February 10, 2026 | By Miya Warner, Charles Harding, and Lauren Cassidy

February is National Career and Technical Education (CTE) Month, a public awareness campaign to celebrate the accomplishments of CTE programs and emphasize the importance of CTE for all students.

Join us as we reflect on the importance and history of CTE in the United States and celebrate CTE programs that we’ve partnered with over the past year.

Why is CTE important?

CTE builds high school students’ career awareness and experience and equips them with the knowledge, skills, and tools to successfully navigate the complex landscape of college and career options. If students set clear and realistic career goals in high school, they may be more likely to make informed choices about the postsecondary education or training they need to realize those goals. Indeed, a recent evidence review found that participating in high school CTE programs can have positive impacts on a diverse range of student outcomes, including students’ academic achievement, high school completion, employability skills, college readiness, 2-year college enrollment, and employment after high school.¹

In addition to these promising student outcomes, CTE deserves attention because of the sheer number of students it currently serves. Over 98% of public school districts report offering CTE programs, and 85% of high school graduates have taken at least one CTE course.² Moreover, state interest in CTE continues to grow, with forty-two states enacting 152 policies aimed at boosting CTE in 2024—the highest number recorded since 2019.³

How has U.S. policy addressed CTE?

Federal policy on CTE has shifted in focus and rigor since its inception. Beginning narrowly as vocational education in 1917, it was intended to train students, most often lower-income and minority students, in agriculture, home economics, and trades that did not require a postsecondary degree, and these students took few academic courses.⁴ Over time, it expanded to include more industries and students at postsecondary institutions, but less-than-rigorous curricula and low expectations for students persisted.

Educators and policymakers recognized the urgent need for change with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, which argued that U.S. schools were failing to prepare an economically competitive workforce. The following year, lawmakers passed the first iteration of the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act (Perkins), which laid the foundation for strengthening vocational education in the states. The fourth update in 2006 (Perkins IV) coined the term “career and technical education” to replace vocational education.

Under Perkins IV, CTE courses were intended to be more rigorous and integrate both vocational and academic skills to prepare high school students for both work and postsecondary education. This shift was partly a reaction to the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), which called into question the academic quality of vocational education programs. Policymakers pushed for high school curricula to prepare all students for college, regardless of whether that was their goal.

The focus on “college for all” has since eased. Educators now realize the need to help students understand their options—career and academic—and make the best choices given their interests, skills, and opportunities. CTE programs now integrate both academic and technical content and attempt to align programming with local industry needs. Perkins V (2018), the most recent version of the act, aims to increase equitable access to CTE and prepare students for either college or careers.

How are we helping to advance CTE?

At SRI, we are committed to ensuring all students have a clear path to a sustainable future. We work together with the federal government, states, districts, and foundations to learn more about students’ experiences and outcomes from their participation in CTE. Here, we highlight two collaborative efforts to strengthen CTE programs.

• In partnership with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and Policy Analysis for California Education, SRI will be releasing a landscape study next month documenting who has access to CTE and Linked Learning pathways in LAUSD, who participates, and how participation is associated with key student outcomes. This landscape study will be followed by an impact study that compares the effect of participating in a robust, integrated pathway model to the effect of participating in a more traditional CTE pathway on students’ high school experiences and outcomes The findings from both studies will contribute to a more systematic understanding of how school districts are preparing high school students for college and careers and will inform decisions about which opportunities to offer and how to ensure equitable access.
• SRI recently served as a research partner with the Center for the Future of Arizona (CFA) on its Career Connected Pathways (CCP) project. Funded by a federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant, CCP aimed to increase access of high-need high school students to career pathways in cybersecurity and computer science. As external evaluator of the grant project, SRI provided CFA with feedback to support program improvement, documented overall program implementation, and assessed the program’s impact on student outcomes through a quasi-experimental research design.

Other notable SRI projects include a statewide evaluation of CTE programs in Texas, a study assessing the aligment of West Virginia’s CTE programs and the labor market, rigorous evaluations of the California Linked Learning District Initiative and the Oakland Health Pathways Project, and a model demonstration evaluation of the California Community College Linked Learning Initiative.

To learn more about how SRI works in partnership to strengthen CTE programs for all students, visit our College & Career Pathways website.

Topics: Career and technical education