Look closely at the push for career and technical education and you’ll see schools being asked to do three different things. First, provide students with a rigorous academic foundation. Second, offer high-quality CTE coursework and pathways leading to valuable industry credentials. Third, serve as the connective tissue between students and regional labor markets through employer partnerships, apprenticeships, and work-based learning.
The first two responsibilities fit naturally within the mission of K–12 education. The third is much more complicated. It requires aligning schools with a sprawling employment ecosystem—employers, colleges, workforce agencies, and others that operate under different incentives, funding streams, calendars, and even legislative oversight. Without recognizing that distinction, schools risk being held responsible for challenges that extend well beyond their reach.
All of this sits within the broader effort to reinvent the American high school, a theme explored in these pages as part of Fordham’s 2022 Wonkathon. Watershed Advisors’ Kunjan Narechania and Jessica Baghian provided a sobering analysis of why the secondary experience remains largely unchanged from 50 years ago and why the pursuit of CTE is so daunting:
Today, workforce improvement efforts are funded by a variety of federal agencies and spread across a potpourri of state bureaucracies, public institutions, nonprofit organizations, and industry groups… They point to a system so fragmented that it’s hard to navigate for state and local agencies, let alone a high school guidance counselor or rising sophomore… For years, we’ve looked to superintendents and principals to single-handedly reimagine high school. That’s not realistic. We can’t expect local educators alone to reorganize a system that stretches outside of education and beyond city and state lines.
That observation is not an argument against CTE. High-quality pathways matter. So do industry-recognized credentials that carry real labor market value. Schools should help students explore careers and graduate from high school with viable and productive options.
None of these efforts, however, can substitute for the primary credential that all students leave with: the diploma. If that no longer reliably signals readiness, the rest of the workforce agenda is left trying to compensate for a problem it cannot solve. The students who coast to graduation on mere attendance today are the workers who will struggle to navigate training requirements tomorrow. And the employees who cannot handle the jobs they were told they were ready for.
Finishing high school nowadays requires persistence more than proficiency, and even that low standard has been weakened by credit recovery programs. Grade inflation has worsened the problem, making graduation rates one of the least credible metrics in education today. The result is a diploma that no longer certifies what people assume it does. Teachers know this. So do employers.
Former Indiana governor and Purdue president Mitch Daniels has described these deficiencies as a “breach of warranty.” The remedy, he argues, begins well before students reach high school:
Through one of the educational reforms for which I advocated as governor, Indiana prohibits the so-called social promotion of children… too many schools choose to shuffle along kids who are not ready, dooming them to struggle and failure later on… A little accountability can go a long way. But whenever the K–12 system can devise ways to disguise its shortcomings, it will. Oregon made a cryingstock of itself by ending proficiency exams for its high school graduates… A lot of losing football coaches in Oregon wish they, too, could just stop keeping score, but, of course, football is too important for such nonsense.
The toolkit available to states and districts is not limited to retention policies. If policymakers were serious about ensuring that a high school diploma meant something, they could commit to higher grading standards. They could revisit end-of-course exams and graduation requirements. They could also make fuller use of A–F grading for schools, not only to hold them accountable but also to give parents clearer information about school performance while there is still time to act on it. These are reforms that lie squarely within the authority of K–12 education.
Higher education is already responding to the weakening of the diploma’s signal. Over 3,000 faculty across the University of California system recently signed an open letter calling for reinstating the SAT and ACT, citing “severe preparation deficits” among incoming students. While tightening testing requirements is a welcome correction, it also underscores the need for higher expectations much earlier in the pipeline. It further explains why employers continue to rely on the college degree as a proxy for readiness, given that the diploma itself carries little informational value.
That is why restoring the diploma’s credibility should be the centerpiece of both workforce preparation and college preparation. CTE coursework and valuable credentials can strengthen that foundation. Work-based learning can build on it. But none of those initiatives can compensate for a diploma that has lost its meaning.
CTE deserves its growing bipartisan support. Schools should continue to expand high-quality pathways and help students earn credentials with real value in the labor market. But they should not be expected to solve the cross-sector coordination problems in connecting education to employment. The most important contribution K–12 can make—and the one it fully controls—is ensuring that every high school diploma is a trustworthy credential.
