There is plentiful research suggesting that, among in-school factors, teachers consistently matter the most when it comes to student testing outcomes. On average, those with more experience and better prior preparation are likely to produce larger learning gains. Plus, teachers’ licensure status and their scores on licensure tests are positively linked to those gains. But this existing research is almost entirely focused on academic subjects such as math and English language arts (ELA). Enter a group of (mostly) CALDER researchers seeking to determine whether those patterns also hold in the realm of career and technical education (CTE).
Their data come from Massachusetts, which has led the way in building a robust CTE infrastructure and making an array of courses readily accessible to students in urban, suburban, and rural areas. The Bay State has notched some impressive outcomes for its CTE students, as well. Two-thirds of its CTE programs are known as Chapter 74–approved programs, which, among other things, makes them eligible to receive additional funds if they require their teachers to pass both a written and a performance subject matter test to get their preliminary Vocational Technical Education License. The performance test requires candidates to demonstrate skills in a hands-on setting where an evaluator assesses their tech skills and related knowledge. The programs are also required to have at least 70 percent of students eventually employed in the field of study.
The other one-third of CTE programs are dubbed “Perkins Only programs,” lacking (among other things) the funding benefit that comes from having test-based licensure. Thus, they make a handy comparison group for the researchers. Housed in both CTE-dedicated regional centers and within comprehensive high schools, Chapter 74 programs tend to enroll more White students and students with special needs than do Perkins Only programs, which tend to enroll more Black students. The study sample includes six cohorts of students with expected graduation rates from 2011 to 2016, comprising around 60,000 pupils across grades 9–12.
To address selection bias and sorting concerns, the study compares students in the same school and CTE cluster who take the same academic courses, have similar math and ELA test scores in eighth grade, and have similar demographics and school program participation. They also compare students within tracks so that they have similar course-taking patterns outside of CTE. That’s a lot of precision matching, but it’s still not a causal design.
The key finding is that, all else being equal, CTE teachers who received better scores on their subject performance test tend to have students with higher longer-term earnings than do CTE teachers who received lower scores. Specifically, a 1 standard deviation increase in teacher performance is associated with about a $900 increase in average expected earnings (approximately a 3.9 percent increase) for the teacher’s students five years after their expected graduation date, controlling for licensure test area and observable differences between students. The analysts benchmark that result against an analogous result in a seminal 2014 study that examined the impacts of teacher value-added on subsequent earnings (and other outcomes in adulthood). In that work, a 1 standard deviation increase in teacher value-added for students’ elementary teachers was associated with a 1.3 percent increase in annual earnings at age twenty-eight. Thus, CTE teacher value-added appears to function in similar ways.
The current study also suggests that the impacts are linear, such that increasing the performance of low scorers has the same impact as increasing the performance of the higher scorers. That relationship can be partly explained by the sorting that occurs into higher-paying occupations. But even then, higher scores on CTE licensure tests are independently predictive of higher earnings for students. What’s more, the scores on the performance-based, hands-on test are much more predictive of earnings than the multiple-choice, written test.
The analysts also find that teachers who are licensed in the program area in which they teach—as opposed to being licensed in a CTE cluster more generally—tend to have students with higher future earnings. But there is no relationship between CTE teacher experience (whether novices or veterans) and students’ four-year college enrollment overall. Oddly enough, there is a modest increase in the average long-run earnings of students who were five years out and had a novice CTE teacher in high school. The analysts hypothesize that, since these teachers have been more recently employed in their prior industry than veteran teachers, they may be better able to place students in a work-study position, provide current references, or make recommendations relevant in the immediate term.
Last, correlational design aside, the authors make this reasonable claim in their conclusion: “It is difficult to imagine how any licensure requirement like this could have positive impacts for students if the information collected during the licensure process did not contain any signal of teacher effectiveness.” Hear, hear! Yes, we need more rigorous research to say whether having CTE teachers with impressive, field-related licensure scores leads to high school students experiencing positive outcomes in adulthood. But for now, the signal is flashing green, so we must move ahead in identifying the most-talented teachers for this vital and growing education sector.
SOURCE: Bingjie Chen et al., “CTE teacher licensure and long-term student outcomes,” Education Finance and Policy (March 2023).
