Can your district expand career and technical education without quietly sorting students into winners and everyone else? Many superintendents I speak with ask a version of this question before a single new pathway launches. Board members ask it too, usually right after someone mentions “CTE academy” in a budget meeting. The fear is real: a program built to open doors ends up closing them for kids on the other side of a schedule wall.
Here is what usually goes wrong first. A district builds a shiny new career academy, houses it in a separate wing, and staffs it with people who rarely talk to core teachers. Counselors start routing certain students toward the new track and other students away from it, often based on assumptions about who belongs where. Within two years, the academy has strong industry partners and weak academic integration, and families notice.
I learned this firsthand years before I ever sat in a superintendent’s chair. A district I once worked in asked me to lead the expansion of career pathways across every high school. I had a choice to make before writing a single page of the plan. I could unveil a finished model at one staff meeting and call it done.
Instead, I spent three weeks meeting one-on-one with department chairs, CTE teachers, and counselors. I asked every group the same two questions. What role would their content play in a student’s career path, and what did they need to make it real? Then I asked each group to write their own piece of the plan, not mine. Every department posted its commitment beside the course catalog, where students could see it.
Within a year, students moved between advanced biology and health science courses without anyone treating it as unusual. The pathway grew because the whole building owned it. No one experienced it as a separate track, because no one built it as one.
That same principle scales to an entire system, not just one department. Advance CTE’s national vision for the field calls this codesigning, and it works the same way at every level (Advance CTE, 2021). When students, families, and counselors help build a pathway, it becomes part of the whole school, not an add-on.
- First, count CTE coursework toward core graduation credit whenever state rules allow it, so a welding class carries the same weight as a lab science.
- Second, build the master schedule around shared blocks instead of separate bells. Students should take AP Chemistry and a health science pathway course in the same semester. When scheduling separates students by track before ninth grade even ends, the separation becomes permanent by accident.
- Third, tie work-based learning to advisory time and academic credit, following the both/and model the U.S. Department of Education promotes (U.S. Department of Education, 2025).
- Fourth, use the required local needs assessment to name real labor-market data before adding a single course. That data protects the pathway from becoming a guess dressed up as a program. It also satisfies the accountability language built into current federal law (Perkins V Act, 2018).
Indiana already proves this works at scale. Its Workforce Diploma lets students earn CTE credentials and work-based learning credit inside the same graduation framework everyone else uses (U.S. Department of Education, 2025). That structure doesn’t create a separate track; it broadens the existing one.
Every credential added to a pathway should meet three quick tests before a district spends money on it. These tests separate a credential that opens a door from one that only looks good on a website. Ask these three questions before the purchase order goes through:
- Do employers recognize it in your actual labor market, not just admired by a state office?
- Does it stack toward a postsecondary certificate or degree instead of ending at graduation?
- Is it open to any student who meets the prerequisite, not reserved for a chosen few?
Central office teams often ask for a five-year plan before they ask for one planning meeting. Flip that order. The plan will improve once the people doing the work help write it.
None of this requires a new building or a new budget line. It requires one meeting where every department answers the same two questions I asked years ago. Pull your CTE director, your counseling team, and two academic department chairs into one room this month. Ask them what role they will play in the pathway, and what they need to make it real. Then write it down, together, before anyone touches a master schedule.
Will your next pathway open doors, or quietly close them?
#EducationalLeader,
Kim
When schools are well led, students learn well.
References
- Advance CTE. (2021). Without limits: A shared vision for the future of Career Technical Education. Advance CTE.
- Perkins V Act (Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act), Pub. L. No. 115-224, 132 Stat. 1563 (2018).
- U.S. Department of Education. (2025). Expanding meaningful school choice through CTE and work-based learning.
The views shared herein are solely those of Dr. Kim D. Moore and do not necessarily reflect the positions of her employer, the school district, or any local, state, or federal government entity.
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