Many Americans, including the last wave of Gen Z-ers now entering high schools, want schools to offer more education and training options for young people like career and technical education, or CTE. They broadly agree that the K–12 goal of “college for all” over the last several decades has not served all students well. It should be replaced with “opportunity pluralism,” or the recognition that a college degree is one of many pathways to post-secondary success.

School-based CTE programs (there are also programs for adults) typically prepare middle and high school students for a range of high-wage, high-skill, and high-demand careers. These include fields like advanced manufacturing, health sciences, and information technology which often do not require a two- or four-year college degree. CTE programs award students recognized credentials like industry certifications and licenses. Some programs also provide continuing opportunities for individuals to sequence credentials so that they can pursue associate and bachelor’s degrees if they choose.

CTE Today

The federal role in today’s CTE began in 1917 with the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act. In 2006, what had been called vocational education in the Smith-Hughes Act was rebranded career and technical education in the Carl. D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. Federal funding for CTE in 2023 exceeded $1.462 billion.

Current-day CTE is unlike the vocational education of old that placed students into different tracks based mostly on family background. That sorting process often carried racial, ethnic, and class biases. While middle- and upper-class white students enrolled in academic, college-preparatory classes, immigrants, low-income youth, and students of color typically enrolled in low-level academic and vocational training. As Jeannie Oakes and her colleagues at the RAND Corporation found in their influential 1992 report, “Educational Matchmaking,” educators often characterized vocational programs as dumping grounds for students thought to be incapable of doing academic work.

CTE rejects this biased presorting. It combines academic coursework with technical and career skills for middle and high school students that offer pathways to jobs and further post-secondary education, training, and credentials. The coursework of CTE programs is a structured progression that builds knowledge and skills for good jobs. They immerse young people in education, training, and work by connecting them with local employers through experiences like internships and apprenticeships. These programs often include support services like job placement assistance after graduation. They also build social capital: strong relationships between participants and adult mentors.

Advance CTE has worked with stakeholders to create the National Career Clusters Framework, which organizes academic and technical knowledge and skills into a coherent sequence and pathways. The Framework is being revised but currently has 16 Career Clusters representing 79 Career Pathways. It is used in some form by all U.S. states and territories to organize CTE programs at the state and local levels.

Nearly all public school districts (98 percent) offer CTE programs to high school students, with about three-fourths offering CTE courses that earn dual credit from both high schools and postsecondary institutions. More than eight out of ten (85 percent) high school students earn at least one CTE credit, with technology courses being the most popular. Some 11 percent of high school teachers teach CTE as their primary assignment; almost two-thirds of them (61 percent) have ten or more years of teaching experience.

More than one-third (37 percent) of 9th grade students have a CTE concentration, meaning they are earning two or more credits in at least one CTE program of study. This concentration is associated with higher levels of student engagement, increased graduation rates, and reduced dropout rates. Those with a concentration in CTE also are more likely to be employed full time and have higher median annual earnings eight years after graduation.

The American Public on Pathways to Success

CTE pathways to success align with what the American public, including young people, want from schools. A recent Purpose of Education Index survey reports that of 57 educational priorities among the American public, getting kids ready for college had dropped from its pre-pandemic rank of 10th to the 47th priority today. Other surveys report similar findings: a 2023 Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that 56 percent of Americans do not think a degree is worth the cost, up from 47 percent in 2017 and 40 percent in 2013. Skepticism today is strongest among those 18 to 34 years old and those with college degrees. The Index also reports that Americans’ top priority for students is “developing practical skills” (such as managing personal finances and the ability to do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic), with only one in four (26 percent) thinking schools currently do this.

Gen Z—those born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s—agrees. Around half (51 percent) of Gen Z high schoolers plan to pursue a degree, down more than ten percentage points pre-pandemic and 20 points since shortly after Covid began. Gen Z middle schoolers are even less likely to say they plan to go to college. Moreover, Gen Z high schoolers aspire to continuous learning on the job and throughout life. Two-thirds (65 percent), for example, believe education after high school is necessary and prefer options like online courses, boot camps, internships, and apprenticeships. More than half (53 percent) want formal learning opportunities throughout life. Only a third of these students say their ideal learning occurs simply through coursework.

Gen Z high schoolers have a practical mindset. They want academic knowledge but also want to learn life skills like financial literacy, communication, and problem-solving, which they say are overlooked in classrooms. Nearly eight in ten (78 percent) believe it important to develop these skills before they graduate so they are better prepared to choose career paths. They also have an entrepreneurial spirit—a third want to start their own business.

Pathways in Action  

CTE programs are one way to respond to this opinion shift. These programs can be created from the top down or the bottom up. “Top-down” programs include those created by governors and legislators from both political parties. Delaware Pathways, for example, was started by Democratic Governor Jack Markell, while Tennessee’s Drive to 55 Alliance is an initiative of Republican Governor Bill Haslam. Similar programs exist in states as politically diverse states as California, Colorado, Indiana, and Texas.

“Bottom-up” CTE programs are developed by local stakeholders like K–12 schools, employers, and civic partners. Examples include 3DE Schools in Atlanta; YouthForce NOLA in New Orleans; and Washington, D.C.’s CityWorks D.C. Cristo Rey is an effort comprising 38 Catholic high schools in 24 states. Other organizations like Pathways to Prosperity Network, P-Tech Schools, and Linked Learning Alliance form regional or local partnerships that provide advice and practical assistance to those creating pathways programs.

Successful programs have five features, which I have detailed in another piece for Education Next: (1) an academic curriculum linked with labor-market needs that awards participants an employer-recognized credential; (2) work experience with mentors; (3) advisors to help participants navigate the program; (4) a written civic compact among K–12 schools, employers, and other partners; and (5) policies and regulations that support the program.

Many of these programs award credentials that certify the successful completion of a specific course of instruction. These individual credentials can be sequenced as building blocks or stackable credentials that can be combined over time and lead to an associate or bachelor’s college degree if that is what an individual chooses to do. Credential Engine identifies 1,076,358 unique U.S. credentials in 18 categories delivered through traditional institutions like secondary and post-secondary education but also including other types of non- and for-profit training organizations and Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. U.S. spending on training and education programs by educational institutions, employers, federal grant programs, states, and the military is estimated to be $2.133 trillion.

While credentials are not of equal quality, many do add value and yield significant benefits for those who earn them. Studies by RAND and the Brookings Institution show how individuals (especially low-income students) who stack credentials (particularly in health and business) are more likely to be employed and earn more than those who do not stack credentials. And there are organizations like the American Institutes for Research CTE Research Network that focus on measuring the impact of CTE programs on student outcomes. Other organizations have conducted case studies that examine state CTE programs as varied as those found in Arkansas, Colorado,  Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Texas. Additionally, studies like one conducted by economist Ann Huff Stevens of the University of Texas at Austin analyze CTE programs provided by public institutions like community colleges, for-profit organizations, and safety net or federal employment and training.

A Fordham Institute synthesis of this growing body of research identifies five benefits that come from participating in CTE programs: (1) they are not a path away from college, since students taking these courses are just as likely as peers to attend college; (2) they increase graduation rates; (3) they improve college outcomes, especially for women and disadvantaged students; (4) they boost students’ incomes; and (5) they enhance other skills like perseverance and self-efficacy.

CTE and Career Education

K–12 students often do not receive information from their schools on programs like CTE that offer practical pathways to careers and opportunity. A Morning Consult poll reports that less than half of Gen Z high schoolers say they had enough information to decide the best career or education pathway for them after high school. And two-thirds of high schoolers and graduates say they would have benefited from more career exploration in middle or high school. This gap between what students want and need and what schools provide in career preparation has consequences. Students often struggle in the transition from school to work and receive lower wages when they enter the workforce. It’s high time schools strategically invested in career education.

An effective CTE pathways agenda requires a thorough career education program with a  goal of instilling career aspirations in students and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills, and relationships they need to reach their potential by the end of high school. The international 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has documented program models that integrate a young person’s school life with increasing levels of knowledge and employment options organized by three categories: exposure, exploration, and experience.

• Exposure activities introduce students to jobs and careers. These begin in preschool and include reading books or telling stories about jobs and careers and visits from those who work in different jobs. Exposure also entails age-appropriate, outside-the-school experiences like workplace visits as young people move through school.
• Exploration activities allow students to explore work by engaging them in volunteer work, job shadowing, resume development, and practice job interviews. These activities typically begin in middle school and continue through high school.
• Experience activities include work-based learning where young people engage in sustained and supervised projects and mentorships like internships and apprenticeships. These opportunities are an options multiplier, creating bridges to other opportunities that lead to full-time jobs, more education, or both.

There are other useful frameworks. Colorado’s work-based learning continuum uses an approach for middle and high schools organized by workplace activities: learning about work, learning through work, and learning at work. These approaches help young people develop new knowledge and skills, social and professional networks, and the capacity to navigate pathways that turn ambitions into reality. They can be combined with platforms like YouScience that use artificial intelligence to create assessments that help young people discover personal strengths and aptitudes and match them to potential careers.

Such career education programs have many benefits. OECD examined the link between young people’s participation in career-preparation activities and adult career outcomes in eight countries. They report that there is “evidence that secondary school students who explore, experience and think about their futures in work frequently encounter lower levels of unemployment, receive higher wages and are happier in their careers as adults.” These programs also nurture the technical and material aspects of success and its relational dimensions: social networks for young people, mentoring relationships, and professional networks that help them throughout life.

Consider the United States Youth Development Study, which followed those born in the mid-1970s to age 30. It finds a positive relationship between those who worked part-time at ages 14 and 15 in internships and apprenticeships and those likely to agree at age 30 that they hold a job they want. It seems almost undeniable that greater exposure to the workplace better equips students to prepare for the type of career that suits them.

Career education also deepens young people’s knowledge of the culture of work and fosters their capacity to aspire to, create, and navigate the work pathways that make a reality of their ambitions. It also helps them develop an occupational identity and vocational self, which gives them a better sense of their values and abilities. On a practical level, CTE creates faster and cheaper pathways to jobs and careers. Finally, career education fosters local civic engagement from employers and other community partners by cultivating the connections and bonds essential to innovation, economic dynamism, and a flourishing local civil society.

A Governing Agenda

K–12 education debates are often cast as a culture war between left and right, a story that divides Americans based on what we expect from schools. This story is mostly wrong and creates a false either-or narrative. In contrast, “opportunity pluralism” offers a both-and narrative, where CTE and other career pathways programs are discussed in the same breath as college preparation.

But broad agreement does not imply implementation uniformity. The give-and-take of negotiating legislation and regulatory proposals will produce diverse programs and priorities, or implementation pluralism. That’s all for the better as we test new approaches and tailor them to community needs and use states and local communities as “laboratories of democracy.”

Opportunity pluralism can provide policymakers across the political spectrum with a commonsense governing agenda that reorients the goals of K–12 public education. It’s a program led by civic pluralists who seek to nurture civil society by building different career pathways programs for young people. Taken together, it suggests a sea change in education—one that has the potential to allow students to flourish and reach their potential at the same time as we ease our seemingly intractable political divides.

Bruno V. Manno is senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former U.S. Assistance Secretary of Education for Policy.

As Maine voters decide to either re-elect Governor Janet Mills or replace her with Paul LePage, who served from 2011 to 2019, education policy is a key issue.

The first television ad in the race, from the Maine Republican Party, criticized Mills, a Democrat, for spending “nearly $2.8 million” on “radical school lessons” to teach kindergarteners about being transgender. “Is this really what our kids should be learning in kindergarten instead of math, science, and reading?” the ad asked.

Curriculum content is just one of the issues attracting voter attention. The candidates have also clashed over student test scores, and both have stressed the need to focus on career and technical education. Mills has emphasized her role in increasing state funding for public schools.

A Pan-Atlantic Research poll of voting-age Mainers conducted during October 2022 asked what were the top three most important issues facing the State of Maine. Nearly a quarter of respondents named “education/schools” as one of the top three, with only “cost of living” and “inflation” rating higher.

This emphasis on education in Maine is reflective of nationwide trends this election cycle. Although economic concerns have largely taken center stage, education has quietly remained a top priority. According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted during August 2022, approximately 58% of registered voters expressed that education-related issues were to be a “very important” factor in deciding their Congressional votes this election cycle. That ranked higher than abortion, immigration, or climate change.

And in terms of governors races, the contest in Virginia in 2021 gained national attention for the way in which it placed education front and center (See “How “Mama Bears” Won a Court Victory—and Helped Elect a Governor—in Virginia,” features, Fall 2022). Following Youngkin’s electoral victory, it was forecast that “every Republican in the country is going to run on education in 2022 because of what happened in Virginia tonight.” It seems as though there may have been some truth to that prediction, particularly in the State of Maine.

Comparing the Candidates’ Approaches

While education policy has found a place in both Mills’ and LePage’s campaigns, the candidates have mostly emphasized different issues. Mills has placed at the heart of her education platform the fact that her administration fully funded public education to the statutorily-obligated 55% of the total cost. The Maine Education Association, a teachers union, endorsed Mills, accusing LePage of having “consistently shortchanged funding for schools.” Mills further highlights how she enacted “a budget that puts Maine on track for universal pre-K to two years of free community college to pandemic-impacted students.” Her education platform also speaks to investing in career and technical education in response to workforce shortages and mentions that she enacted a minimum teacher salary of $40,000.

LePage’s education platform is centered on a “Parents Bill of Rights,” consisting of policies focused on transparency, parental engagement, and school choice. Also stressed is the need to expand access to career and technical education, specifically by identifying “students who have the ability to work with their hands earlier” and introducing vocational opportunities as early as middle school. His platform also includes policies that would prioritize “education dollars to provide for after-care programs, in our schools, until 5:00 PM” and “provide teachers stipends to incentivize them to participate in formal tutoring programs, after-school, to aid children who fell behind during the pandemic.”

The candidates differ not just in terms of specific proposals, but in terms of tone and focus. The only noticeable point of overlap concerns career and technical education, although even then the candidates each work to stake claim to the issue in unique ways. LePage frames his platform with reference to parents and students, while Mills takes a more institutional approach, focusing on teachers and funding.

“Parents Bill of Rights”

LePage’s “Parents Bill of Rights” has garnered a great deal of attention since its announcement in late September of this year, perhaps because its overarching philosophy is reminiscent of the conversation happening nationally surrounding curriculum and parental involvement. Mills has repeatedly criticized this slate of proposals during debates on the grounds that they would violate Maine’s tradition of local control over curriculum decisions. It’s unclear how effective that criticism will be, though, because none of the policies put forth in LePage’s “Parents Bill of Rights” actually would increase state control over curricular content.

A professor of political science at the University of Maine, Robert Glover, said he viewed LePage’s “Parents Bill of Rights” as an attempt to “capitalize on people’s passionate sentiments that something is going fundamentally wrong in their local schools.” Glover also noted that, “the reason that this has filtered up…in the state and around the country is because there is this sense, for some folks, that the curriculum is out of control and parents need to exert more control over those decisions…and that the state needs to step up.”

The State House correspondent for Maine Public Radio, Kevin Miller, said LePage’s “Parents Bill of Rights” is perhaps, to some extent, the result of replicating a national phenomenon. “Glenn Youngkin in Virginia got a lot of attention for campaigning on these issues, and it seemed to be a successful strategy there,” he said.

Miller also said the state’s tradition of local control could mean that curricular concerns could resonate less in Maine than they would elsewhere. Therefore, it makes sense that LePage’s “Parents Bill of Rights” appears to address the same fundamental concerns that have been raised in other states in a way that preserves the autonomy of local school boards. According to Miller, “LePage basically said that he’s not looking to put in place any state policies…and is still saying it’s a local issue….his administration would make sure schools are more transparent about what’s being taught and would give parents more information so they can figure out what’s going on in their children’s schools.” With this approach, LePage has been able to offer parents who may be worried about the content their children are being exposed to a solution that would empower them without implying that he, as governor, would railroad local school boards.

School Choice

Although school choice has not featured prominently in either campaign’s messaging this election season, it has been present in the background. In LePage’s case, he included as the final tenet of his Parents Bill of Rights that “the money should follow the student,” specifically advocating that “parents should be able to decide whether a public school, private school, charter school, or parochial school best fits their students’ needs.” Despite its inclusion in his signature slate of policies, LePage seems to have spoken little about his position regarding school choice on the campaign trail. The practice in the state of paying for private or public schooling in districts that don’t operate their own public schools, known as town tuitioning was the subject of a 2022 Supreme Court decision, Carson v. Makin.

As far as Mills is concerned, the issue of school choice has essentially been absent. That said, language often used by advocates for educational freedom has appeared in her education platform. The platform states that “she believes that all children deserve equal access to the same opportunity to attend quality schools, regardless of where they live in Maine.” Mills has also repeated this phrasing during gubernatorial debates. Her solution to the problem of unequal educational opportunities is funding rather than choice, and she frequently mentions achieving the 55% threshold for public school funding.

Career and Technical Education

Although Mills and LePage both stress the importance of expanding access to career and technical education in Maine, they approach the problem in slightly different ways, each attempting to claim the issue as their own. Mills’ campaign website asserts that: “Janet knows that our Career and Technical Education Centers (CTE) are an invaluable resource in solving Maine’s workforce challenges.”

Similarly, LePage states on his campaign website that: “Introducing vocational and technical education to students in high school is TOO LATE. We must introduce vocational and technical education to children in middle school. We need to identify students who have the ability to work with their hands earlier, and provide them with good-paying career opportunities they can pursue into high school.”

The inherent connection between the focus on career and technical education and workforce shortages was made apparent during the gubernatorial debates. When asked how he would address workforce shortages should he be elected, LePage incorporated his stance on career and technical education into his set of proposed solutions.

Maine’s governor in 2023—whether LePage or Mills—will have to address the state’s longstanding education issues along with the newer challenges of pandemic learning recovery and intense conflicts over curriculum. The fact that these issues were so salient in the election campaign will mean that whichever politician emerges as the victor will have some claim to a mandate in moving to improve the state’s schools along the lines proposed in the campaign.

Libby Palanza, a Maine native, is an undergraduate at Harvard College studying government.

Several weeks ago, I asked whether America’s present strategy for serving our lowest performing high school students is really the best we can do. This wasn’t a rhetorical question; possibly the answer is yes. That strategy is to try much harder than in years past to keep such students from dropping out, while also allowing them to earn course credit through online credit recovery if they fail to pass their classes the traditional way. It’s a combination of doing more to encourage and support struggling students (hooray!) while also—let’s be honest—lowering the bar for what it takes to graduate (boo!).

The last half of that equation is regrettable. But it’s almost surely the case that most students are better off staying in school than dropping out, even if it means deflating the diploma’s value along the way—especially if dropping out means turning kids into “disconnected youth” with no involvement in the education system or the labor market. That generally leads to nothing good. So maybe we should simply celebrate the fact that our high school graduation rate was at an all-time high before the pandemic struck, and redouble our efforts on every strategy that was working to make it so.

But allow me to make the case for trying something very different for high school-age Americans who struggle mightily with academics—say, those in the bottom 10 percent of the national distribution—one that might provide a much better experience for them during their adolescent years and lead to better long-term outcomes. Put simply: Let these young people take jobs while still in high school—during the school day, during both their junior and senior years, full pay included, no strings attached—akin to Jobcorps or Jobstart, but before kids drop out.

I’m not talking about fancy apprenticeships or internships. That’s the European model, and it’s a great option for kids with relatively high levels of academic skills, generally leading to further education in technical institutes or community colleges and to bona fide certifications in well-paying careers. No, here I’m talking about teenagers who have been failed by the system, haven’t learned much in elementary or middle school, and are struggling in high school, too. And I’m talking about $10–$15-an-hour jobs, the kind that these students, for better or worse, have a realistic chance of attaining, in industries like food service, hospitality, caregiving, or construction. Let them get started on these jobs as soon as they turn sixteen, but under the guidance of a school-provided career coach/mentor/therapist, and with the hope that they build valuable real-world skills that will quickly lead to greater pay and more opportunities.

In effect, this is a compromise between dropping out and staying in school. It allows these teenagers to move forward into the world of work, while still remaining connected to the school system in a real way.

I know this idea will strike some as fatalistic and defeatist, if not classist or racist. It amounts to giving up on young people, they will say. I respectfully disagree. In my mind, it means freeing some young people from a prison of our own creation, from “credit recovery jail” that boosts schools’ graduation rates without doing much good for the kids stuck inside.

The time we make these kids spend in bogus academics carries real opportunity costs. Because, in today’s system, what we don’t spend time doing is actually preparing young adults to succeed on the day after high school graduation. We don’t help them find a job that is a good fit with their strengths and interests—a job that is actually available where they live or want to move. Once these kids are in the real world, they must try to figure out how to show up on time every day, manage through workplace challenges, deal with a difficult boss, figure out how to ask for a raise, and decide whether they should look elsewhere for better opportunities. But by then we’ve kicked them out of the school system. They are on their own in the jungle.

And many don’t survive. As AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt has chronicled so effectively, the number of men, in particular, who are neither in school nor working has skyrocketed in recent years. The labor force participation rate for never-married American-born men who dropped out of high school now hovers around 50 percent.

The kind of “job study” program I have in mind would be appropriate only for a limited population, to be sure. It would be nuts to encourage most students to take this path, students who are great, good, or even just decent at school, and have the academic skills to succeed in high-quality college prep or career and technical education programs. For them, more formal education is well worth the time and effort.

Yet however much we wish it weren’t so, millions of teenagers in America do not fit this description. After suffering from years of low expectations in K–8, they entered high school three or four grade levels behind in reading, writing, and math, struggle to pass classes, and generally hate school and everything about it. It is these students who might relish, and benefit from, a ticket out.

I won’t sugarcoat it: The career prospects for such students in a knowledge economy are not great. High-tech sectors are out of bounds for them. Most professional settings will be a reach. Yet the American economy continues to create millions of job opportunities for people with limited academic skills. They don’t pay great. Though thanks to a hot labor market and rising minimum wages in many states and localities, they pay better than they used to. Our (more generous than most people think) social safety net further boosts the value of such jobs. And as low-wage workers gain on-the-job skills, they typically see their wages grow. Orderlies can become nursing assistants, and upward and onward from there. Dishwashers can move onto food preparation, eventually line cooking, and so forth. These aren’t easy paths, but they sure beat poverty or prison.

So the right question to ask, in my opinion, is how to help our lowest-performing students successfully make the transition into the world of work and get launched in a way that will help them make their way in the adult world.

Why not start the process while still under the tough-love care of high school educators? Isn’t that at least worth trying?

Imagine if we spent the $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 that we currently plow into their education every junior and senior year, and invest that instead in adults, working for the school system, whose job it is to help these students successfully transition into the workplace. We might even subsidize local employers for taking on the students as workers or for supplementing their pay. The students would spend most of their week at work—say, thirty hours or so—and would also meet a few times a week one on one and in small groups with their mentor/counselor/career coach. If they want to participate in school sports and extracurricular activities, that could be worked into their schedules. Think of summer jobs programs, but during the school year instead.

No doubt, we would need to work out a ton of programmatic details. Which students should be eligible to participate? Should we start with a pilot? Should we give these students a standard diploma, a GED, or something else?

By embracing such an approach, we wouldn’t be giving up on kids’ college dreams. College was never in the cards for high school students who are reading, writing, and doing math at the 10th percentile. The real question is whether a job is a better alternative for these junior and seniors than simply dropping out or painfully trying to follow the “credit recovery track” so many are on today. It’s a question worth answering.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Recently, I wrote about the vast distance between our rhetoric and reality on career and technical education. Despite our oft-voiced enthusiasm for “multiple pathways,” we force almost all high school students through what’s essentially a college-prep track. Instead, I argued, we should reserve that route for students “who like school and are good at it,” and let kids with other strengths focus on career preparation. Yet in virtually every state, numerous and exacting academic course requirements (four years of English, three years of math, etc.) make it virtually impossible for high school students to spend much time doing real work-based training.

As expected, I was attacked for calling for a return to 1950’s-style tracking. To my surprise, however, even my colleague and mentor Checker Finn criticized me on those grounds! In last week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, he charged me with taking a “Back to the Future” approach.

And you know what? I’m guilty as charged, at least on some counts.

No, I don’t want to go back to the old way, whereby The System decided who could take college-prep courses, and who should “work with their hands.”

And hell no, I don’t want The System making those decisions based on the color of students’ skin or their zip code.

But do I think there should be tracking in American high schools? Yes. More to the point, tracking in our high schools is simply a fact and we would do well to stop pretending otherwise or believing that it could be any other way. At the very least, we should allow for diverging paths after the tenth grade. We also need to completely rethink our approach for our lowest-performing kids.

Consider this: According to the latest (pre-pandemic) data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap between the 10th and 90th percentiles of public school students in eighth grade reading was 96 points (on a 0–500 scale). In rough numbers, that equates to six grade levels. Math is even worse, at 101 points. So some kids enter high school at a fifth-grade level, others at an eleventh-grade level. Does anyone think we can effectively teach students with such extreme degrees of academic preparation (or lack thereof) in the same classroom and serve them well? Or that we can’t predict which group is likely heading for success in college and which is going to need to get a job after high school, whether immediately or when they flame out of college?

So, yes, high schools track students. It’s a practice, by the way, that a recent American Compass survey found is overwhelmingly popular with parents of all socioeconomic groups—which helps explains the fierce political reaction when policymakers go on the warpath against the advanced track, as we saw recently in Virginia.

* * *

In the 50s-era “James Bryant Conant High School,” as Checker called it, there were four tracks: “It had Honors, for those who thought they might want to go to Duke or Wellesley,” Checker explained. “It had College Prep for those who wanted to go to the state school nearby. It had Voc-Ed for those who were heading for a trade. And then it had something called the General Track…and frankly [those students] weren’t prepared for anything when they came out of high school.” (Of course, back then, many of the General Track students never made it to high school graduation, since they dropped out long before, and often found an acceptable job anyway.)

All these years later, after decades of “de-tracking” policies and the like, we’ve really just collapsed those four tracks into three:

• The Honors Track. This one remains, largely untouched, though in many high schools it now features a heavy load of AP and IB course-taking, and happily serves a larger number of students. That’s because of reforms to encourage more schools to create AP programs, efforts to reduce the gatekeeping to those courses, and the growth of the American upper-middle class, which is who’s most obsessed with getting their kids into (and able to afford) selective and highly selective colleges, even those far from home. High school course requirements are generally not a problem for the students in this track because they would take four years of most academic courses anyway. Let’s estimate that this track now serves about 20 percent of all students.
• The College and Career Ready Track. Here’s where the big change has happened. In essence, we’ve tried to collapse the old College Prep track and the old Voc-Ed track into one. And in some respects that’s for good reason, since we’ve learned that the technical jobs of today generally require at least some postsecondary education, and that means getting students to a relatively high level of preparation in reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as various social and emotional skills that are valued in the modern workplace. As I wrote two weeks ago, though, we’ve loaded up students’ schedules with so many academic course requirements that we’ve squeezed out most of the time that could be spent doing technical training. So the students in this track really do mostly college prep, sometimes including a handful of AP, IB, or dual-enrollment courses, while perhaps also taking a few CTE courses as electives. This track serves the mass of students—probably about half—generally those from the 30th to the 80th percentile of achievement nationally.
• The Credit Recovery Track. Of course we don’t call it that, but we should. Students in this track are often enrolled in “on level” courses, but that’s a ruse. These are the kids entering high school with very low levels of academic preparation, who struggle through their academic course requirements, racking up a lot of failure along the way. Unlike the old General Track, most of these students stay in school—a success of sorts, and the result of state policies that hold schools and districts accountable for boosting graduation rates. But since many of these students were so ill-prepared to start with, we’ve had to invent workarounds, especially credit recovery programs of dubious value (except perhaps to the for-profit companies reaping juicy financial rewards, and administrators who used it to boost their graduation numbers), plus grading “reforms” that make it easier for students to earn passing grades. None of which helps these students, and it probably devalues the high school diploma to boot. I’d estimate that 30 percent of American high schoolers are in this track; that’s about the number that NAEP deems to be “below basic” in math (32 percent) and reading (28 percent) coming out of the eighth grade.

To be sure, today’s system is in some ways an improvement over yesterday’s. Collapsing the College Prep and Voc-Ed tracks means that more students are pushed toward high-level work, surely a good thing. Dual enrollment, at least when properly done, seems to show particular promise in getting more kids onto a pathway toward college. Efforts to help kids earn technical credentials while still in high school are also encouraging.

But there are trade-offs, too. It means we don’t give students the time to do bona fide career training while still in high school, the kind we see in Austria and Germany, where their equivalent of juniors and seniors might spend virtually all day in apprenticeships or technical courses. Are we so sure that career-minded students are better off spending their time taking Spanish, Fine Arts, and English IV than, say, interning at a hospital center or first-rate restaurant kitchen or electronics plant? A better approach is the one embraced by Maryland’s Kirwan commission, whereby students who demonstrate mastery of key college and career ready skills at the end of the tenth grade are allowed to proceed to either true college prep or real career training. That would split the College and Career Ready track into two again—but after tenth grade.

My biggest concern, though, is with what I’m calling the Credit Recovery track. Yes, it’s good that most of these kids aren’t dropping out. They are safe and warm and fed and cared for in high school, and are off the streets. That’s no small thing. But I wonder whether the approach we’ve backed into is the best we can do—which is to have students experience a lot of failure, then make them click through a bunch of boring computer-based make-up programs, and finally hand them a diploma they can hardly read, with no plan or training for what happens the day after graduation.

I’ll explore other options in a future post.

What’s undeniable is that we continue to track kids, and until and unless we send many more kids into high school at much higher levels of achievement, we’re going to continue to track kids until the end of time, whether or not we admit that that’s what we’re doing. The only real question is what the tracks look like, and where they head. The sooner we’re honest about that, the better.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

One of the biggest shifts in education reform in recent years has been widening acknowledgment that the “college for all” mantra was misguided. Almost everyone now admits that college, as traditionally defined, is not going to be for everyone, and that career and technical programs and trade schools can provide sturdy on-ramps to the middle class.

Yet so far our commitment to “multiple pathways” to opportunity is almost all talk accompanied by very little action. Those of us in and around K–12 education continue to behave as if virtually every student is expected to go off to a four-year university. That’s especially the case when it comes to:

• High school course requirements. These policies may have more on-the-ground traction than any others in education, yet they get almost no attention. They should because they remain stuck in the college-for-all mindset. According to the Education Commission of the States (ECS), of the forty-seven jurisdictions that set these requirements at the state level, forty-six require four years of English, forty-two require three years of math, forty require three years of social studies, and thirty-six require three years of science. Not to mention requirements for health, physical education, and fine arts. How are students supposed to take career and technical programs, do on-the-job training, or tackle apprenticeships when their schedules are already full of mandatory academic courses?

• High school course-taking. Not surprisingly, given states’ graduation requirements, students’ course loads remain overwhelmingly academic—even more so than in the past. According to the latest Digest of Education Statistics, public high school graduates in the class of 2009 earned, on average, 4.4 Carnegie units of English, 4.2 units of social studies or history, 3.9 units of math, 3.5 units of science, 2.2 units of foreign language, and 2.1 units of art. Compare that to 3.9, 3.2, 2.7, 2.2, 1.0, and 1.5, respectively, for the high school graduating class of 1980. Meanwhile, just since 2000 (when statisticians started collecting the data), the number of career and technical education credits obtained by the average public high school graduate declined from 2.9 to 2.5. So the class of 2009 earned more than eight academic credits for every one credit of CTE. That says to me that virtually all students are in fact in a college-prep program, maybe with a little CTE on the side.

 

Table 1. Average number of academic Carnegie units earned by the graduating classes of 1980 and 2009 (Source: Digest of Education Statistics)

Class year	English	Social studies	Math	Science	Foreign language	Art	Total
1980	3.9	3.2	2.7	2.2	1.0	1.5	14.5
2009	4.4	4.2	3.9	3.5	2.2	2.1	20.3

• High school testing and accountability systems. According to another analysis by ECS, “about” twenty-two states use a college entrance exam as their high school accountability test (either the ACT, SAT, or PSAT)—exams that are of little use to students heading into the trades. State accountability metrics tend to focus heavily on high school graduation rates—themselves tied to those academically-oriented course requirements—as well as college-and-career-ready indicators that strongly emphasize student success in various forms of post-secondary education rather than the labor market. In many states, for example, high schools get credit for sending their students on to college, but no credit for helping graduates earn a living wage.

These policies reflect the reality that our education system—and education reformers—remain uncomfortable with separate high school tracks for students with different goals, skill sets, and academic backgrounds. Thus we promote college and career instead of college or career.

We do so for understandable reasons. We remember the old vo-tech system, which was rightly criticized as racist, classist, and sexist. Too often, school systems in the bad old days selected students to “work with their hands” based on their skin color or zip code, rather than a sophisticated assessment of their strengths, proclivities, and goals. We want college prep to be the default, lest academically promising students from the wrong side of the tracks fail to enroll in the right classes and fulfill their potential. Plus, we Americans love the idea of second (and third, and fourth) chances, never wanting to “give up” on people if we think they have a chance to “make it.”

But that thinking still reflects a college bias, perhaps hard-wired into educators and reformers who themselves graduated from four-year colleges. It assumes that college is better than the trades, or middle-skill jobs, or plain old work experience—and that kids should only “settle” for these options after giving college the, well, old college try. That’s one reason we see so many people bemoaning the fact that college-going has plummeted during the pandemic.

If we really believe that Americans without college degrees are just as valuable to our society, democracy, and economy; just as worthy of dignity; and just as worthy of respect as us over-credentialed professionals, then we should stop telling our young people that college is the only goal worth shooting for. We should be willing to be more honest, to say that college is a great option for people who like school and are good at it. That group is probably about 40 percent of high school graduates, give or take, judging by college-readiness and college-graduation rates of late. And in light of the pandemic and massive learning loss, we’ll be lucky if that number doesn’t decline, at least in the short term.

 

Figure 1. College readiness rate versus college completion rate, by high school graduating class, 1992–2012

Note: In reading, the National Assessment Government Board estimates that “college-prepared” is equivalent to “NAEP-proficient.” So these numbers are the percentage of all twelfth-grade students who were proficient in reading in the years shown. Bachelor’s degree completion numbers come from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics, Table 104.20: “Percentage of persons twenty-five to twenty-nine years old with selected levels of educational attainment, by race/ethnicity and sex: Selected years, 1920 through 2020.”

 

For people who aren’t academic superstars but have other strengths and interests, a trade or the like might be a better fit. Individuals only benefit from the “college wage premium” if they actually complete college, and that is unlikely for people who leave high school without college-ready skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. And as recent studies have shown, more education doesn’t always equate to more earnings.

Yet today, thanks to state high school graduation requirements and school accountability systems, we only give kids time to take a few CTE courses as electives. Instead, we should embrace models from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, where many sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds spend most, if not all, of their time in apprenticeships, at workplaces, while finishing coursework that purposefully connects academics to technical skills. We might, in other words, allow students to choose to finish their core academic courses after their sophomore year, and spend junior and senior years getting ready for the real world, as Maryland’s Kirwan Commission recommended. And if we stop fetishizing college degrees, we might even help to stem the populist backlash against meritocracy that is shaking our society and our politics.

We talk a good game on career and technical education and the “dignity of work.” It’s time for us to walk the walk, too.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Faith in the idea that a four year college degree is the key pathway to social and economic mobility and a prosperous life produces what the political philosopher Michael Sandel calls the credentialist prejudice. The result is a degree that becomes, in Sandel’s words, “a precondition for dignified work and social esteem…fueling prejudice against less educated members of society.” The K-12 mantra for this is “college for all.”

This view exists despite two facts. First, nearly two thirds (65 percent) of the U.S. labor force doesn’t have a college degree. Second, there are many good middle-skill jobs for individuals with a high school education who don’t have a college degree.

There’s a promising movement underway to replace the “bachelor’s degree for all” mentality with a broader approach to understanding opportunity. While not abandoning the degree pathway, the new opportunity agenda creates more specialized skills-based pathways and credentials linked with labor market demand. This approach makes the nation’s opportunity infrastructure more pluralistic by offering many publicly recognized and credentialed pathways to success. That’s good for the students who benefit from these programs and also for society, which can make better use of talents that might otherwise be overlooked.

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic may help accelerate the transition away from the credentialist prejudice and toward opportunity pluralism.

The Receding Credentialist Prejudice

The credentialist prejudice manifests itself in different ways.

Four-year degrees are now required for jobs that once did not demand them. A Harvard Business School study documents the pervasiveness of this “degree inflation.” For example, while only 16 percent of existing production supervisors in 2015 had college degrees, two thirds (67 percent) of job postings for supervisors include degree requirements. Actual skill requirements haven’t changed, but the credential threshold for being hired has increased. Another analysis of degree inflation showed that while only 19 percent of administrative assistants have a university degree, about 65 percent of job postings ask for one. Given the significant racial gaps in college attainment, degree inflation is especially pernicious in the negative impact it has on hiring racial minorities.

Another manifestation of credentialist prejudice is the common assumption that low-wage workers without degrees are low skilled. A study whose lead author was Harvard economist Peter Q. Blair found 16 million U.S. workers with only a high school diploma had skills for high-wage work (defined as more than twice the national median wage). Eleven million of them were employed in low- or middle-wage work. Employers are missing out on talented workers.

A college degree has become what Burning Glass Technologies CEO Matt Sigelman calls a proxy that assures employers—rightly or wrongly—that the learner has successfully completed “a major exercise in deferred gratification.”

There are indications that Covid-19 is weakening the link between college and high-wage jobs. Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-market analytics firm, calculates that since the pandemic began, entry-level hiring for college grads decreased 45 percent. The pandemic also has produced soaring unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds. At 11 percent in April 2021, it’s higher than it was in any month in 2017, 2018, or 2019. A survey of college graduates by human resources firm Monster found almost half (45 percent) of spring 2020 grads still looking for work.

As a Wall Street Journal article put it in a message to the class of 2021, “The good news: You’re entering one of the hottest job markets on record…as the economy pulls out of its pandemic lockdown. The bad news: The competition is ferocious. Many…who graduated last year are still trying to find their first big break.”

Finally, there’s also support from the American public as well as parents and young people for rethinking the connection between K-12, careers, and degrees.

A Strada Education Network-Gallup survey shows seven in 10 Americans believe employers should hire job candidates with the required skills and work experience, even without a college degree. Less than half say employers in their field do so.

A Carnegie Corporation-Gallup nationally representative survey of nearly 3,000 parents of 11-to-24-year-olds found nearly half (46 percent) want more post-high-school pathways other than four-year college. As parents learn more about these programs, they are more favorably disposed.

An FIL Inc. nationally representative survey of parents amid the pandemic found two of three call for rethinking “how we educate students, coming up with new ways to teach….” Eighty-two percent favor “work-based learning programs or apprenticeships” and 80 percent support “more vocational classes in high schools.”

More than half (52 percent) of Generation Z high schoolers now say they can achieve professional success with three years or less of post-high-school education, with only one in four saying a four-year degree is the only route to a good job.

A New Opportunity Program

How to replace the receding credentialist prejudice with opportunity pluralism? The essential elements of a new program are what students know—knowledge—and whom they know—relationships. The goal: ensure every American—especially those in K-12 schools—regardless of background or current condition, has multiple pathways to acquiring the knowledge and networks they need for jobs and careers preparing them to access opportunity and a flourishing life.

In short, Knowledge + Networks = Opportunity

Five features should guide pathways program design, creating a pathways success infrastructure.

Academic and Technical Skills and Credentials. Successful programs teach academic and technical skills that are aligned with labor market needs, supplying graduates that meet employer demands. There’s a timeline for program completion. When participants do complete the program, they receive a recognized credential, tied to a good job.

Work and Careers. Exposure to work and careers begins early in school through guest speakers and includes exploring job options through field trips. High school includes career experience via work placement and mentorships, integrated into classroom instruction. Exposure, exploration, and experience connect students with adults. That is especially important for students in high-poverty communities.

Advising. A well-functioning advising system prevents forced tracking into jobs based on race, ethnicity, gender, or social class. This ensures students make informed choices; barriers like financial assistance are addressed; and data are used to keep students progressing through the program. This fosters agency. With good advising, students eventually become knowledgeable enough to make their own choices about the correct pathway.

Authentic Partnerships. Employers, industry groups, and other institutions must collaborate for programs to succeed. Written agreements can help to define who is responsible for what and to formalize a management and governance structure—a civic partnership—between partners.

Supporting Policies. Local, state, and federal policies create frameworks and funding streams for program development.

Opportunity Pluralism

Not holding a college degree should not be a barrier to career pathways that lead to social and economic mobility and a prosperous life. The credentialist prejudice needs to give way to a broader array of opportunities. University of Texas law professor Joseph Fishkin writes on how opportunities are structured and accessed by individuals, including how the job credentialing process contains bottlenecks that constrain opportunity. He argues for opportunity pluralism, or offering individuals multiple education, training, and credentialing pathways to work and career, including the four-year college degree. Instead of struggling to equalize opportunity on a single pathway, the range of opportunities for individuals should be broadened and deepened, making the nation’s opportunity infrastructure more pluralistic, valuing both educational and employment outcomes.

An opportunity program is not about discouraging young people from pursing a two-year or four-year degree. Rather, it positions those options among many other possible valued credentials that recognize that knowledge, networked experience, and skills lead to good jobs and a fulfilled life. This same principle—that a wider array of options is better for both students and society—supports the idea of more colleges separating, or “unbundling,” the four-year degree into multiple certificates or credentials. These building blocks, or stackable credentials, would be acquired while working and learning through a career progression toward what we typically call an associate’s or bachelor’s degrees. David Osborne of reinventing government fame has proposed individual “career opportunity accounts” as a way to pay for this approach to education and training. It would combine federal and state dollars, potentially including individual contributions somewhat like individual retirement accounts.

These pathways programs that help young people acquire knowledge, networks, skills and experience also help them develop an occupational identity and vocational self. This includes a broader sense of who they are as adults. Such programs also provide faster and cheaper pathways to jobs and careers than traditional postsecondary education. Finally, they place students on a trajectory to economic and social well-being, informed citizenship, and civic responsibility, laying a foundation for adult success and a lifetime of opportunity.

Bruno V. Manno is Senior Advisor to the Walton Family Foundation’s K-12 Program.