Testimony on “From Classroom to Career: Strengthening Skills Pathways Through CTE”

Good afternoon, Chairman Kiley, Ranking Member Bonamici, and esteemed members of the Subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify about innovations in career and technical education (CTE) and the role of the U.S. Department of Education in promoting them.

I am a senior policy advisor in the Center on Education & Labor at the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank New America. The Center on Education & Labor is dedicated to building more pathways into the middle class and good jobs by better aligning education, employment, and economic development systems.

Before I joined New America, until December 2024, I worked for 26 years for the U.S. Department of Education, spending most of that time working on policy and research in the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) and reporting to the Assistant Secretary for Career, Technical, and Adult Education. OCTAE has been fortunate to have some smart, dynamic Assistant Secretaries from both parties and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to help them execute their ideas and advance the CTE policy goals of Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. One reason I have enjoyed working on CTE policy is that it has always been bipartisan–or, at least, it has been until very recently.

I am excited to participate in a hearing about innovations in CTE because providing young people opportunities for career-connected learning is an important part of American public education.

CTE has not always been as well-regarded and valued as it is today. In 1998, shortly after I joined the Department, I arrived too early for a meeting and found myself alone with a senior Department budget official. I introduced myself and told him how happy I was to be working in OCTAE. He promptly burst my bubble, and told me I should keep an eye out for other opportunities because CTE was a “dying field.” He recounted how the Department had to scramble every year to try to preserve funding for the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education (Perkins Act) in the budget formulation process because it was typically targeted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for budget cuts. He predicted it would be zeroed out in the next few years.

That budget official was correct that CTE, then known as vocational education, was on the margins of public education and considered a less demanding alternative to a rigorous academic education. In too many schools, vocational education taught certain students a narrow set of skills for specific jobs, many of them low-wage, in the expectation that they would immediately enter the workforce after high school. The “certain” students tracked into vocational education were disproportionately from low-income families and students of color. A few years before, the 1994 National Assessment of Vocational Education Interim Report to Congress had noted that the top concern identified by a majority of vocational teachers in a survey was the perception that “problem students” were being “dumped” in vocational education. It also reported evidence that vocational education programs with large numbers of students who were members of special populations were stigmatized and avoided by other students.

But the budget official was wrong that vocational education or CTE was a “dying field.”

It was a field that was modernizing, transforming, and becoming more rigorous so that it could offer all young people opportunities to explore careers of all kinds and to build employability and technical skills that would be useful to them wherever they landed after high school. The era of rote learning for dead-end jobs ended as CTE administrators aligned CTE programs with in-demand career pathways, many of which require further learning after high school, whether it is a Registered Apprenticeship, postsecondary certificate, associate degree, or a bachelor’s degree. Today, 80 percent of students who concentrate their studies in CTE in high school go on to enroll in postsecondary education at some point following high school graduation.

I admire the hard work and vision of CTE leaders at the national, state, and local levels who were responsible for that transformation. I also appreciate the contributions made by Congress through amendments made to the Perkins Act. In 2006, Congress amended Perkins to require that CTE programs be aligned with the academic standards adopted by states under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). It also made the performance of CTE concentrators on state academic assessments a core indicator in the program’s accountability system. That was an important milestone in CTE’s transformation. CTE leaders were welcomed to the table as partners in schoolwide efforts to ensure young people graduate with solid academic knowledge and skills, as well as the employability and technical skills that are the hallmark of CTE. CTE was no longer on the margins of public education. School administrators and academic teachers began to recognize the powerful contribution high-quality CTE can make to student success in high school.

Read the full testimony here.