Career & Technical Education Policy Exchange
The Career & Technical Education Policy Exchange (CTEx) is a multi-state consortium dedicated to improving the quality of high school career and technical education (CTE) programs in the United States. We work side-by-side with state and local partners and researchers from universities and research centers across the country to develop data-driven policy recommendations that ensure all students are ready for both college and career.
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. The Career & Technical Education Policy Exchange provides actionable, evidence-based research directly to policymakers and practitioners. While part of our contribution is compiling longitudinal databases, CTEx will ultimately be used as a tool to facilitate research on the causal impact of various aspects of CTE education on student success.
Lessons, Challenges, and Opportunities for CTE
After several years of cross-state work, we have learned a lot about CTE policy through our unique partnership and the data we use. These issue briefs serve as a way to coalesce what we have learned to help inform fellow researchers and policymakers.
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