The shifting job market is fueling demands for a “new kind of educational journey” that puts students on a more “connected path” from school to the workforce, according to a new vision document from one of the largest advocacy organizations for career and technical education.
Advance CTE, a national nonprofit that represents state CTE leaders, seeks to bring together a cross-section of leaders from education, the business world, philanthropy, and research every five years to take stock of the career and technical education landscape and what they can do together to make progress.
Advance CTE unveiled the new vision during its annual spring meeting held here recently. It’s the organization’s fifth report outlining its vision since the early 2000s. It was developed with input from more than 200 national, state, and local CTE leaders, and more than 40 national organizations have signed on as official supporters and partners.
In a conversation with Education Week at its spring meeting, Advance CTE Executive Director Kate Kreamer discussed how the organization is trying to establish stronger ties between schools and employers, and why the work of doing it can be so difficult.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s different about this vision compared with previous years’?
We’ve seen so many more investments and support in CTE and career-connected learning. So it’s a more crowded space, but [there’s] still a need for some coherence. What is it we can all get behind?
[There’s] a lot of conversation about AI and the rapidly changing economy. Every five years, we say, “Things are moving faster than ever,” and that just keeps getting faster and faster. So there was an urgency in this [vision], given all the uncertainty. Where is it all going? What is work going to look like?
That’s where we landed on this connected theme. We need to be connecting systems better and be more efficient and more intentional about how we’re working together. We also need to be creating better connection points for learners. They may be living in a disconnected world, but CTE can really help connect them.
The other shift was: Employer engagement [in CTE] has always been a conversation. There is a frustration that has emerged—we’re having the same conversation, and something needs to give, something needs to look different. We’re talking about employer engagement differently, really thinking about what a co-designed system looks like. Part of [the vision] is putting a challenge out to education and industry to say, “How can we work differently together going forward, so that it works for everybody—employers and learners equally?”
What major challenges are you addressing with this vision?
We haven’t been able to move the needle on employer engagement. We were having the same conversation about how to engage employers in CTE that we’ve been having for 10, 20, 30, 50, years. So [we’re] trying to think of some new ways, new pushes in that area, [to] create some new relationships.
We’ve always committed to data and having better data, but [we’re now] really pushing for outcomes. A lot of our data in education and the workforce is about inputs—how many did this? How many did that?—and very little on what that outcome is, which requires better connections in education and workforce data.
Lastly, we are making a much stronger case for integrating CTE across all of education. How do we break down the silos between CTE and core academics so that we don’t just have CTE courses reinforcing academics—which they do now—but also have core academics reinforcing real-world impact, bringing the career-readiness skills or durable skills, as well as industry-aligned content to make learning relevant for learners?
There’s a lot that CTE offers that goes beyond the CTE programs—career advising, career exploration, work-based learning. A lot of that is funded and provided through the CTE system. We are limited around resources, but we think every learner wants to benefit from those. How do we really bring these programs to scale to benefit all students across the country?
What can K-12 educators take away from this vision?
When thinking about how do you integrate academics and CTE, there are state levers, but so much of that comes down to the local level, comes down to the school leadership, district leadership, the classroom teachers who want to walk across the hall, talk to the teacher from a different discipline and actually work together.
If you’re [in] CTE, talk to your academic counterparts, compare your lessons, see where there’s opportunities to have some reinforcement. I’ve done work in the past on bringing math and CTE teachers together, and once they recognize the opportunity to strengthen what they’re doing, a light bulb goes on.
Now that this vision is out, what’s next?
We have 40 supporters. We are collecting from all of them: What work do you have that’s already aligned to these principles and these actions? What are resources you need? What technical assistance do you need? So we can map what’s already happening and where those gaps are.
We also will certainly be providing a number of resources and tools for the field. This will inform all of Advanced CTE’s resources, professional development, and technical assistance for the next five years. It informs our federal advocacy.
A big part of this meeting and the months to follow is getting a sense from the field: What do you need to achieve this? We have a sense of what those can be, but we always want to hear [from the field] … and design [resources] based on that feedback from the field.
