We need to know more about CTE teachers

We currently are near the end of the fourth school year disrupted and changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, school leaders, educators, and researchers have focused on two critical issues: disruptions to student learning and the teacher shortage. Turmoil in the teacher labor market continues to grow, accompanied by numerous commentaries ranging in tone from doomsday predictions (e.g., Nathanson, 2022) to calls for nuanced attention to regional and context-specific issues (e.g., Edwards et al., 2022; McMurdock, 2022).

We know that achievement gaps widened between students from low- and higher-income households during the pandemic (e.g., Willen, 2022). We also know that teacher turnover and shortages have not occurred uniformly across subject matters and school types (McMurdock, 2022). Before the pandemic, for example, shortages typically were more acute in hard-to-staff subject areas and fields, including STEM and special education (Goldhaber et al., 2015).

Teacher shortages in career and technical education (CTE) represent an underexplored area. Interest, enrollment, and program offerings in CTE have exploded in recent decades, spurring a spate of research on the academic and economic benefits of CTE in high school and the effectiveness of various state and federal initiatives. (See Dougherty, 2023, in this issue for a summary of the recent research.) Yet we know comparatively little about high school CTE teachers and their demographic characteristics, career trajectories, and qualifications.