward for being “good?” No one, that’s who.

As I’ve aged closer to 60 and further from six, I’ve become accustomed to the necessity of the poking and prodding and discomfort that comes with physical inspection. We won’t live long if we don’t take care of our health, right?

In a similar manner, culinary arts programs won’t survive long if they resist assessment and active inspection. Only through a clear-eyed analysis of what IS can we evolve to meet a rapidly transforming industry and student body. We need a tool to take our temperature.

Successful secondary and postsecondary CTE programs must be living, breathing entities that constantly reinvent themselves.
– Timm Boettcher

A few words of background
My first few years teaching culinary arts were like many of my colleagues: nose above water, fighting for my life, lurching from week to week, day to day, and often class to class. The idea of taking the program I was developing for a thoughtful checkup was laughable in the extreme. There was no TIME to consider the overall health of my culinary school during the first few years after transitioning from the industry to the classroom. I was (attempting) to write my first lesson plans, fix found/donated/borrowed equipment, source vendors, find internships, figure out how articulation programs work, grasp CTSO competitions, interview and hire culinary teachers, master CAPE funding, teach counselors how to schedule student class loads, recruit and meet with potential partners… the list was unending!

As I became more established and the culinary program had reached a comfortable expansion rate, I was able to slow down and take a look at what was growing around me, searching for some way of assessing how my program was doing. When I spoke with like-minded colleagues at the larger, national conferences, I discovered they too were looking for some tool to measure their success – that they too were trying to take their program’s “temperature.”

In short order, I became curious about inspecting industry partnerships as a way of taking my culinary program to the doctor, so to speak. In grad school, I made studying these relationships a priority. The more I read, the greater my concern. I’ve written about this challenge previously but here’s a brief synopsis:

Other CTE career clusters recognized and responded to the challenge of active involvement from their industry partners years ago, prioritizing and assessing existing industry relationships for health and crafting interesting ways of addressing shortfalls. Culinary arts programs rarely followed their lead. Worse, we in the culinary field don’t seem to be moving in that direction. Many have taken a superficial approach to what is a significant challenge: our industry partnerships have fallen way past the point of simply being unhealthy. (Think about the activity of your own advisory board and the number of people sitting on it.) 

We were failing the academic health standards research has identified as basic. Our collective thermometer reads: sick.

Getting practical: Identifying the basic standards of what we should be doing
Let’s start with an easy one. The National Career Academy Coalition published its most recent Standards of Practice a few years ago and wrote that in a healthy CTE program:

“Representatives of employers… help guide the academy’s curriculum and provide experiential components such as guest speakers, real-world projects, field experience sites, shadowing opportunities, mentors, student internships, community service opportunities, and teacher externships.” (NSOP 2022)

A similar list comes from the excellent research of Fletcher, Smith, and Hernandez-Gantes in “It Takes a Village: A Case Study of Internal and External Supports of an Urban High School Magnet Career Academy.” They said: 

“Business/industry partnerships assist schools with raising funds, mentoring students, advising on curricula, training teachers, exposing students to real-life instruction and problem-solving, and providing equipment as well as facilitating work-based learning experiences.

Please note that this list is not descriptive but prescriptive. Industry partners DO all these things in a healthy program.

Most of my colleagues will find this list challenging, but not impossible. Our students DO go on field trips and we DO get guest speakers from time to time. Our partners aren’t guiding curriculum or helping with real-world projects, to be sure. And they certainly aren’t on campus enough to mentor individual students, nor do they provide shadowing opportunities (and when they do either of these things, it’s only for a few students). And they rarely help with teacher externships to keep me or the instructors under my purview current. But they show up, sometimes. In order to avoid frustrated rage-typing, I’d rather not talk about significant partner help with funding CTSOs or providing needed equipment. There is precious little of that for anyone I’ve met.

“In 1992, Cramer and Landsmann asked whether school-business partnerships were making the grade in terms of educational improvement. The essential answer from a business perspective was that partnerships “deserved an A+ for image and a C+ for effectiveness.” … [Many years later, the] good news is that we have seen some progress. The bad news is that they—and we—are not performing nearly well enough to meet the challenges of the 21st century.” – Dianne Hoff

I know of teachers who have more active engagement with their partners than is common, colleagues who can check off a bit more of the list. Not many. But a few. I am familiar with at least one secondary and another postsecondary school which would check off the entire thing. 

Both of these high-partner-engagement schools have something in common: they have been around longer than most and have become what I call “legacy schools” - organizations that can call on alumni, former students now in the industry and happy to give back to where they came from. Legacy schools tend to have contacts with multiple owners, business leaders with multiple employees from that program on their payroll. Legacy schools have been around long enough to have that most generous of all gifts: a solid and positive community reputation. Few culinary arts programs fall into the Legacy School category.

Here’s a more challenging thermometer: Advisory board makeup
John Gaal and Shane Trafton, in their ominously titled “Determining When to Close a CTE Program” report on this issue specifically writing, “we should be using best standards to assess Advisory Board and Industry Partner participation.” 

According to these standards, any CTE program – specifically one that has been around for three years or more - should have an advisory board consisting of at least 12 business/industry representatives with supervisory/decision-making/ownership roles. What’s more, at least half of everyone present during a scheduled Advisory Board meeting MUST be from the industry and without their presence, a voting quorum cannot be established. This number is in addition to the four mandated education representatives (director, lead instructor, local administrator, district representative) and in addition to the six mandated stakeholder representatives (parents, students, community leaders – two of each). Simple math: twenty-two people, minimum.

I sit on several Advisory Boards in addition to my own. NONE of the culinary programs I support meet this standard, including my own. NONE.

Culinary educators (who are rightfully proud of what they have accomplished) tend to become a mite defensive at this point. When I was first faced with a token of this reality, I reacted poorly too. What turned down the volume on my tirade of volatile reactivity and allowed me to focus on objective data was the discovery of a clear, comprehensive questionnaire that incorporates ALL the elements mentioned so far. I am speaking about the checklist created by the Council for Corporate and School Partnerships, the Business/Education Self-Assessment Tool for Improvement. Click the link, scroll to the list of questions on page 24, answer each and total your score. Perhaps you will find your school’s relationship with industry pros is fantastic!

More likely, if you are like the vast majority of culinary arts teachers, directors, and administrators, you will more likely find the Council’s Self-Assessment Tool a powerful, searching MRI, pointing the way toward necessary change.

Editor’s Note: Click here to read Chef Christopher Bates previous article, “Research Article: Industry Partnerships in the Culinary Arts Classroom Point Toward a Greater Problem.”  

Further Reading & Resources
Adam Manley, R. (2012). Keeping up with business and industry: secondary-level career and technical education's struggle. On the Horizon, 20(1), 17-23.

Boettcher, T. (2019). Beyond Industry Partnerships: How Postsecondary CTE Programs Are Achieving Success [Article]. Techniques: Connecting Education & Careers, 94(7), 40-43. 

Cramer, J., & Landsmann, L. (1992, November). School/business partnerships: Are they making the grade? Forbes, 131.

Fletcher, E. C., Smith, C. A., & Hernandez-Gantes, V. M. (2021). It Takes a Village: A Case Study of Internal and External Supports of an Urban High School Magnet Career Academy. The Urban Review, 53(4), 681-707.

Gaal, John, and Shane Trafton. "The PSI Score Card: Determining when to Close a CTE Program." Techniques: Connecting Education and Careers (J1) 84.6 (2009): 44-46.

Luecking, Richard, et al. "A Guide to Developing Collaborative School-Community-Business Partnerships." National Technical Assistance Center on Transition (2015). National Standards of Practice: Career Academies. National Career Academy Coalition (2022).

Sanders, M. (2016). Leadership, partnerships, and organizational development: Exploring components of effectiveness in three full-service community schools. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 27(2), 157-177.