Last year, about 9,000 Ohio high school students earned a credential in retail sales and customer service. State records showed employers looking to fill three jobs that required it. Another 4,000 students earned emergency management credentials for a field with fewer than 300 openings.

Bruno Manno lays this out in a piece for The 74 today. Ohio has let students graduate since 2019 by completing CTE coursework and earning an industry credential instead of passing a state test. Students did what the rules asked. Credential attainment went from 53,000 in 2019 to 170,000 in 2024. The approved list grew past 700. Emily Passias of Advance CTE, who helped build the original list, told Manno that states have mostly picked credentials "based on vibes."

Ohio spent the past year cutting that list to 126, screening on job placement, pay and whether the coursework counts toward a degree. It also built a dashboard where, to borrow the title of an upcoming documentary, you can see everything: where graduates enrolled, whether they finished, and what they earned, drawn from state unemployment insurance records. An Ohio State analysis found that credentials in transportation, manufacturing and construction produced wage gains that lasted into workers' mid-20s. Nurse's aide and culinary credentials showed no income advantage at all.

The national picture is not much better. Research from ExcelinEd found that 18% of the credentials students earn are ones employers say they want. An Advance CTE survey found 27 states review their approved credentials on a regular schedule. Fourteen use wage data when they do.

A new report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, covered in Education Week today, describes the same problem from the student's side: "hundreds of doors without clear labels." More than 40 states have or are building longitudinal data systems, but K-12, college and workforce records usually sit in separate ones. Shaun Dougherty of Boston College called linking them the single most important recommendation in the report and the hardest to do. The report also notes that the people who might help students read the labels, school counselors, serve 376 students each on average. The recommended ratio is 250.

NASBE's new report on high school transformation shows how far states are from closing that gap. Twenty-three states have adopted a portrait of a graduate. Six have a competency framework that tells teachers what the portrait means in a classroom. Indiana is the exception in the report: diploma seals built with employers, colleges and the military, and a federal accountability waiver to match. Kentucky now starts individual learning plans in sixth grade.

All of that is policy. The other Education Week story today is logistics. Carl Allen of 4MATIV Technologies told Jennifer Vilcarino that a CTE program serving 10 students scattered across a district can end up routing three or four vans, at a cost of $30,000 to $50,000 per student per year. West-MEC, which serves 37,000 students from 48 Phoenix-area high schools across six campuses, ran on a two-year state transportation grant until it expired. It now splits bus driver salaries with partner districts under five intergovernmental agreements.

Then it bought land next to Agua Fria High School and built a campus there. It opened in 2025 with electrical, HVAC, diesel and welding. Four more programs arrive in 2027. "If the students can't get to us," Superintendent Scott Spurgeon said, "we're going to get our campuses closer to the students."

—Thomas

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