States and school systems looking to improve students’ college and career readiness have increasingly expanded career and technical education (CTE) opportunities in high school, but this rapid expansion—coupled with the very specific technical expertise required to teach these courses—has led to strained CTE teacher labor markets, with CTE being one of the most common teacher shortage areas in states across the country. While teacher licensure policy in academic subjects has long valued formal teacher preparation, the policy response to CTE teacher shortages in some states has been to create CTE-specific pathways to teacher licensure that typically prioritize prior industry experience over formal teacher preparation. Despite the potential impacts of these decisions on staffing and student learning, policymakers have little empirical evidence to guide choices.

This multi-phase, multi-state project seeks to address this shortcoming through a three-stage exploration of CTE teacher labor markets, CTE teacher attributes, and the outcomes of CTE students related to their teachers across four states: Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, and Washington. First, the project team of Celeste Carruthers, Shaun Dougherty, Thomas Goldring, Daniel Kreisman, and Roddy Theobald will conduct a comprehensive overview of how CTE teacher characteristics and preparation vary across CTE clusters and within clusters across schools. Next, the project will employ a mixed-methods approach to both quantitatively evaluate teacher attrition and qualitatively contextualize strategies addressing CTE staffing via a survey of and semi-structured interviews with state and district-level administrators. The third phase will examine whether teacher characteristics and preparation influence student outcomes such as test scores, college enrollment, employment, and earnings.