The Promise of Career and Technical Education
Date Posted: October 2, 2019
Posted In: Discussion, Ideas, Workforce,
From the Brookings Institution: In the transition away from No Child Left Behind, there has been a parallel resurgence of interest in career and technical education (CTE) as an alternative pathway for K-12 students. In 2015, the most recent evidence available, more than 7 million secondary school students and nearly 4 million postsecondary students were enrolled in CTE programming. In 2018, the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act was reauthorized, providing $1.2 billion in funding for CTE programs and job training for students.
As noted by Jacob (2017), proponents of CTE argue that such programming improves career opportunities by providing students with hands-on training and the soft skills necessary to succeed in the labor market. Similarly, advocates stress that CTE may improve core academic skills by fostering student engagement and motivating students to attend school more regularly. Cullen et al. (2013), in their recommendations for improving failing schools, argue for an increased focus on vocational training such as CTE as a way to foster practical skills and labor market integration. Nevertheless, despite the resurgence of interest in CTE, there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of CTE as an alternative pathway for K-12 students.
What Evidence Suggests About CTE Efficacy
Answers around the success of CTE have eluded researchers for a long time. A primary challenge in identifying the effects of CTE programs is the fact that students who choose to pursue CTE are usually different in important ways from those who do not. Therefore, without some source of experimental variation, it is not possible to identify the effects of CTE programs independent of other factors like student motivation. Yet new research has begun to disentangle this relationship; we describe below some of the few studies that provide evidence of the causal impact of CTE on student outcomes.
What little high quality causal evidence exists has all been conducted on smaller scales that inhibit our ability to understand what to expect from CTE systems operating at scale. Earlier experimental work on career academies, one model of career-themed curricula that create schools within schools, suggested that participation in themed CTE programs in high schools improved earnings in the first seven years after high school. More recent work suggests that career academies may also improve high school completion.
Though both of these studies are excellent in terms of their support of causal inference, they included nine schools and one school respectively. Similarly, there is some evidence that whole-school models can enhance high school completion with no change in test scores; in this study, however, only three schools were included in the most internally valid estimates. Since each of these prior studies include so few schools, there is reason to be concerned that perhaps these individual schools are anomalies and not representative of a model that could be impactful at scale.