In 2018, the United States Congress passed the "Strengthening of Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act." This legislation included the requirement to conduct a comprehensive local needs assessment, which must include input from community stakeholders. This project designed and evaluated a three-step process that…

The purpose of this technical assistance paper is to assist education leaders and administrators in the consistent implementation of the Florida Career and Professional Education (CAPE) Act in Section 1003.491, Florida Statutes (F.S.). This technical assistance paper addresses questions on recent legislation, funding, and data reporting. [For the…

This paper addresses families' perceptions of corporate influence in career and technical education (CTE) through market-driven policies that enable data extraction for student profiling and seek to align K-12 education with business-driven needs. Aligning education with business needs can offer early employment, however, accelerating…

In recent years, career and technical education (CTE) programs that include quality work-based learning (WBL) opportunities for students have gained significant traction among educators, policymakers, and stakeholders as an effective way to prepare students for the labor market. However, a lack of data on WBL--which many CTE students participate…

Systems for learning and producing knowledge, such as career and technical education (CTE), often reproduce inequities unless an equity-focused lens is used when designing, implementing, and evaluating programs. This framework presents guidance for conducting CTE research with an intentional focus on equity. Developed by the CTE Research Network's…

The purpose of this technical assistance paper is to assist education leaders and administrators in the consistent implementation of the Florida Career and Professional Education (CAPE) Act in Section 1003.491, Florida Statutes (F.S.). This technical assistance paper addresses questions on the legislation, funding, and data reporting.

This Toolkit presents lessons learned from the process of implementing a new system for collecting student-level work-based learning (WBL) data in high school career and technical education (CTE) programs. As part of a study on career academies and WBL, a research team worked closely with a district CTE office and school staff to design and…

Comprehensive and timely data on vocational education and training (VET) is important for increasing the efficiency and transparency of Australia's VET sector, in order to improve understanding of Australia's VET market and management of the national VET system. The National VET Data Policy (the Policy) brings together requirements for collecting…

This report is the support document accompanying "An analysis of 'micro-credentials' in VET," which examines subject-bundle enrolments in Australia's vocational education and training (VET) system in 2019. This support document is a technical discussion of how the raw data were extracted and transformed for analytical purposes and it…

This brief, the second in the series, advances a theory of change that centers the learner experience in strategies to improve institutional data collection and use and strengthen college information management systems. It is the second in the Advance CTE's Advancing Postsecondary CTE Data Quality Initiative (PDI) series highlighting five states…

Online surveys are an efficient and relatively affordable way to collect data. However, there are issues associated with it, including potential fraudulent data due to accidental or deliberate duplicate entries. In this brief we describe a case study of deliberate duplicate entries in an ongoing study of community college students. Students from…

Students have many options as they leave high school and enter postsecondary education or the workforce. But during the six years that the Data Quality Campaign has reviewed report cards from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, it has been found that states have struggled to provide a robust picture of all of these options on their report…

In this chapter, we review the strengths of NCES survey data, provide an example of analyzing NCES survey data to explore the pathways between coursework in career and technical education in high school and postsecondary success, and offer suggestions for future data collection.

With the recent reauthorization of the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (Perkins V), unprecedented philanthropic investment in career pathways, and the urgent economic needs of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, the career readiness field is at a critical moment in time. To meet this moment, states,…

The overwhelming majority of families rely on public education for a foothold in the American Dream, making it perhaps the most consequential expression of America's core value of opportunity for all. State policymakers are the constitutional stewards and primary funders of America's public schools. They have the awesome responsibility of guiding…