Dive Brief:
- Career and technical education still faces numerous challenges in fulfilling its potential to educate students and help them identify a potential career pathway, according to a recent report from YouScience.
- The report found that while aptitude-informed CTE helps students discover their talents and interests and engages them in learning, 40% of CTE programs struggle to find partnerships with employers, 66% of CTE leaders say students lack awareness of CTE options, and 57% say CTE programs still face significant bias and misperceptions.
- School systems should focus on offering career and technical education so it’s more embedded into students’ everyday academic lives, said Edson Barton, CEO of YouScience, a CTE solutions provider. “By having students more engaged in career-connected learning activities, virtually every aspect of their academic and personal lives improve.”
Dive Insight:
CTE programs are often still treated as a “second-class citizen” separate from the rest of academics, Barton said.
To improve that dynamic, students first need intertwined academic and career guidance starting in middle school and based on their aptitudes — and not just on a cursory survey of their interests, he said.
Otherwise, Barton said, “We’re letting them out there into the next phase of their lives without any structured understanding of who they are, deeply, and what they’re capable of.”
Schools should also give adequate time for that guidance to take effect and to direct students toward independent exploration, Barton said.
“Too often, we think we’ve got to plow through experiences — training after training after training,” he said. While state laws tend to require career exploration, that’s often “treated as a ‘check the box and go’ rather than, ‘Let’s understand and explore it to set a solid foundation for you.’ Once you have a solid foundation, everything else improves on top of that.”
Setting this in motion at an early age helps more students get into nontraditional pathways, such as increasing women in STEM careers, Barton said. “That happens at dramatic rates if this is taken seriously,” he said.
Educational offerings relevant to the labor market will draw students’ interest, agreed Catherine Imperatore, research and content director at the Association for Career and Technical Education. She added that the YouScience report “echoes what I’ve heard from the field — both the challenges and solutions and strategies that CTE programs are trying on the ground.”
While many districts are working to ensure that middle school students know what CTE opportunities are available in high school, and that high school students know what’s available beyond senior year, “that messaging isn’t getting out, necessarily, across the board,” Imperatore said.
“There are places where students don’t know what’s offered until it’s too late, and they’re well into their high school career,” she said. “We need to crack some of those access issues, especially in rural and more geographically dispersed areas.”
Connections with employers can help schools figure out the more relevant offerings to provide and develop work-based opportunities, which requires close, regular communication among teachers, administrators and employers, Imperatore said.
“All of those people are busy and have other things going on; and it takes time and dedicated resources to build and sustain those connections,” she said. “That’s one of the most foundational things.”
Related research that Imperatore cited includes ACTE’s own work on strategies for addressing CTE teacher shortages and developing resources to explain CTE to school counselors and others who don’t come from a CTE background.
Additional research includes recent reports from Advance CTE, an organization representing state directors of CTE, about career readiness data and about how credentials are identified, validated and incentivized within CTE, as well as a 20-year meta-analysis of CTE research from the CTE Research Network.
Much of this research tries to push past correlation into causation, Imperatore said.
“It’s often hard to get past the correlation between, students did this, and came up with this outcome,” she said, adding that there’s greater value in “research where they could create more experimental designs that allow them to compare control and treatment groups. That has found some very positive outcomes from CTE.”
