More than 7 million high school and middle school students in Career and Technical Education programs—and their 140,000 teachers—are celebrating Career Technology Education Month in February. In this blog, Catherine Jacques describes the importance of these teachers, based on her recent research.
In this blog post, Mark Schneider uses data to show that despite the recent push for expanded opportunities for apprenticeships, we need to remember that not all apprenticeships lead to equal outcomes.
Forty years ago, President Gerald Ford signed the Education of All Handicapped Children’s Act, now known as IDEA: the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Three waves of legislative reform since then have continued to strengthen access and emphasize academic success for all students. In this blog post, AIR expert Louis ...
At 21, many foster youth “age out” of financial benefits and supports from the child welfare system—before they even finish college. Given the challenges they face, it’s not surprising that only 3 to 10 percent of them earn undergraduate degrees compared with 34 percent of young adults who weren’t in ...
Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."
In this blog post, Mark Schneider discusses the disconnect between what students and faculty expect from a college education, and how to reconcile those differences.
The old either/or model of college-prep or vocational education is out of sync with the needs of 21st-century America. Career pathways offer a way out of this bind. They help high school students gain secondary and postsecondary education, training, and support services while they acquire marketable skills, industry-recognized credentials, and ...
The Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, launched in 2011, offers a rich opportunity to study how a large-scale tuition-voucher program works and to analyze the results it has produced in its first few years. This article describes the results of a four-year study of the Indiana program.
Career and Technical Education (CTE) advocates are still eagerly awaiting reauthorization of the Perkins Act. While we wait, two important events could change the face of CTE across the country: 1) the passage of ESSA and 2) a new vision for CTE released by Advance CTE. In this blog post, ...
Where can a math or English or history teacher go to discover ways to integrate and assess college and career readiness standards and skills in their classes? In this blog post, AIR's Catherine Jacques suggests working with career and technical education teachers, who have used this kind of instruction for ...