While many of the high school career and technical education (CTE) programs of today have evolved since the vocational education “wood shop” classes of the 1970s, some students and their parents remain skeptical of work-oriented education. Some families and schools are hesitant to enroll high school students of color in CTE programs, remembering the history in which those students were often tracked into vocational programs that steered them away from college and into jobs that offered few or no opportunities for advancement.

However, many of today’s high-quality CTE programs are proven by research to improve high school graduation rates and subsequent labor market earnings. Some CTE programs also prepare students for both careers and college.

To learn more about how program designers, educators, and other stakeholders can learn from the vocational education programs of the past to build equitable CTE programs today, MDRC’s Center for Effective CTE spoke with Dr. Eddie Fletcher, an associate professor in workforce development and education at The Ohio State University. Dr. Fletcher started his career as a high school CTE teacher in business and marketing. Today, he studies high school career academies—“schools within schools” that aim to restructure large high schools into small learning communities and create better pathways from high school to further education and the workplace. Dr. Fletcher focuses particularly on the role of career academies for ethnically and racially diverse students and students whose families have low incomes.

Read the full article about CTE programs and vocational schools by Erika B. Lewy at MDRC.