CTE's Missing Students: How Future M.Ed. Leaders Can Close the Access Gap

Demand for career and technical education is climbing faster than most districts can staff or schedule it. About 71% of K-12 educators told the EdWeek Research Center in 2025 that student interest in CTE has grown over the past five years, even as access stays uneven for English learners and for families without reliable transportation.

That mismatch is where school leadership gets tested. A pathway a student cannot reach, cannot decode, or never hears about at home is not meaningfully open, whatever the course catalog says.

Perkins reporting now requires districts to disaggregate participation by student group, which turns a question of values into one of documentation.

Which Students Are Missing From CTE Programs?

Which students are least likely to get a real CTE experience? The groups most often left out are English learners, students with disabilities, rural and low-income students, and students steered toward gender-segregated pathways. National data show the gaps are less about taking one CTE course than about depth, pathway choice, and who hears about the options.

What the National Numbers Show

The most recent nationally representative NCES transcript data cover the 2019 public high school graduating class. Eighty-eight percent took at least one CTE course¹, and 38% became concentrators by earning two or more credits in the same area. Twenty percent earned three or more.²

The subgroup details from that same year:

• Race and ethnicity: Asian graduates had the lowest participation at 77%, followed by two or more races (82%) and Hispanic graduates (83%). Black and White graduates were both at 86%.
• Gender: 87% of male graduates took CTE versus 82% of female graduates, and males averaged 2.88 credits to 2.34 for females.
• Home language: Graduates whose first language was not English averaged 2.30 CTE credits, compared with 2.67 for English-first graduates.
• Disability: Graduates with an IEP averaged 2.91 credits, versus 2.40 for those without one.

The Perkins V national evaluation reports lower participation among Black, Hispanic, and English learner students, while NCES found no measurable English learner difference in taking any CTE course.² Definitions and methods differ, so treat these as signals to check locally. No national rate by income, rurality, or nontraditional-field enrollment is available.

Who Fills CTE Seats

American Council on Education research, cited by Education Week, counted 11.8 million CTE students in 2019. Of those, 5.8 million were students of color and 5.3 million came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2023-24, about half of high schoolers in CTE came from economically disadvantaged families, and about 10.8% were students with disabilities.

Counts of who is enrolled do not show who was never offered a seat, or who landed in a low-wage track.

Why Exclusion Costs More Now

Jamie Molina of New Mexico State University notes that CTE now includes engineering, education, and cybersecurity, not only the trades. A student shut out of CTE today may miss early credentials, dual enrollment, and a head start in fields with strong demand and college pathways.

CTE Participation at a Glance: Who Is Already Enrolled?

Education Week's 2025 survey and 2023-24 enrollment figures, along with American Council on Education research on 2019 participation, show CTE is growing and already serves large numbers of students of color and students from low-income families. These counts show who is in the room, not who is missing. The audit section below explains how to find the students these totals leave out.

What Causes CTE Equity Gaps? Five Root Causes Leaders Can Fix

Multilingual learners make up less than 10% of CTE participant enrollment in 44 states, according to a 2026 brief on special populations under-enrollment.¹ The brief lacks a reporting year and a comparison to these students' share of total enrollment, so treat it as a signal, not a precise measure. The pattern it points to is consistent across sources: access gaps come from how systems operate, not from a lack of student interest.

Barriers a School Controls

• Scheduling: English learners often carry full academic schedules, plus English-language-development and support classes, leaving little room for a CTE course. Migration Policy Institute research describes this difficulty but does not give a national exclusion rate.
• Thin or uneven counseling: Perkins V treats career guidance as the mechanism before and during enrollment. Yet only eight states report always or often tailoring counseling and outreach to English learners and students with disabilities.²
• Prerequisites and placement rules: Language requirements and IEP or 504 placement can work as unintended barriers. Evidence does not show a uniform national prerequisite set, so audit your own course catalog.
• Unclear program labels and weak communication: Perkins V requires understandable information for special populations, but translated materials are not always available.²
• Bias and low expectations: Practitioners report difficulty judging English learners' academic levels, which can lead to lowered expectations for attainable pathways.

Why Do English Learners Have Less Access to CTE?

Research points to two linked problems: weak communication between schools and families, and program names that families schooled elsewhere may not recognize. Mark Emerick of Vassar College has described both. Evidence has not measured name confusion as a separate national barrier, so it is best understood as part of a broader information gap.

Emerick also cited a student interested in healthcare who did not pursue that pathway because it did not seem viable. The student chose a familiar field instead and had to start fresh in college. Nobody denied that student a seat. The pathway simply never looked reachable.

Barriers a School Must Work Around

Some constraints sit outside a school's direct control. Geography matters when programs are off campus, and family finances affect whether students can absorb travel or related costs. Leaders cannot erase these, but they can plan around them with transportation options and cost transparency. The controllable barriers come first because they cost the least to fix.

Transportation and Location Barriers to CTE Participation

A CTE pathway a student cannot physically reach is not a pathway. Many of the strongest programs, health sciences labs, welding bays, cybersecurity suites, sit at regional technical centers or community college campuses rather than the comprehensive high school. Getting students there depends on whether a district can move them across town or across a county during the school day. Education Week's reporting on CTE transportation challenges illustrates the math: a cohort of just 10 students spread across a district can require three or four vans and a route approaching three hours. Families without a reliable second car, or with work schedules that rule out midday pickup, absorb that gap themselves, and students quietly choose the course that meets down the hall instead.

Four strategies districts are using

• Shared regional routing. Capital Region BOCES in New York pools buses, drivers, attendants, and routing systems across member districts, starting with out-of-district CTE runs, so no single district carries a half-empty van.¹ Shared runs reduce overall cost and soften the driver shortage.
• Mixed-mode transport. West-MEC in Arizona used a two-year state grant beginning in 2023-24 to move students between its campuses and home high schools using buses, We Rides, Uber, and parent gas reimbursements. It covers half of a driver's salary and benefits, with partner districts covering the other half and supplying the vehicle under intergovernmental agreements.
• Bell-schedule alignment and consolidated pickups. Districts are redrawing start and end times so CTE blocks fit a single travel window, and consolidating stops, which shortens routes but asks some students to walk farther.
• State reimbursement. New Hampshire law allows full reimbursement of regional CTE transportation through a formula based on vehicle type, mileage, and trips.² Sending districts arrange and pay first, and because the formula does not depend on how many riders are in each vehicle, small cohorts are not penalized.

The limits leaders should name honestly

None of this is free, and none of it is simple. Vermont's Act 73 transportation report identified the driver shortage as the most significant constraint, citing CDL requirements and higher private-sector wages, a pressure that intensifies in rural districts with vast distances, thin fleets, and no backup vendor.³ Maryland's workforce board has heard the same from rural, suburban, and urban districts alike.⁴ Smaller fixes still matter: Caroline County Public Schools used carryover career-counseling funds to buy a passenger van for career exploration and coaching.⁴ Aspiring administrators should treat ride time, driver capacity, and cost per student as pathway design variables, not operations problems to hand off.

How to Audit Your CTE Participation Data

Every district that accepts Perkins V Basic Grant funds must complete a Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment (CLNA) and refresh it at least every two years.¹ That requirement is the natural home for a CTE access audit, and it gives a curriculum leader the standing to ask for disaggregated numbers instead of one healthy-looking enrollment total.

Four questions, asked in order

• Disaggregate enrollment. Break participation down by gender, race and ethnicity, and each of the nine Perkins special population categories¹, then repeat the cut pathway by pathway: health sciences, information technology, education, trades, agriculture.
• Compare each pathway with the whole school. Use representation ratios, not raw counts. A pathway that is 9 percent English learners in a school that is 24 percent English learners has a gap, even when the roster looks full.
• Follow students through the sequence. Participation is the entry point, not the outcome. Track concentrator status, program completion, industry-recognized credentials, and work-based learning placements for the same subgroups.
• Watch the transition points. Find where students disappear between the introductory course and the second-level course. That is usually where scheduling, prerequisites, and transportation quietly filter the roster.

Where the numbers come from

State CTE reporting systems generally hold enrollment and concentrator figures. Perkins core indicators, reported annually and disaggregated by gender, race and ethnicity, special population, and career cluster, supply the performance side.¹ The district student information system fills in demographics and the schedule history that explains why a student never enrolled at all.

Expect small-cell suppression. No single federal minimum cell size exists; states set their own privacy rules, and several states add their own disaggregation dimensions, so a category visible in one state may be blank in another.² Combine reporting years and clusters before concluding that a subgroup is missing rather than merely hidden.

What a red flag looks like

One pathway whose English learner share sits far below the school's overall share, sustained across two reporting years, is the clearest signal a leader can bring to a department meeting. Pair it with a completion gap in the same cluster and you have a case for changing outreach and scheduling, not just for another recruitment poster.

Document each material gap with the subgroup, the pathway, the metric, the numerator and denominator, the reporting year, the comparison group, the target, and the data limitations. Your state's threshold, not a universal federal cutoff, determines when a gap must be addressed in the CLNA narrative.

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Recruitment and Outreach That Reaches Multilingual and First-Generation Families

Say what the pathway leads to, in the family's language

Federal guidance requires that families receive school and career-program information in a language they understand when they are making enrollment decisions.³ Treat that as a floor, not a courtesy. Translated materials should span recruitment, enrollment, financial aid and career outcomes⁴, and they should be plain: what the program teaches, which credential or postsecondary option it opens, what it costs, how scheduling and transportation work, and what employers expect. A label like "family and consumer sciences" means little to a parent who did not attend school in this country, and many English learners never learn the full range of options available to them. Pair the materials with a low-risk orientation that walks families through the application, parental approval, attendance and safety requirements. Applications are genuinely complicated, and a parent signature requirement alone can quietly screen out capable students.⁵

Replace the flyer with a two-way channel

• Bilingual information nights: schedule them at flexible times, including summer and out-of-school hours, with interpreters matched to family preference.
• Trusted channels: school websites, local newspapers, community organizations and bilingual family liaisons reach households that one-way flyers never touch.¹
• Decision partnership: invite families into Perkins V comprehensive local needs assessment conversations, which the English Learner Playbook recommends specifically for surfacing dual-enrollment and work-based-learning barriers.⁴

Check the advising itself for bias

Referral patterns are where gaps harden. Review which students counselors steer toward which pathway, and weigh opt-out structures so eligible students are enrolled by default in career exploration rather than required to self-select. Pair peer ambassadors with professional advising: cohorts, bilingual study groups and mentoring programs are recommended in the research, though the sources give no effect size and no universally superior model.¹ Set ratios and training hours locally.

Build the pipeline earlier

Middle school exploration, using interest inventories, career speakers, fairs and virtual tours, should start early and repeat, with translated pathway maps in hand before high school deadlines.² The evidence here is directionally strong but thin on dosage: no source establishes which activity, or what frequency, produces the largest gains.

Building Inclusive CTE Pathways as a Curriculum Leader

In a Massachusetts longitudinal study, multilingual learners were 5 percentage points less likely than similar peers to concentrate in CTE and earned 23% fewer CTE credits. Researchers traced much of that gap to what schools offered and to barriers inside schools. That puts much of the fix within a curriculum leader's reach.

Rebuild the Master Schedule Around Access

When a pathway course sits in the same period as the only section of chemistry, English language development or an AP class, students must choose. Students who need core credits to graduate usually drop CTE. Before the schedule locks, map singleton CTE sections against core singletons. Then look for double-blocked periods, alternating-day options or zero-hour sections that let students keep both.

What to try Monday: pull a list of every CTE course that conflicts with a required core or language support section.

Remove Barriers Built Into Course Design

• Prerequisites: Ask whether each one predicts success or simply filters students out. A grade gate on an intro health sciences course may screen out capable students who never had a chance to show interest.
• Accommodations: Students with disabilities made up 10.8% of high school CTE enrollment in 2023-24. Research summarized by ACTE indicates that in most states they concentrate in lower-earning clusters. Pair CTE and special education staff so IEP accommodations follow students into labs and shops.
• Nontraditional fields: Students entering fields where their gender or background is rare do better with cohort placement, mentors and visible role models.²

What to try Monday: list every CTE prerequisite alongside the reason it exists.

Widen Work-Based Learning

Nationally comparable data on high school CTE students' access to internships, apprenticeships and co-ops, broken out by race, income, disability and language status, is not well established.¹ Related evidence points in a consistent direction. One national look at college students found 43% at four-year schools and 26% at two-year schools held paid work-based learning, with first-generation students and women less likely to participate. Unpaid placements exclude students who can't give up wages, and transportation shuts out many rural and low-income students.²

Three strategies to widen the door:

• Pay students: Push for paid placements or stipends. Monday: ask your three strongest employer partners whether a stipend is feasible.
• Wrap support around the placement: Add transportation assistance, tutoring and bilingual family communication.³ Monday: flag which current placements are reachable without a car.
• Prepare employers: Build partnerships with employers who commit to fair, objective supervision and welcome diverse interns.³ Apprenticeship tax credits, where states offer them, can strengthen the pitch.⁴ Monday: share your disaggregated intern roster with one partner and ask how to broaden it.

How to Close CTE Access Gaps: A Leader's Action Plan

Closing CTE access gaps takes a sequence, not a single initiative, and the order matters because each stage feeds the next. The six stages each carry one concrete action and a realistic timeline.

The Six Stages

• Audit (one semester): Pull enrollment by pathway and split it by English learner status, disability, income, and gender. This is the data work described in the participation audit section.
• Diagnose (same semester): Interview students and families who did not enroll and trace each gap to one of the five root causes, such as scheduling conflicts, counseling habits, or prerequisites.
• Remove barriers (one to two semesters): Fix the cheapest structural obstacle first. Revise a prerequisite, move a course block, or map a transportation route using the options from the location and transportation section.
• Recruit (before the next registration cycle): Rewrite pathway descriptions in plain language and offer them in families' home languages, following the outreach section. Hold at least one family night at a community site rather than the school.
• Support (first full school year): Assign each newly enrolled student from an underrepresented group a named adviser and a check-in schedule, built on the inclusive pathway design work.
• Monitor (every year): Rerun the audit and compare it with your baseline.

Set Two or Three Targets

Do not track everything. Choose two or three measurable targets and review them each year. A workable set might be the English learner share of one named pathway, the share of students with disabilities completing a concentrator sequence, and the number of applicants who withdraw before the first week. Write each target as a baseline, a goal, and a date.

A small number of targets keeps the work visible to principals and boards. It also protects against the pattern in which a program announces an equity goal, enrolls a few more students, and never learns whether they stayed.

Treat the first year as a pilot. One pathway with a clear baseline teaches more than a district-wide launch with no comparison point, and the results give you evidence to request funding for the next pathway.

Connecting Equity Goals to M.Ed. Coursework and CTE Administrator Pathways

A CTE administrator is the school or district leader responsible for running career and technical education programs. The job typically covers Perkins compliance, employer and community partnerships, state data reporting, and the master schedule that decides whether students can actually reach a pathway. Every strategy described here, from participation audits to family outreach, lands on this desk.

Mapping Equity Skills to Coursework

Educational leadership programs rarely label courses by these skills, so look for the closest match:

• Data audits: program evaluation, research methods, or data-informed decision-making courses.
• Family outreach: community engagement, school-community relations, or equity and diversity in leadership.
• Inclusive scheduling: school operations, resource management, and school law.

The internship or practicum is where these skills become real. Ask whether you can pair it with a CTE program, a Perkins reporting cycle, or a scheduling team.

Certification and Endorsement Options

There is no national CTE administrator credential, and rules vary by state. Most paths run through a state-approved leadership curriculum, an internship, a capstone or exam, and sometimes prior teaching or service years.

Eastern Washington University offers an online M.Ed. in Career and Technical Education with an Administrator Certificate, which uses a comprehensive examination. The University of Maryland Eastern Shore offers a 30-credit master's in CTE for those holding a CTE-related bachelor's degree. Tennessee State University's M.Ed. in Instructional Leadership has a CTE Teacher Leaders concentration (2.75 minimum GPA), which builds leadership skills but is not an administrator license.

Most other options are general building-level leadership degrees that can feed into CTE leadership roles:

• Penn State: M.Ed. in Educational Leadership, School Leadership concentration, 30+ credits, tied to Pennsylvania principal certification.
• Oakland University: 32 credits, leading to the Michigan Administrative K-12 Certificate.¹
• Arizona Christian University: approved for principal licensure in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Texas.²
• Clemson University: 36 credits, leading to PK-12 building-level certification.³

Wayne State University and Nicholls State University also offer M.Ed. leadership programs, while Montclair State's is an M.A. rather than an M.Ed.

Confirm Before You Enroll

The program pages for these general leadership degrees do not show Perkins-specific coursework, so ask admissions directly how the curriculum handles CTE funding, accountability, and reporting. Then check your state education agency for current licensure requirements, since a program approved in one state may need extra internship hours or service years in another. Your target role determines the right fit: a CTE director position may call for a CTE-specific certificate, while a principal role calls for building-level licensure.