Throughout history, and continuing today, learners of color, low-income learners, female learners and learners with disabilities have been historically tracked into terminal vocational programs leading to jobs with uncertain promise of economic growth and prosperity. To help state leaders recognize these historical barriers and adopt promising solutions to close equity gaps in CTE, Advance CTE launched a series of policy briefs titled Making Good on the Promise. The first briefs in the series explored the history of inequities in CTE and highlighted promising practices from states that are using data to identify and address access and achievement gaps by different learner populations.
Building off these briefs, the third brief in the series, Making Good on the Promise: Building Trust to Promote Equity in CTE, maps out steps state leaders can take to rebuild trust in marginalized communities that CTE historically failed to serve equitably. The brief outlines five steps state leaders can take to build trust in communities that do not view CTE as a viable mechanism to help them achieve their college and career goals:

• Acknowledge that inequity is a problem;
• Promote a culture that values equity and diversity within the state agency and instructor workforce;
• Commit to transparency and advancing only high-quality CTE programs of study;
• Implement strategies to gain buy-in from communities and stakeholders; and
• Celebrate, lift up and replicate successful programs of study and practices.

To helps states with these steps, the brief features state examples from Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Idaho and Nebraska and draws on messaging data from Advance CTE’s The Value and Promise of Career Technical Education: Results from a National Survey of Parents and Students:

• In Oklahoma, the Department of Career and Technology Education created an equity and diversity specialist position in 2016 to provide diversity training to agency staff, teachers and administrators to promote equity through the secondary and postsecondary systems.
• In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) formed the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Work Group to promote equity in WTCS.

Brianna McCain, Policy Associate