Career and Technical Education at a Crossroads

As they attract a new wave of attention and support in schools across the country, career-and-technical-education programs grapple with new challenges: How should they maintain program quality and weed out career paths that lead students to dead-end jobs? As high-flying programs become popular and more academically rigorous, how can educators ensure that they remain demographically diverse? And how can schools do a better job of getting the word out to all students about all of these new college and career options? Three states—Tennessee, New Jersey, and Arkansas—take on these challenges in this three-part series.