Career & Technical Education Policy Exchange

A prevailing belief amongst the policy and business community is that CTE programs will achieve many goals: provide marketable skills for non-college bound students, grow the supply of skilled technical workers demanded by the labor market, and equip these students effectively without sacrificing the general knowledge we expect high school students to obtain. These are worthy goals. To achieve them will require rigorous research and evaluation to test which models work, under what circumstances, and for whom.

Compared with other domains in education, we know very little about whether CTE innovations are accomplishing their stated goals or if there are unintended consequences on student learning or postsecondary and labor market success. CTEx provides actionable, evidence-based research directly to policymakers and practitioners. While part of our contribution is compiling longitudinal databases, the lab will ultimately be used as a tool to facilitate research on the causal impact of various aspects of CTE education on student success.

At present, we have only a cursory understanding of how CTE students fare in the labor market, even in a descriptive sense, and almost the entirety of this research uses national surveys. Through our multi-agency data agreements across several states, we have the unique opportunity to study the effects of CTE course-taking on short- and medium-term careers.

The role of CTE in building local workforce capacity has largely been ignored, and we have little understanding of how CTE offerings by local schools respond to changes in labor market demand. We will develop a broad set of questions that rely on labor market shocks and make use of detailed observational data to ask how well CTE outputs are matched to demands of a changing workforce.

The past decade has ushered in a host of new accountability measures for CTE in order to satisfy federal reporting requirements. Little if any research has asked whether increased accountability has affected student outcomes.

While we have a great deal of research on what teacher characteristics are associated with student outcomes in non-CTE courses, there is virtually no information on what CTE teacher characteristics (specifically, industry training versus traditional teacher training) are correlated with student success in these courses. By using matched student-teacher linkages, we shed light on this relationship.

The number of students earning industry-recognized credentials has exploded in recent years. These credentials are awarded based, at least in part if not entirely, on End of Pathway assessments, providing a unique opportunity to test for certification effects.