CTE Adds Programs Easily. It Almost Never Retires Them

Perkins V was supposed to make career and technical education answer to the local job market. The first national evaluation of the law, published by the Institute of Education Sciences and conducted by the American Institutes for Research, suggests it has done half of that job. Districts now look at labor market data when they open a program. Very few look at it when deciding whether a program should stay open.

The study surveyed CTE directors in 51 states and territories and a nationally representative sample of 835 Perkins-funded districts about the 2022–23 program year. When deciding whether to add a new high school CTE program, 60 percent of districts relied heavily on data about which industries and occupations are in demand, and 48 percent relied heavily on employer recommendations. When deciding whether to phase out a program, only 22 percent weighed their state definitions of high-skill, high-wage, and in-demand occupations to a large extent. Only 18 percent leaned heavily on employers.

The Needs Assessment Is Not Doing the Work

The tool Perkins V created for this purpose is the Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment (CLNA), which every funded district must complete every two years with input from employers, workforce boards, postsecondary partners, and families. On paper, it is exactly the mechanism a district needs to retire weak programs and refresh aging ones.

In practice, the evaluation found that it often functions as a compliance exercise. About one-third of districts identified a need to phase out or remove existing programs, and a similar share identified a need to update them. But of districts that identified any program need, only 34 percent said the CLNA helped them to a large extent. Roughly 36 percent of districts did not closely involve a single stakeholder group in the process. And 23 states reported that the CLNA was burdensome enough that it was a reason some districts chose not to apply for Perkins funding at all.

"Of the districts that identified at least one need, only some (34 percent) indicated that the CLNA process helped them to a large or very large extent in identifying these needs, which indicates that many districts may be identifying changes needed to program offerings based on factors other than the CLNA process."
— National Evaluation of Career and Technical Education Under Perkins V (NCEE 2026–007r)

Why Programs Outlive Their Purpose

The reasons are not mysterious. A program represents a teacher, a lab, equipment, and a community of students and families. Closing it is politically costly. Launching its replacement is harder still: 30 percent of districts said adding programs that better reflect labor market needs was very or extremely challenging, and 26 percent called finding or keeping teachers for in-demand fields a very large barrier. When a replacement is that hard to build, the rational move is to keep the old program running, even when the jobs it points to have shifted.

Meanwhile, the evaluation shows where attention actually goes. Work-based learning was the most common top priority for both states (29 states) and districts (36 percent). Aligning programs with labor market demand was a top-three priority for only 19 states and 19 percent of districts. Twenty states still lacked definitions for at least one of the three terms (high-skill, high-wage, in-demand) that the law uses to judge alignment.

Make Refreshing Cheaper Than Coasting

The underlying problem is cost. As long as rebuilding a program takes years and a new hire, districts will keep programs past their useful life. Lowering that cost changes the math.

That is the problem Core Learning Exchange is designed to address. Our CTE knowledge graph maps 15,472 learning objectives to state standards and to more than 80 industry certifications. A district reviewing a fading program can see which competencies carry over to a stronger pathway, which gaps remain, and build a custom course from the graph rather than starting from scratch. Content from partner providers receives a Socratic AI tutoring overlay that helps teachers moving into a new field support students while they build their own industry depth, and it deploys inside an existing LMS in hours.

None of this replaces the judgment a CLNA is meant to capture. It makes acting on that judgment affordable. The Perkins V evaluation describes a system that knows how to say yes to new programs. The next step is building one that can also say "not anymore," and then quickly offer something better.

Read the Full Article

Read "National Evaluation of Career and Technical Education Under Perkins V" on the Institute of Education Sciences / American Institutes for Research

About Core Learning Exchange: We provide turnkey Career and Technical Education (CTE) solutions for grades 6-14, built on a CTE knowledge graph of 15,472 learning objectives and 3,806 AI-enabled lessons aligned to state standards and industry certifications. Our AI platform uses proven Socratic methodology to develop critical thinking skills through personalized, adaptive learning—deployed in hours via LTI integration.

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