A new education bandwagon is well and truly here: career-connected learning. A wave of new organizations, money, and rhetoric is cresting, from school boards to foundations to legislatures. But before we mistake activity for impact, we need to get honest about what it takes to deliver high-quality career and technical education and what the consequences will be for the most vulnerable students if we don’t get it right. We don’t need more of the same nice-to-have programs. We need place-based coalitions of leaders in government, education, business, and philanthropy to build entirely new models.
To be clear, I have long been a supporter of CTE. From 2005 to 2010, I served as superintendent of New York City’s District 79, overseeing a citywide portfolio of programs for nearly 100,000 young people and adults who had dropped out, been pushed out, become overage, or were pursuing their education in alternative, justice, or correctional settings. My team and I oversaw one of the largest career and technical education systems in the country. We built, scaled up, and learned from new approaches to helping young people reconnect to education, credentials, and economic mobility.
For example, we overhauled our licensed practical nurse pathway to intentionally serve young people who had aged out of a traditional diploma. We tied high-interest, lab-based learning to a credential that mattered in the labor market—and could stack directly into a nursing degree later. Our program design aggressively addressed reading and writing gaps through embedded academic support and test prep. Students who had been written off passed. And young people could suddenly see a real pathway to upward mobility.
But the dominant pattern, both during my time as superintendent and as I travel the country in my current work as CEO of ThirdWay Solutions, is very different—and troubling. Certifications tied to already obsolete software programs. Work-readiness courses for youth involved with the juvenile-justice system that are infantilizing and culturally clueless. Auto-repair programs that teach students how to fix cars that went out of rotation decades ago instead of focusing on the technology transforming the industry. Few programs track whether young people are building the core academic and durable skills that underpin economic mobility. The worst offenders: pathways pushing young people into debt at for-profit colleges for antiquated credentials that neither close skill gaps nor prepare them for a rapidly transforming world of work.
Often, CTE programs that look good on paper are just screening out the very students they should be particularly eager to serve. Many of the programs require minimum GPAs, evidence of reading skills, or demonstrated work readiness to enroll. More insidiously, workforce funding, metrics, and the politics of shiny new programs create incentives to admit students who drive up numbers in attendance, passing rates, and credentials—useful or not.
Often, CTE programs that look good on paper are just screening out the very students they should be particularly eager to serve.
Meanwhile, the young people who stand to benefit most from expertly designed approaches are often the least likely to attend schools that provide the academic preparation, social capital, and access needed to take advantage of them. The programs accessible to them tend to be about temporary work exposure, antiquated jobs, or low-wage work. School systems, workforce initiatives, and city officials pat themselves on the back for engaging such students at all. Compounding the problem, employers are far less likely to see this group as worth taking a chance on.
Too often, struggling students are told—explicitly or implicitly—that they can either catch up academically or prepare for work. The best pathways refuse that false choice. Young people in them strengthen their reading, writing, and math while earning credits and at the same time doing work that feels connected to a future they want. Students learn writing by drafting workplace reports, technical summaries, and professional communications tied directly to the work itself. Reading gaps are addressed through technical manuals, industry texts, and applied problem-solving. But this only works when the academics are intentionally sequenced, explicit, and tightly aligned to the work-based components—not treated as an afterthought.
Additionally, the strongest programs do not lecture young people about “professionalism” or force them through canned, compliance-oriented work-readiness curricula. In my New York City district, instead of purchasing a low-quality social-emotional-learning program to improve students’ behavior, at some of our sites, we leaned into entrepreneurship, treating young people as capable designers of their own lives. Students learned how to assess their assets and liabilities, speak their truth and own their story, recruit mentors, and persist through rejection, setbacks, and obstacles. And importantly, these lessons were tied to rigorous work-based projects and outcomes students actually cared about.
For young people facing the longest odds, setbacks are not hypothetical. One missed train or one mistake at work can unravel everything. The strongest pathways plan for this reality instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. The most effective programs select employer partners and train workplace mentors who know how to support young people when they are about to mess up or give up. Just as important, students also need a primary adult outside the workplace who helps them problem-solve and stay connected when life starts to spiral.
Young people deserve pathways connected to the new and the next—not stale assumptions about the economy or narrow tracks that lock them into one lane too early. Toward the end of my time in New York City, we started experimenting more with what we called “taster menus”—giving students exposure to multiple industries, technologies, and applied experiences before pushing them toward a single pathway.
If we want pathways that truly deliver, we must come together as educators, industry leaders, and communities to center young people who need them the most: students who are disconnected or tenuously connected to school and work and often navigating child-welfare, juvenile-justice, and public-housing systems. This refocusing would force us to break down silos between K-12, workforce-development programs, and wraparound supports—and to invent new approaches aimed at true economic mobility, not just completion.
Let’s stop pretending that dressing up old approaches and abandoning academic rigor will meaningfully improve outcomes for students. If leaders recast their task as creating real pathways for young people furthest from opportunity, we can unleash a new wave of innovation. Done well, these approaches will put more young people on an upward trajectory and strengthen the communities where they live and work.
