Rachel Rosen: Hi, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar. Thanks so much everybody. It’s great to see this group joining. I think there are still people logging in, but we’re going to go ahead and get started with this discussion so that we can make sure that we have time. My name is Rachel Rosen and I’m the director of the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education here at MDRC, and I’d like to welcome you all to today’s webinar, Why Are Boys Succeeding in CTE While Struggling in Postsecondary Education?

Today’s discussion was prompted in part by findings from MDRC’s recent evaluation of the New York City P-TECH 9-14 schools. These are six-year high schools that are a collaboration between a high school, a community college, and one or more employer partners. Students can earn free associate degrees and develop employability skills through work-based learning experiences provided by the employer partners. The associate degrees prepare students to work in the fields of the employer partners.

Our study, which utilized a rigorous randomized lottery design, found that P-TECH students were more likely to earn postsecondary degrees within three years of high school than students who did not have the opportunity to attend P-TECH. However—if you give me a second, I’m going to share my screen—one of the things we found that was really interesting was that the findings were primarily driven by impacts on young men. What we see in this graph is that the young women in the study performed about equally well as each other, but the young men who attended P-TECH did much better than the young men in the comparison group. And we wanted to know more. This finding was fairly in line with other CTE studies that have found differential impacts for young men, and so we wanted to know more about what was happening, especially in light of other results that show that young men are struggling in other areas of education.

So, to discuss the seeming paradox between results in CTE and results for boys in other educational settings, we brought together a really stellar panel of experts who can provide us more information from all angles on this topic. This will be a unique discussion, bringing together experts from different but related research as well as providing practitioner perspectives in hopes that we can begin to be able to dig into these issues in unique ways. Before introducing our panelists, I would like to mention that this event is made possible with generous funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Carnegie Corporation [of New York], and through the IES CTE research network.

With that, it’s my honor to introduce our panelists. Richard Reeves is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, as well as a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. He’s the author of the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, which helped raise the alarm bell about what’s happening with boys and men in our society. His writings have appeared in the Atlantic, the National Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

Shaun Dougherty is a professor of education and policy at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. His research primarily focuses on the study of career and technical education, education policy, causal program evaluation, and the economics of education. He’s the co–principal investigator for the national CTE Research Network and the CTE [Policy] Exchange. His work emphasizes how education can address human development as well as issues of equity related to race, class, gender, and disability.

Diallo Shabazz is the director of the New York State P-TECH Leadership Council, a multistakeholder forum on the private sector government agencies and higher education institutions that collaborate to support P-TECH schools across New York State. Previously, he managed workforce strategy and training for the nation’s largest municipal public sector labor union, as well as worked at the New York City public school district structuring public-private partnerships to improve career and technical education.

We’re going to begin with Richard, who will give us an overview of his research and the issues that are affecting young men. Then Shaun will give us an overview of what the research tells us about career and technical education and boys. And then Diallo will give us an overview of what CTE settings look like, particularly P-TECH schools, and how they may be working on the ground to support young men. After the presentation, we’ll have some guided questions for the panelists—and sometimes the panelists will ask each other questions—and then we’ll take questions from the audience in a Q&A feature. Let’s go ahead and get started. Richard?

Richard Reeves: Great, thank you, Rachel, and congratulations on this event and all the work of the CTE Center, which has had a huge influence on my own work. It’s an honor to be on a panel of people whose work I’ve cited so much along the way. I’m going to use my time to share some basic data points on the one side of the paradox, which is these growing gender gaps we see in mainstream education where boys and men are falling behind. Hopefully that will then illuminate some of what’s to come. I’m going to share my screen here and someone will indicate to me that it’s working—is that working?

Rachel Rosen: Yes.

Richard Reeves: Great. Okay. Thank you so much. This is part of the mission statement for the American Institute for Boys and Men, which is the first—and only—think tank focused on boys and men: There are reasons to worry there are some real problems facing boys and men, which are in no way framed as a zero-sum game against the ongoing issues of women and girls. I do think there’s a case here for rising together.

I know we’re going to focus on education, but I’m very briefly going to talk about one aspect of mental health as we have an audience here and this is a key priority for us. It’s obviously weighed downstream, but I’m showing here the increase in suicide rates for women of different age groups between 1999 and 2022. You can see they have risen for all age groups of women. But now I’m going to show what’s happened to men over the same time period, and you can see that there’s been a similar increase but from a much higher base and that the suicide rate is actually four times higher among men than it is among young women.

In the most recent years, the biggest rise has been among young men. In fact, recent work by Jean Twenge—after this chart was put together—shows that the suicide rates of men in their twenties are now higher than those of men in [inaudible] ages, especially for men who don’t have a four-year college degree. We’ve seen very slow wage growth for men, which is the dark green on here, as opposed to the light green for women.

[Shows new chart.] We’re also seeing labor force participation rates dropping, especially—again—for less educated men. Those are the men on the left and women on the right, by education, since the seventies. We’re seeing a decline in the employment rates or the labor force participation rates of men—again, especially those who don’t have a four-year college degree, suggesting we’re just not serving them very well.

And then [here’s a chart] on family as well. This is a share of men in their 40s who have never been married, by education. There is a rise for all groups with a growing class gap in marriage rates as well, showing that we’re seeing this big educational divide, particularly for men.

Now I’m going to dive into education. I know postsecondary is on the agenda here, but postsecondary is obviously highly predicted by what happens in high school. So here I’m showing high school GPA, ranked from the bottom tenth—the bottom decile. The bottom 10 percent of high schoolers ranked by GPA is two-thirds male. That’s the dark green here. But if we show the whole distribution, you can see that the top tenth—the best high schoolers ranked by GPA—is two-thirds female. So out of high school you can see very, very big gender gaps, at least in terms of GPA, which is an important predictor and measure of what happens after that.

That then flows through into what we see—that’s the top decile, there—in college degrees. We go back to 1972—which is a good year for the data people in the audience, because there’s a good series that goes back to there from NCES—but also because it’s when we passed Title IX to encourage women in education, of course. At that point, most college degrees went to men. There was a 13 percentage point gap in favor of men in the share of college degrees. This [chart shows] four-year college degrees going to men: about 43 percent of women and 57 percent of men. But pretty quickly we narrowed that gap and then over time what we can see is the gap widened, but in the other direction. We actually now have, in terms of degrees being gained by gender, a bigger gender gap than we did in the 1970s, but it’s the other way around.

In other words, women are slightly further ahead of men today in degree acquisition than men were ahead of women in 1972 when we passed Title IX. This wasn’t something that was predicted or expected, but it’s part of a general pattern now where we see big gender gaps. It’s worth saying, just in passing, that we see similar patterns in most advanced economies. In fact, in the Scandinavian countries, [we see] much bigger gaps. Some of the biggest gaps we see in postsecondary education are in Norway, Finland, Denmark, et cetera. So this is a general pattern, not something weird about the U.S. education system. But there are some ways in which we are a little bit bigger.

These are relative numbers, of course, but this [chart] shows you the absolute enrollment into higher education since the seventies. You can see the same sort of gap emerging here: in recent years, a significant stagnation and then a drop in male college enrollment and absolute numbers as well. There is a demographic story here, of course, but we’re also seeing a big gender gap in enrollment, in young men going to college.

Then in completion, too—this is a noisy chart, but if you look at the top, what this shows you is conditional on enrolling. What are the graduation rates? The top line here is the four-year graduation rate, and the one below it is the more commonly used six-year graduation rate. What you can see is there’s an 11 percentage point gap in four-year graduation rates and a 7 percentage point gap in six-year graduation rates. Even though fewer men are going to these institutions, they’re also less likely, having gone, to complete. And that’s a big part of the story here.

Just below that, [the chart is] showing the difference between publics and privates. Actually, the gaps aren’t really any different, but of course the levels are. The basic story here is there’s an enrollment issue and a completion issue. If we break by race and gender—which I now think is an obligation on researchers, to do it both ways—you can see that there are big race gaps in enrollment rates. These are enrollment rates, now, for 18- to 24-year-olds—for the total on the left—and then for these racial and ethnic groups. What you can see is there are still very big race gaps. We shouldn’t skip past the fact here that whilst there are gender gaps by race, there are also huge race gaps. It’s important to recognize that in enrollment.

In completion, similarly, we see different conditional on enrolling, quite big differences: very high rates of completion for Asian Americans, followed by White, and lower for Hispanic and Black. Also, you see bigger gender gaps for certain groups. The completion rate among those students who do go to college is much lower for Black men than for Black women, even though it’s lower for Black students overall. So when we crosscut by race and gender, we use an intersectional lens. We do see certain groups that are struggling even more than others, and that’s particularly true of Black men in the education system, which is why it’s a priority for the American Institute for Boys and Men to dig further into what’s happening there.

[Shows new chart.] This is some work that we’re doing now—we haven’t published this, so this is work that we’re trying to do, here, but then I realize that actually all the experts in this field are on this call and listening in on this. And so we want to wait and see how this conversation goes, because we’re very interested in what’s happening to CTE more generally. This is showing you a broad decline [in CTE participation] up until 2013. And then, of course, I think we’re going to hear that there’s been a bit of a shift back towards CTE, but overall for men and women, [there was] a decline during that period. There’s a turn away from CTE investment during that period, which I think is now starting to be addressed somewhat.

What I’ll say in conclusion is that whilst it’s quite clear that for various reasons the education system now looks to be inadvertently somewhat more female friendly than male friendly, CTE, as we’re going to hear, actually seems to go the other way—hence the paradox, Rachel, that you referred to at the beginning. I think that that should be a lesson that we can learn from on both sides: What can each side learn from the other? But it makes me more optimistic that there are ways in which we can, in fact, provide learning for boys and men that can help them to flourish more and perhaps reverse some of those trends that I started my presentation with.

And if it turns out that CTE is somewhat more male friendly than it is female friendly (or vice versa), then that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That may be a feature rather than a bug, even as we recognize that of course these distributions are always going to overlap and that there will be many, many girls and women who will benefit significantly from CTE training and vice versa. I think it’s now not only permissible but important for us to say we need to look at the gendered effects from these different educational approaches and interventions so that we can try and create an education system that’s diverse enough and flexible enough and balanced enough to provide the kind of support that both girls and boys, women and young men need in order to flourish in today’s labor market. And with that, I’ll close my remarks.

Rachel Rosen: Thank you so much, Richard. That was really fascinating and [those were] some really stark graphs you shared on some of the issues that are affecting young men. Why don’t we turn it over to Shaun, who you’ve nicely teed it up for, and who’s going to really dig into the research that he’s done on CTE?

Shaun Dougherty: Terrific. [Shows new slide.] Hopefully that’s now visible to you all. Excellent. Thanks, Richard, for setting the stage and for all of your excellent work thus far that I’ve enjoyed following as well. This seems like a uniquely nice group of folks to [be on a] panel with, given our respective interests. I’ll focus a bit further on building on Richard’s last slide on gender differences in technical education—focusing mainly on technical education in high school in the United States.

In general, we’ve long known that participants in CTE in high school tend to come out of high school earning more money than non-CTE participants. Historically males were more likely to participate in CTE because vocational and technical education 40 years ago was highly focused in skilled trades in areas that, as I’ll show you, disproportionately enrolled male students rather than female students. So we have known these things pay off. But what programs and programs of study that students pursue are highly different by gender, and I’ll try to make clear some evidence of that.

There’s also evidence that motivates this webinar today that shows there are really quite stark differences in outcomes that run contrary to the trends that Richard was showing overall in the educational space over the last 40 years or so. Understanding the sources and the consequences of these differences is critical. [This slide shows] a somewhat analogous breakdown to what you saw a few moments ago, showing total CTE credits—so year-long courses, more or less, that students have taken in high school. And this is the most recent data that still is about a decade out of phase with where we are currently. But I’ll point out on the right-hand side here, [there is] a big difference in the total credits completed in high school between males and females. If we look [apart from] gender across racial differences, there are some pretty stark differences here. I would say there’s little evidence that I’ve seen in more recent years that this is meaningfully out of date. So this is older data, it’s a decade old, but I think largely reflective of what we still see happening in the current educational landscape.

[Shows new chart.] Some of these overall differences in CTE participation in high school are really summed up in what sort of cluster or program of study students are following. For instance, here, just to the right of the center, there’s “engineering, design, and production,” where males are participating almost five to one in terms of total credits accumulated relative to females.

On the other side of that, here in “health care” we see that it’s sort of four to one in favor of females. That’s similar if I had education programs on here—and back the other direction if we look at construction trades. And so really large differences in overall participation, but even conditional on what programs students are participating. Inevitably this accounts for some of the difference that we end up finding in terms of post-school outcomes. I’ll have some more to say about that in just a second.

To show you another look at this that maybe makes it a little easier to see, this [chart] is using state data from just one state (Massachusetts), but it’s reflective of about half a dozen states where I’ve used the state administrative data to compare. The horizontal line is 50-50 participation and each of these bars are different programs of study. You can see areas like “information technology” (in the light blue), “construction,” “transportation,” “engineering” are all about 80 percent male. In contrast, “health care” and “education” are about 90 percent or more female. [There are] really stark differences in who’s participating.

Does this matter? I would say the evidence is increasingly clear that there’s a consequential difference in outcomes for males and females in these spaces. We found in a few different settings that males who participate in technical education in high school are increasing their attendance in really meaningful ways: reducing the total absence from school by about 20 percent or more. We also see some evidence that test scores are better for males who participated in technical education. Despite the fact that there’s not an explicit focus on more math or more reading, participation and outcomes on the required state tests are actually better for males who participated in technical education.

Most stunningly, some of the largest effects we see for males are in high school graduation, on the order of being about 10 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school, in some settings. And in almost all of these educational outcomes, we see no difference in the outcomes for females. I’ll just offer, by way of explanation, that some of this is because the outcomes for males who don’t participate in technical education are especially bad. Whereas for females who don’t participate in technical education, their outcomes are sort of around the average for females in these same settings. So some of this participating in technical education is really about avoiding the bad outcome for males that would involve not graduating from high school, not showing up for school, performing at a much lower level on state standardized test scores and then subsequently having worse workforce outcomes.

If we look at college-going differences across even more settings—as Rachel showed earlier in the P-TECH study—males who were in CTE in high school, at least in the 9-14 model, performed better in college (10 percentage points higher attainment for two-year degrees).

This is similar to some studies of career academies in North Carolina. Dual-enrollment programs elsewhere in North Carolina showed the opposite. But this stands out as a bit of an exception—though it was a different program structure, admittedly. Across all of these studies that look at postsecondary outcomes, most of the positive impacts for males show up in two-year colleges. And again, just by way of speculation, I’ll say that part of what CTE and high school does—and in particular these 9-14 or career academy models—[they] have direct pathways into postsecondary programs and make a clear connection between what students are studying in high school and how it relates to a college-going pathway. Both the relevance of the programming in high school and a clear reason for pursuing further training in college may help explain some of why we see these programs as smoothing the point of transition to postsecondary education for males.

Finally, I’ll just focus on workforce outcomes for a second. The evidence that we see on earnings through about age 25 in a few different settings, now—they are profoundly larger. They are 20 to 30 percent higher, both at any single point in time—so at age 25—and cumulatively, between ages 18 and 25. Getting into these technical education programs tends to put males, in particular, on pathways to higher earnings—so in transportation and skilled trades in advanced manufacturing programs that pay some of the highest wages for individuals coming right out of college or a two-year degree. By contrast, again, we don’t see that females are faring worse, per se, but they’re not performing better for two reasons, we think.

One, the comparison outcomes for females are not as bad as they are for males. To harken back to a figure from Richard’s slide deck, labor force participation is quite low, much lower among high school–educated males now than it was 40 years ago. A lot of this difference is made up when we look at males who participated in technical education. In contrast, females are much more likely to participate in the workforce. However, these education and health care or other caring professions that are predominantly female in CTE tend to pay relatively poorly compared to the average wage for someone with a high school degree or a two-year degree. And so again, we don’t see worse outcomes, but we don’t see the same sort of financial and workforce participation differences for females that we do for males.

Given the time we have, I think I’ll just make one comment on this slide. On the vertical axis, people who are above the horizontal line are earning more than average seven years after graduating from high school. Those below—there’s no one below, in fact—are earning less. In this case, all of these data points being above the horizontal line suggests that CTE is paying off for students from a range of backgrounds, but it’s especially high for males relative to females. But the left and right of the vertical axis highlight college-going differences, and there you can see females are more likely to go to college even in CTE programs and males on average are much less likely. I’ll pause there and cede my time, but I think it’s very clear that there are substantial differences in gender outcomes as a function of CTE participation in high school.

Rachel Rosen: Thank you so much, Shaun. It was really interesting to hear about how you’ve been pulling it apart based on the field and students going to college and not going to college. Let’s turn it over to Diallo, who’s going to talk through the P-TECH model in our study. I do want to clarify, in the MDRC study of P-TECH, it included seven P-TECH schools in New York City. Diallo is going to talk through the P-TECH model that is spread across New York State in more than 50 schools. Diallo, why don’t you help us dig into what P-TECH looks like on the ground?

Diallo Shabazz: Absolutely. Thank you very much, Rachel. Let me pull up my slides.

I think I’d like to start by referring back to the early slides that Richard showed where he opened with some of the disparities that men were dealing with compared to women as it related to suicide, wages, labor force participation. It reminds me sometimes of what we’re up against. In New York and across the United States, in addition to men dealing with some of those higher percentages of suicide, there are other types of factors that are impacting particularly the boys that we’re serving, broken down by race and ethnicity. For example, we know that in many cities and states that there are higher incarceration [rates] for Black and Brown boys. I’m originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, although I lived in New York most of my life. And in Wisconsin, I believe the statistic was that Black people comprise about 4 percent of the state’s population, but about 50 percent of the prison population.

These systems sometimes are designed in a way where when education fails, obviously this is where the boys end up. These 9-14 high schools are two-thirds male; some of our schools are as high as 80 percent male. So we look at the design of P-TECH as a way of not just being able to serve students and prepare them for college and careers, but also as a way of allowing them to survive these systems outright.

P-TECH is a 9-14 six-year model. Talking about the way we structure these CTE programs is important. We’ve been talking about CTE, but what do we mean by that? How are we defining CTE? What does a high-quality CTE program look like? Those are some of the details that I want to take you through in this presentation. P-TECH is designed so that it primarily focuses on underserved students where if not for P-TECH, these students would not have had an opportunity to attend college to get their associate degree at a community college.

All of P-TECH is STEM focused, for the most part, so about 85 percent of our career pathways are STEM. We do have some business careers and communications, et cetera, but for the most part it’s preparing students for technology and engineering careers. P-TECH is at no cost to a student’s family, which means they’re getting a free college education. Also, we do all of this work in collaboration with industry partners. We have our industry partners agreeing that the P-TECH students will be first “in line” for jobs upon completing P-TECH.

Career readiness is also integrated into the P-TECH model. We know that we’re preparing young people for particular types of careers. We differentiate between career exploratory programs and career preparatory programs in CTE. Whereas career exploratory programs are the types of programs that expose students to a career and show them what happens when you work in a particular occupation, the career preparatory programs like CTE are the ones that are actually conferring the technical skill sets and the industry certifications and the associate degrees that prepare students to be employable right after they complete the P-TECH model.

In designing these CTE programs—keeping in mind some of the best ways to design programs for high school students and also boys—we have a skills-mapping approach to our curriculum design where we’re sitting down with the industry partners and the college partners to figure out what are the skill sets and the competencies the students need to learn in high school and in college so that they graduate college and career ready.

Also, from a support standpoint, we have a robust work-based learning model where we try to make sure that students in the program aren’t just learning in the classroom. This work-based learning model is broken down into three different levels for P-TECH. It goes from an order of what I would call more simple to a higher level of complexity.

For Level 1, what we’re really talking about are these one-offs, these guest speakers, site visits, career days, mock interviews. We want to make sure the students are exposed to these types of careers so they see what’s possible. From a diversity standpoint, we want to make sure that the people coming into the schools—many times you have an opportunity for the students to see people that look like them [and] that reflect some of their own backgrounds.

Level 2 is competitions and hackathons, so the students are able to utilize the skill sets that they’re developing at the school. This is also an opportunity for them to build relationships among their peers, among mentors, and to be able to get out of the school and participate in some paid internships and possibly apprenticeships as well. We really try to make sure that students have a robust exploratory experiential model  through P-TECH. These bullet points here highlight some of the experiences P-TECH students have had in collaboration with industry partners: New York Power Authority is a large utility that offers internships to P-TECH. IBM, the founding corporation of the P-TECH model in New York City, has hired P-TECH graduates for various IT roles. Even Tesla, which has its solar roofing product made in upstate New York, has hired students as production associates.

This is all a part of our model. And, of course, P-TECH, although it started in New York, has been replicated in 13 states across the U.S. and a couple dozen countries. So this is more than just a pilot operating in New York City or New York State. It is something that has been scalable to varying degrees of success. Within the state of New York, we have about 59 P-TECH schools and programs. There are some schools where every student in the school is a P-TECH student, and then there are some schools where P-TECH operates as a program where a small number of students in the high school are able to participate in the 9-14 model. There are 10 economic regions across the state of New York, and it’s important to consider this because P-TECH is not only an educational strategy, it is a workforce development strategy as well. Nine of the 10 economic regions across the state of New York have more than one P-TECH school or program there. It’s seen as a way of preparing young people for the workforce. And, of course, this is done in collaboration with over 40 college partners and we have about 7,500 students that enrolled in P-TECH across the country.

In terms of career pathways, this [chart] is a mind map that shows some of the industries and degree pathways that P-TECH students participate in. In the upper left, for example, you see advanced manufacturing is one of the degree pathways, and here you see that there are a couple of different types of AAS degrees. If we’re talking about preparing students for careers, we focus on AAS instead of AS. An associate degree in science is usually preparing a student to pursue their bachelor’s, but the associate in applied sciences is really preparing them for the workforce. We really want to make sure that students have an opportunity to graduate prepared for the workforce, which is why, while there are some P-TECH programs that allow students to earn an AS degree, the majority of them focus on an AAS degree so that we can prepare these boys for their careers.

I’m not going to run through all of these [slides]. This [chart] is performance data pulled primarily from some previous MDRC reports. Rachel will see some quotes here that look familiar. These P-TECH schools, they’re public schools; they’re not cherry-picking students. There’s no test to get in. Actually, on average, the eighth-grade students that are coming into a number of our P-TECH schools are lower achieving than some of their comparison schools. Through a series of summer bridge programs and tutoring and mentoring and increasing seat time, et cetera, they’re really able to support these students and push them into the math and science acceleration that they need to begin taking college courses, sometimes as early as their tenth grade and sometimes as late, of course, as the fifth year—right after they complete their senior year.

We also have some data from the Public Policy Institute, which is the nonprofit associated with the Business Council of New York State as part of the P-TECH Leadership Council. This [slide’s information is] from 2021; about 78 percent of students that were in a P-TECH program were persisting until the end of their senior year at earning a high school diploma and 74 percent were getting some college credit.

This last statistic here on the bottom right-hand side is really one of the big ones for us: We have about a 39 percent graduation rate for tech students completing their associate degree within the program (so by Year 6). We know that that substantially exceeds the national on-time for community college graduation rate.

These last couple slides show us a little bit of a gender breakdown. For the most part, across the state of New York, P-TECH students—females and males—are doing relatively well in terms of receiving their high school diploma. Males are outperforming females slightly. We have females at about 85 percent and male students closer to 90 percent.

This slide here shows that breakdown by gender. We have the males on the top and the females on the bottom across the board. By race, the males are slightly outperforming the females in every single category. This is also one of the few models where students of color are outperforming White students. With P-TECH, this is an opportunity to talk about how the White students in P-TECH obviously are not underperforming. They’re still meeting, I think, state averages, in terms of high school graduation, and [they] have higher two-year college community college rates. But it shows the impact that P-TECH is able to make across the board for students from other backgrounds. We’re continuing to improve the P-TECH model, and I have a lot of additional information to share, but I’m going to pause here so that we can kick it back to Rachel to continue the discussion.

Rachel Rosen: Thank you so much, Diallo. That was a really great overview of what exactly P-TECH includes so that people can understand what’s behind some of the results that we have. Before we go into specific questions, I just wanted to let folks in the audience know that the Q&A section is open, and if you want to start putting questions in there, we’ll filter those questions and get them to the panelists after we go through a few questions that we had to get started.

Just to kick us off: Richard, I wanted to ask you [something that’s] a little bit off topic [from] what you presented. One of the things that really stuck out to me in your book Of Boys and Men was about how there were a lot of programs that when they were broken down—I think it was Kalamazoo Promise and some of these other social programs—most of the results were driven by females, the opposite of what we see in CTE programs. As the premier scholar on what’s going on with boys and young men, do you have thoughts about that? What is it about CTE that is supporting young men in ways that other social programs are not?

Richard Reeves: Well, thank you. I have thoughts, Rachel, that’s the right way to describe what I’m going to do rather than anything—and actually, inspired by Diallo, I came up with four Ps that might explain it. I’m going to throw these out and see what people think.

One is the pedagogy, which is [that] the learning approach is different. Is there something different about it, is it “more hands-on,” et cetera.

The second P is it could be the person. There’s some evidence that boys are slightly more relational learners. They need to know the who before the what. Is there something more relational about CTE as opposed to classroom learning? If so, that might explain it.

The third P is the point. Is it that CTE makes the point of the learning more obvious, more related to work, more immediate, more like, I know why I’m doing this, I know why I should care about this? Which, again, for all kinds of reasons about future orientation, might be a little bit more focused on boys.

And then the last one is the pathway, the structure. The additional structure. I’m thinking about the guided pathways work in community colleges, et cetera. It may well be that if boys, on the average, have slightly lower levels of noncognitive skills, more structure—especially across the transition from secondary to postsecondary—might just, on the average, benefit boys a bit more than girls. In other words, they might need more structure or benefit more from the structure. They don’t necessarily have the skills.

Those are my four starting hypotheses or thoughts, but I wouldn’t say anything more strongly than that at this stage. I’d love to hear what other people think about that.

Rachel Rosen: I think that’s really fascinating: person, point, pedagogy, and pathway. Maybe it is something about this structure. I really like how you’re thinking about that in this framework. Shaun, one of the things you talked about in your presentation was that you really showcase the differences in the fields of study and choices that boys and girls are making and how those are different. I’m wondering if you can talk about how we [should] think about that divide in fields—of how young men are choosing the kinds of things they study versus what young women are choosing and whether it makes a difference that boys are clustering into CTE programs both that are higher paid and where there are also fewer females. How do we think about that in light of the work that Richard has talked about, with boys struggling?

Shaun Dougherty: Part of the way that I’ve thought about this is the CTE clusters are subsets of our overall workforce, but they really make the gender differences stand out. If we look in the workforce overall, it’s not so obvious. But if we look within individual occupations or industries, the differences we see in CTE participation by gender really mirror what we’ve seen in the workforce in the U.S. and globally for a long time, which suggests that we’ve socially constructed work or types of work—[and] who sorts into different types of work—in ways that align with gender, to some extent. Those have been reinforced over time. But over the last 50 to 70 years, the U.S. has gone from a primarily production-based economy to primarily service-driven economy. So a lot of the jobs that have been predominantly male from half a century ago, many of those don’t exist or they exist differently than they did then.

In addition to people sorting into programs that align with where they see themselves in the larger economy, there’s also this different importance of CTE maybe in connecting males to work that they find meaningful or that has representation in the workforce. That creates an especially strong connection. The other related piece—and then I’ll pause—is as the economy has gotten more service oriented, the sort of traditionally female-dominated professions or more service-oriented professions have tended to be more female on average. And so I think the educational structure and a pathway into the workforce has maybe been less opaque for females than for males as this overall economic shift has occurred.

Rachel Rosen: It’s really interesting to couch it in the bigger question of what’s going on in the economy and how that has affected young men and young women differently. Diallo, you work with so many different schools and you’ve also worked with the New York City public schools and you have a real background in working with lots of CTE programs over your career. I’m wondering if you can tell us what you think it is about CTE settings that’s really working to support young men in these ways?

Diallo Shabazz: Well, I really like the four Ps that Richard laid out. I think it encapsulates some of the—I won’t call them best practices, but better practices that are utilized to ensure students are able to move through the model. The pedagogy piece reminds me of how we really try to emphasize project-based learning. It also reminds me that when we’re trying to push students into technology and engineering careers and pathways, that there really has to be an intentional focus on how to get them through the science and the math. The way some schools have structured that is by increasing the amount of seat time the students are spending in these courses, which means that they’re starting school earlier, they’re allowing students to leave later, they’re putting them into peer-mentoring courses where they’re tutoring them in between the college courses.

Some of the newer recommendations on the table for the future of P-TECH that have been thrown out—and there are no RFPs for this yet, but we’ve had principals say, “Life is getting in the way, particularly for our boys. Can we change P-TECH from a 9-14 model to a 9-16 model because that would help us be successful? Can we start a public boarding school so that students can get everything they need to get in this facility?”

From a mentoring standpoint, obviously in order to be a licensed CTE teacher, you have to have had some time in the industry, which means you’re talking about some of the experiences that you’ve had working there. So you’re able to serve as a mentor to the young person. The P-TECH programs with strong mentoring programs—obviously they benefit the girls as well, but I think they have tremendous impacts on the boys. There’s no strong youth development rite of passage component built into the public education model, but we all understand that it’s something that is incredibly important. The schools that are doing that better within a CTE model, leveraging the industry partners, are the ones that are really able to support boys in getting through the programs.

Rachel Rosen: That’s fascinating. I think some of your answers bleed into what my next question is, which is: One of the things that’s really a conundrum is that even though we see all of these really negative outcomes for men across society—with the suicide rates and the lower degree rates and all of this kind of stuff—broadly speaking, at the end of the day, we still see men outearning women. This is a paradox that’s built into this. I’m wondering if you all have thoughts about what the solutions are to how we can continue to support young men to achieve without undermining young women or without keeping young women from obtaining those higher-earning careers and moving into those higher-earning careers. I’d love to talk a little bit about what some solutions might be.

I’m going to open that up to all three of you. After that, it feels like you all want to ask each other some questions. I’m definitely going to open up the floor for that. For the audience—we see your questions coming in the Q&A, and we will start asking those after the panelists have had a chance to answer and ask each other some questions. So again, just think about how we might think about solutions.

Diallo Shabazz: I’ll dive in. I’m going to frame this the way that Richard did: These are thoughts. One of the things that I’ve noticed as students transition from high school to college into the workplace is that earlier on, the girls just crushed the boys across the board, particularly in terms of leadership roles and confidence and opportunities—and then they run into the glass ceiling and the phenomenon of sexism and it flips the paradigm a bit. Some of the same girls that were running all the organizations in high school and college are no longer in those positions as they enter into the workforce. I think that from a solution-based standpoint, one of the things we really need to do is talk about gender dynamics and relations and sexism in leadership development at the high school and college level—[so] that we’re teaching it to young people as a way of qualifying them to be professionals.

One of the rising popular trainings in workforce development now is around the idea of developing executive function within workers. One of the things that IBM said to us about the P-TECH students coming out of the programs—they say, “You nailed it. They have the technical competencies. They can’t advocate for themselves in meetings. They can’t communicate ideas; they can’t push back.” Sometimes [it was] because they were a bit younger. Sometimes it was a bit of a cultural corporate difference. But this idea of executive function is incredibly important. All of the curricula and outlines I’ve seen for the executive function trainings, none of them include anything about sexism or gender dynamics or discrimination. So we need to make sure that we’re thinking about how we create leaders and incorporating some of these concepts there at a very early stage for boys and girls, for men and women, so that it becomes a part of general professional competencies.

Richard Reeves: I’ll piggyback on that. If I may say, there’s recent evidence from a very good meta-analysis showing that there’s still quite a bit of discrimination against men going into female-dominated fields, but that we’ve largely managed to get rid of discrimination in hiring the other way around. The broader point here is that it’s not a zero-sum game and that we should never frame it that way. Sometimes it feels like—and your question sort of got close to this, Rachel—we’re saying, “Look, we need boys and men to do worse in the education system, given that they’re going to have advantages in the labor market, and then hopefully two wrongs will make a right.” That’s the feel of this debate. We should be fixing both. We should be fixing the education system so that it’s actually fair, but at the same time, there’s a lot we need to do in the labor market in the ways that women are held back.

If you look at the gender pay gap, now—Claudia Golden’s work is very good on this, of course—it is because of these occupational gaps that we see. Mostly it’s because something happens to women in their thirties that doesn’t seem to happen in the same way to men. And we haven’t reformed the labor market for a world where, guess what, women and men both work now. We have a labor market that’s still based, explicitly or implicitly, on the single-breadwinner model, and then [we] wonder why that cripples women, especially when they hit their thirties. We absolutely need to fix that as well, because we massively lose female talent in their thirties, but meanwhile, we’re losing a lot of male talent earlier.

I’ll just give a very sneak peek of a piece of work that’s coming out. It’s not published yet; I may get into trouble for announcing this—but anyway, I will. [It’s] from Matt Darling (who’s at Niskanen [Center]) for us, [and] actually shows that if you increase the risk attached to hiring people, it seems to make employers a bit less likely to hire young men and a little bit less likely to hire slightly older women, which is completely consistent with this theory that actually the men aren’t quite getting skilled enough as quickly, but then employers start to worry about women and what their fertility might do for their labor market prospects. This is a big test of our ability to be able to do two things at once and think two thoughts at once, but we absolutely need to, in my view.

Rachel Rosen: There’s a lot in there. I see how you piggybacked on Diallo’s thoughts about how we support young men but agree that there are definitely unique challenges for women as they navigate the labor market into their childbearing years. Shaun, do you have any thoughts about solutions here?

Shaun Dougherty: In the spirit of being additive (but not at all to contrast with what’s been put on the table by Diallo and Richard), the mentoring piece that Diallo mentioned for benefiting males, especially in high school—I’d say we could think about bolstering that for women, particularly in higher education. I think representation matters at the high school level. It does in higher ed, too. And if we have more scientists, more STEM-trained females helping to train and mentor females to pursue and persist in the STEM professions—that’s one dimension of the pipeline where we still see massive gender imbalance; Richard’s work has highlighted this in degree receipt in STEM fields. It’s still disproportionately male, even as females are getting more of the college degrees nationally or in aggregate. I’d say the same thing in education and health care professions for males; having better representation on both sides here could start to normalize, destigmatize, and create supports that should have persistent downstream effects and maybe cumulative effects over time. Just one additional idea.

Rachel Rosen: That sounds great. I really like the idea of mentoring and making sure that everybody has a mentor that fits them. Do you have questions for each other? I thought I picked up on that. If you want to take a few minutes—maybe we’ll take about 15 minutes to allow you guys to ask questions of each other, and then we’ll ask some of these questions from the audience.

Richard Reeves: I’d like to ask both Diallo and Shaun whether the fact that these CTE programs seem to work better for boys and young men should be seen as a feature rather than a bug. In other words, given what else is happening that that’s not something to run away from, but actually maybe even lean into. The implication of that is that we would be pretty relaxed about the fact that it was more boys and men in those CTE programs, given those different outcomes. You’ve already mentioned, Diallo—I think you’ve said you’re two-thirds male. Shaun, you’ve mentioned... Is it not only okay that these skew male, but actually a good thing that they skew male, given the outcomes? They don’t want to answer.

Diallo Shabazz: I am not sure that it’s a good thing that they skew male. For a very long time vocational education—for all the reasons you already stated, I think, both you and Shaun—was predominantly male. While we do have some P-TECH schools that are 80 percent male, we also have some P-TECH schools and programs that are predominantly female. It sometimes depends on the career pathway itself. I think that these are all positives. I think that what we want to do is learn what’s working. We don’t have a scenario where 80 percent of male students are succeeding in programs and P-TECH programs and 20 percent of girls are succeeding, or vice versa. There’s pretty high achievement across the board. I think it kind of helps to inform how we support both girls and boys in the programs. I think it’s a net positive for both.

Shaun Dougherty: I’ll add that to the extent that it’s a feature of the system, I think it’s partially that a lot of technical education—though it’s expanded substantially to include health care and technology pathways that didn’t exist to the same extent 40, 50 years ago—still offers a lot of programs that have been historically or prototypically male. Maybe some of the reason we see these disproportionate benefits are some of the features of some of these programs as well as how they reflect the larger workforce, [which] happens to be disproportionately male. But I’d say the other piece—the reason I do think of it a bit as a feature rather than a bug—is the outcomes for males who otherwise find their way into CTE are especially bad, whereas we don’t see that same contrast for females. So whether it’s the four Ps or that and some other factors, I do think it’s worth highlighting the ways in which technical education tends, on average, to do better with similar individuals than we might expect otherwise.

Richard Reeves: I actually thought your point, Shaun, about avoiding the bad outcome—I think that’s something that tends to get neglected in policy analysis and in debate generally: What’s the counterfactual here? I thought that was a really strong point. I just wanted to underline that we tend to say, “Look at these amazing outcomes: They’re earning 20 percent more; they’re graduating college more.” But actually, sometimes it’s the path avoided. That’s really important, I think, especially for boys. I hadn’t really thought about it that way before. I love the way you frame that and I think we neglect that bottom tail on my GPA chart a little bit, and that’s where a lot more of the boys are. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but I think it may be socially and culturally at least as important to avoid those bad outcomes.

Rachel Rosen: Absolutely. Do any of you have any other questions you want to ask each other before we turn to questions from the audience?

Shaun Dougherty: I have a question for Diallo, being sort of ignorant about the extent of the international scaling of P-TECH. I’m curious, across the U.S. and internationally, do all of these features—these four features—persist? And, if so, in what ways are there different variations on those that have sprung up? If I’m from a place and I’d like to think about expanding these, but my local economy looks like X instead of Y—how have folks approached that, at least from your understanding?

Diallo Shabazz: That’s actually a pretty big question. There are actually three different models of implementation, even within the state of New York. We talked about the ones where every student in the school is a P-TECH student, the P-TECH programs, and then we have the BOCES model—the Boards of [Cooperative] Educational Services—where multiple small school districts who don’t have a lot of money for a high-quality technology lab will pool their money into a BOCES facility and they’ll send students from those different school districts to that BOCES facility to get training. We put a P-TECH right there at the BOCES facility. Even within the state of New York, there are multiple models.

But what we run into is something that we often call a poor implementation of the P-TECH model. That happens when we start looking at the outcomes and they’re just very poor. It’s poor attendance, poor graduation, poor industry engagement. The college partner is changing degree pathway course requirements without telling the school district. It’s a complex model to maintain because you have so many cooks in the kitchen. And every single P-TECH program is supposed to have a steering committee that’s led by the principal of the school—that includes the school district, the industry partner, and the college partner—that meets regularly to talk about how they’re managing the program. It’s a slightly different type of methodology, in terms of how you would manage a traditional educational program. When you don’t do it that way, then things fall through the cracks.

I would say that’s really one of the ways to look at whether it’s working or not working in certain places. In Texas, what they’ve decided to do is [this]: Texas has the most P-TECH programs in schools in the country, but they’ve also gone with smaller models where they put a small P-TECH program in every single high school so they don’t have to manage this massive infrastructure.

And then around the world there are certain countries that have tried to do it their way and not brought in industry in a powerful way and then realized that it doesn’t have the political capital that it needs to be funded year over year. That’s happened as well. So [there’s] a longer conversation around what some of the international implementation looks like. But it really comes down to those four pillars: If people have maintained them from the very beginning, then they have the semblance of what looks like a P-TECH program.

Richard Reeves: Can I ask Diallo a follow-up question? You said, “Life happens,” and you mentioned a boarding school. That was intriguing to me because there are, of course, the SEED schools as one Monument Academy in DC. Are there any CTE-based boarding schools that you know of? That anyone knows of?

Diallo Shabazz: Not that I know. I don’t have a lot of background on boarding schools. The boarding school idea actually comes from Rashid Davis, who’s the founding principal of P-TECH in Brooklyn and who’s lectured on P-TECH all over the country and the world. He’s at a point where he realizes that this would be a really interesting evolution of the P-TECH model.

Richard Reeves: That’s so interesting. There’s the Hershey school that comes up. There’s the SEED schools, but they’re very traditionally academic. That’s kind of the point. So this is an intriguing idea. If we could maybe get someone who’s listening to fund a CTE-organized boarding school for kids from lower-income backgrounds, then that would be something. And then [if] MDRC evaluated [it], that would great.

Diallo Shabazz: It would be—

Richard Reeves: Anyone out there want to do that?

Diallo Shabazz: Right. And just to say really quickly, Rachel, when we think of the boarding school idea, we think of wealthier parents being able to send their kids to boarding school. But there is a low-income model for boarding school that we know of and that’s called a juvenile detention center or a jail or juvenile jail. And so that’s really—

Richard Reeves: That’s the most expensive; that’s the most expensive.

Diallo Shabazz: And that is the most expensive model that we have at scale right now, unfortunately.

Richard Reeves: So true.

Rachel Rosen: One of our MDRC folks in the audience is reminding me that MDRC did do an evaluation of the SEED school, and you all can look that up on the MDRC website. [It] is a publicly funded boarding school. He is writing that he does not recall the results (and neither do I), but that is something you can follow up on afterward.

Why don’t we turn to some of the questions that are coming in from the audience? We’ve got some really good ones here. One person in the audience says, “How do we frame solutions to these gendered recruitment and completion patterns without leaning too far into gender essentialism?” This person is a researcher and says, “In my research that looks like trying to recruit women into computer science. You hear a lot of ‘Let’s show women how computers can help people.’ But then if you flip that, it becomes something like ‘Let’s show men how nursing can be competitive.’ How do we think about framing implications for recruitment and retention efforts without relying on gendered stereotypes of what boys and girls need from different programs?”

Richard Reeves: I’m willing to have a go. I think there’s a middle ground between an overemphasis on gender essentialism—which you saw in a nursing program out in Oregon where it was something like “Are you man enough to be a nurse?” And they had pictures of guys—like rugby players and rock climbers and stuff—and it actually seems to have backfired because it sort of overdid it and actually felt [like] Well, if you’re having to try that hard to persuade me that it’s a masculine thing to do, maybe it isn’t. You know what I mean?

But I think at the same time, we shouldn’t inadvertently miss the fact that some messages do, on average, land a little bit better with one side or the other, and just make sure it’s balanced. If it’s true, and it appears to be that emphasizing, say, a more competitive element to a career…[I’m] thinking about Delfino’s paper that shows that attracting men into social work is more successful when you say something like “This is a profession where ability and hard work get rewarded”—that just seems to tilt a little bit towards men.

Now we can have a long discussion about why, and nature and nurture and whatever. But as long as it’s done alongside messages that are seen as more attractive the other way, it’s okay. So you want messages that are not inadvertently imbalanced. And if it turns out that there are some ways, and the question is right...

I’ll say one more thing. Remember Janet Yellen, and other people trying to get women into economics, would say, “Look, we need to say that economics is not just about Asian monetary policy, it’s also about families and schools and stuff.” That seems to attract more women. Now you could have attacked them for that, for gender essentialism, or you could have just said, “Well, that’s working. It’s getting more women into the profession, so that’s okay.” So we shouldn’t get hung up on it. But we also shouldn’t avoid the difficulty of a conversation. Just see what works and [do] not lean too hard one way or the other—[that] would be my advice.

Rachel Rosen: Thank you. Another question that somebody asks is “Given that we know CTE models work to support young men, how can we bring some of those elements into regular comprehensive high school to support men to avoid the core outcomes that Shaun talked about? To make those kinds of schools and experiences stronger and better for young men?

Diallo Shabazz: I’ll start with this one. I think that there are two perspectives to consider. One of them is being able to distinguish between career exploratory programs and career preparatory programs, so we know what we’re talking about. Are we bringing in the elements to expose students to these careers? Or are we trying to actually have them develop the technical skill sets and earn the certification so they’re prepared to work in those careers? We have to be clear about what the approach is going to be, not only from a program design standpoint, but from a funding standpoint as well. Because the Perkins dollars that you get from the federal government really lean more towards the preparatory side, the exploratory side.

But I do think that New York City has been doing some really interesting work around this with their FutureReady program, which is in a large percentage of New York City high schools now. They try to take a CTE model and create an engagement program that includes classroom training and professional development for teachers and industry engagement and work-based learning; they’ve taken a lot of these CTE elements and put them into more comprehensive high schools.

There’s a lot of information about that FutureReady program on the New York City website. It’s really the “north star” of the chancellor and the mayor of New York City to try to make the elements of the CTE programs more widely available for high school students.

Rachel Rosen: I think, Shaun, some of your research that you did recently looks at CTE and comprehensive high schools. I wonder if you have thoughts from that?

Shaun Dougherty: One challenge in comprehensive high schools is the exploratory element that Diallo mentioned: The way we structure course enrollment (for the most part) in comprehensive high schools is you sign up for a course and that’s your elective for that semester or for the whole year, without [you] ever getting to try it on. There are models that CTE-dedicated high schools—so full-time, CTE high schools—have in place at P-TECH (and some of the models we’ve studied in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York) where it’s possible to build that in. We could envision a way to do this at a comprehensive high school that just largely isn’t done, perhaps because it’s a norm to pursue… College readiness requires four years of a world language, which is fantastic, but sometimes [it] crowds out opportunities for other electives, potentially, or other structures.

The second piece is being able to, in that elective structure, offer enough courses for a student to have a two-, three-course sequence in a program of study, maybe with the same teacher, and some aligned work-based learning opportunities. It takes a different level of intentional planning to do that in a comprehensive high school. But because CTE-dedicated high schools are expensive and they’re relatively few, it’s innovative models like putting a P-TECH model in a comprehensive high school—or Massachusetts has been experimenting with innovation pathways, ways of being really clear about designing and embedding elements of a CTE-dedicated high school but in a comprehensive setting. It is possible, it just takes a different level of planning.

Rachel Rosen: That’s great. Somebody asks, “What ideas do you have for state and/or federal policies that can address the various gender gap issues that have been cited? Or is this a local issue for school districts, community colleges, and employers to work out?”

Richard Reeves: Well, it depends where the policy levels are. A lot of this is state level. I think that Shaun and Diallo will be better able to speak to that, some of it. It varies by jurisdiction as well, where the power is. But I do think we certainly shouldn’t be just looking to federal and Perkins. How is the money spent? Who’s spending it? A lot of the action is state and local.

One thing that I wonder about—and this is very much a state-level thing—[is the] teacher workforce. We’ve seen a real cratering in the share of male teachers in K-12 education. It’s down from 33 percent in the eighties to 23 percent now and falling. I actually meant to ask whether CTE teachers are more male, on average, and whether anyone’s done any work to say, “Maybe that’s part of it.” I said “person” earlier, and that person if they’re more likely to be male. And so I just wonder, that’s certainly something that some states and districts are waking up to: the fact they’re trying to solve the teacher shortage with half the workforce. But also, just more generally, the lack of men in the classroom may be disproportionately affecting boys’ outcomes. I know I added a rider to the question, but I would love to hear from both of the other speakers about both those things.

Shaun Dougherty: Part of the funding component [is] Perkins federal dollars account for less than half of total CTE spending in any given school district. I think the local decisions and state decisions really do dominate considerations. I’ll just mention that Sade Bonilla at the University of Pennsylvania did a great study of the scaling of technical education in California where there was a grant-based program for individual school districts. The school districts were meant to scale programs, add programs that aligned with their local workforce needs. Because of the size of the state and because of proximity to a lot of health care systems, health care programs were disproportionately added, which disproportionately enrolled female students, and showed a lot of the same benefits we see for males in terms of engagement and outcomes at the high school level for females in that setting.

So I’ll just add that, to the extent that gender is a salient component within different industry pathways, thinking about how local workforce needs and workforce participation align with program offerings—as well as who’s teaching in those programs—I suspect, really does matter.

To answer Richard’s point and then the question, CTE teachers do tend to be disproportionately male, but part of that’s about the enrollment pieces we’ve already highlighted—Diallo mentioned two-thirds [of people] in P-TECH [are] male, and a lot of the technical high schools that I’ve studied are 60 percent male. The gender of the instructor has tended to follow the enrollment pattern of the students.

Rachel Rosen: Really, really interesting. Somebody else asked, “What is the next most urgent research question to build on the work that’s been discussed today?” If you could say what we want to know next about this—what would that question be?

Richard Reeves: I think you should answer that question, Rachel.

Rachel Rosen: [Laughter] I can take a stab at it. Partly why we wanted to do this is to think about how we start to build a research agenda around this. I think there are a lot of questions in this issue of how students are choosing fields to go into and this bifurcation of men still going into really traditional fields and traditionally gendered fields and so are women. There are provisions of Perkins that try to break that down, to get nontraditional gender populations to go into different areas.

I think there’s work to be done about the kinds of things you were talking about, Richard. How do we change the messaging to have boys and girls be a little bit more expansive about the kinds of choices they make and how they reflect on Is this career something that I would like? How do I know if I would like it, and is it something that is welcoming to somebody like me? How do students understand what are the economic payoffs of the different pathways that they go into and how does that influence their decisions early on? And how much information do they have about that? That would be one that I’d be interested in, but I’d also love to hear from you all about what you think are ways to go here.

Diallo Shabazz: I think maybe to piggyback—it may have been Shaun; I’m not sure who said it earlier? When I mentioned about the juvenile detention facilities being the de facto boarding schools and him saying something like, “And they’re more expensive.” I would really love to see research looking at a more holistic economic financial modeling of how much it costs to educate versus incarcerate (as it relates to preparing people for the labor force). There have been so many studies recently and newspaper articles about this undercover prison workforce where prisoners are being paid these low wages for what I see as increasingly technical jobs and finding out how much it costs to design and sustain that versus how much it costs to do this in the education sphere, and without pretending like they’re completely separate.

Some of the research that we were able to do—and when I say research, I don’t mean like Shaun and Richard, like your research, I mean some of the back-of-the-napkin research we were able to do over the past year—we were looking at the increase in the number of apprenticeship programs and pre-apprenticeship programs inside prisons and jails. The departments of corrections across the country are becoming a lot more sophisticated as it relates to workforce developments and how they’re connecting to employers that are managing these programs. There’s a whole economy being developed there.

At the same time, as it relates to secondary and postsecondary education, we’re trying to figure out how to fund and expand these programs. Some of the newest thinking about them is from a policy standpoint: We need to get access to Pell Grants for early high school education. In New York City, there was actually a bill that just failed—well, there was a bill to increase the tuition assistance program for students, and they did increase the tuition assistance program for low-income students in terms of the amount of money they have available and the income threshold. But there was a line in there saying that that would be available to early college high school students and districts, and they took that language out before the bill passed. So we’re kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul over here as it relates to funding CTE in early college high schools, while there’s a whole different economy being developed over there. And I would love to see some research around that because they’re all the same pieces, but from different vantage points.

Richard Reeves: I’ll add a couple of things, building on both of you, actually. I would love to see... I was going to say I’d love to see some research on the interventions to try and get more boys into those traditionally female-tracked occupations, but we’d need some interventions first. I think we can learn a lot from the work that’s been done to encourage girls into STEM in middle school and high school and see if it transfers. But what is being done on that front would be huge.

And then the other thing—this is more of a worry that leads to a question. My worry is [that] you hear these good results for CTE in many ways, and then you hear us saying it’s particularly good for boys and men who are struggling in other ways. The danger is then that legislators or policymakers at whatever level open the faucet and just pour money in. But it’s not clear to me what level of concentration you need. What are the institutional frameworks? How do you get the fidelity? Diallo, what was your phrase about suboptimal replication of the P-TECH model or something?

Diallo Shabazz: I think you just framed it better than I did. Let’s go with that.

Richard Reeves: Okay. Mine was a bit even more opaque. [Laughter] That’s why—I said I do this for a living. But I do worry a little bit that people just go “Oh, CTE, good, good for boys, awesome. Here’s money,” without really doing the work, [without] saying, “Well, why is it working? And when does it not work? And how does it work?” That might require some qualitative work as well. We can get a long way with this sort of work, but I think actually if we could do some mixed-methods work here too and get some qualitative research around this.

I’m so pleased you’re doing this, Rachel, because I do think this is a huge research field, particularly looking at these gendered effects as to why it’s working. That comes back to the earlier question, which is “Then are there learnings that could be taken into other institutions? Are there essences here that we can take across?” Right now, I think we’ve got some good data from Shaun and you and others, but we need the granularity before we can really, I think, open the spigot on funding. That’s my concern about this. Shaun’s kind of on the hook here now, I think, so he should go next.

Shaun Dougherty: Part of what I think we should try to take from these findings is, What are the features that are serving students well, especially boys in technical education (but maybe they don’t have to be just in technical education). What if we just wanted to improve boys’ college-going, even if they weren’t interested in a pathway that’s well represented in CTE? What are the features of what’s happening in CTE that we could try to port back to education writ large, in ways that maybe make it so that we don’t have to have just one particular model? Not that there is just one, but I think the point is if we can take general learnings that seem to be showing up as evidence of success—especially for boys in technical education—how can we bring that back to just education, period? And think about developing young humans and setting them on a path for success and self-determination and agency and avoiding the bad outcomes, whether that involves the criminal justice system or unemployment or drug use and mental anguish. All of these things we set folks up for in the K-12 education system. And finding ways to serve the system broadly…because not everyone can be a plumber or a programmer or a health technician, but we want everyone to have successful experiences and outcomes in their educational trajectories.

Rachel Rosen: I think that’s really well said. We have time for one last question, and I apologize to folks in the audience if I didn’t get to your question. The last one that I have here is a question about whether it’s possible to combine CTE with liberal arts. Because even though economic equity is clearly very important, there’s a concern that if we overly focus on CTE, there’s a decline in arts and humanities and some of these other things that (arguably) people need to be able to be humans participating in the world in lots of different ways.

Shaun Dougherty: That’s partially what motivated my last set of comments. One of the figures that Richard showed earlier—we moved away from CTE for two decades in part because we had sort of stigmatized that we knew we were using it as a dumping ground, and that was not good practice. And we increased the importance of state standardized tests in ways that took elective time out of a lot of kids’ schedules. The last thing we’d want to do, then, is to inject so much CTE that we squeeze out civics education and the arts. I think part of a balanced education is having all of these be a reasonable and important focus and making clear their interconnectedness: Learning in an engineering pathway can highlight elements of math that, if taught on its own, would maybe not make the connections that would lead to learning. We can do that by connecting the importance of civil structures in broader society and facilitating the ability to have a functioning business, for instance.

Richard Reeves: I’ll piggyback off that, and that means we’ll give Diallo the last word on this, as he’s the practitioner who actually has to do this. Again, it’s framed as zero-sum, but strong educational environments really can do these things at the same time. These trade-offs, these constraints are very often imposed as a result of institutions that just aren’t serving our kids very well, especially the lower-income ones and those from more disadvantaged backgrounds—so in some ways, as a cop out, because you’re sort of refusing the question. But it’s a sign of our failure that we really do think that we can’t serve across the board.

I’ll take the opportunity to make a broader point about this whole area—and I’ve just written a piece for JPAM about this, people can find [it] on the AIBM website—which is to think about gender and education policy in three different ways. One is to see totally gender blind. Let’s even not look at the outcomes by gender or care about that. Who cares? We’re all just humans. The other is to make it gender based: Let’s have single-sex schools and let’s segregate—this is for boys and this is for girls. But there’s a middle ground that I refer to as gender sensitive, which is, We’re going to look and see what the outcomes are. We’re going to be aware of how things are playing out, and sometimes we might have a policy that we know is going to be a bit better for, say, women, in terms of getting them into the labor market more successfully. But this seems to work a bit better for boys, without in any way excluding anybody else from it.

And so I think there’s a space here for gender-sensitive policy that’s not gender-based policy. I think that’s the spirit of the work that we’re talking about. And I’d like to see more of it, not just in this space, but more generally. It’s okay to look at the outcomes by gender, and it’s okay to say, “This seems, on average, to work a bit better for one or the other.” I think you are helping to create that space, Rachel, with your center.

Rachel Rosen: Thank you, Richard. Diallo, do you want to have the last word on that and then we’ll wrap up?

Diallo Shabazz: The only thing that I would add is, I think that we also need to have a sense of urgency about this issue. Obviously this is something that we’ve been dealing with for a long time, and programs and societies continue to evolve. But during the pandemic, when a number of cities and states started engaging in austerity measures because they weren’t sure what was going to happen with the local tax bases, some of these types of programs—the CTE programs, also some of the arts programs—were the first ones they looked at shutting down because they were the “most expensive.” When you have elected officials who are some of the decision-makers about this, and also some local school boards (who sometimes are very much uninformed about educational policy and process and research) making decisions about what will survive versus not, we run into a situation where we’re dealing away some of the best possible programs to support young people.

I’m inspired by some of the newer iterations of this in terms of combining some of these programs (particularly for boys), like the Brooklyn STEAM Center, which integrates arts in a pretty creative way. [It] has a culinary arts program and a construction program and a cybersecurity program [and] really tries to prioritize not only elevating the arts within the disciplines, but also in the way that they work with their partner schools. Because the Brooklyn Steam Center, kind of like that BOCES model, has eight partnering high schools within Brooklyn. They send their students to the Brooklyn STEAM Center to get that training in the mornings or the afternoons for juniors and seniors. It’s having a tremendous impact on their ability to build professional learning communities where the STEM-CTE-arts focus is able to be disseminated across educational communities. Obviously, we always want to think about integrating models, but I think that being a little bit more diffusive in terms of what works well is something we should prioritize moving forward.

Rachel Rosen: Thank you all so much for your thoughts. This has been such an interesting and informative discussion. I feel like my brain is buzzing with all of the different ideas, and I’m glad we recorded this so I can go back and pay attention to some of the nuggets and write them down and dig into them.

It has been great to hear all of your perspectives on this, and it’s been such a pleasure to host you all. Thanks so much for our audience and who’s left, sticking it out with us for 90 minutes. Thank you all so much for your scholarship and your participation in this area. It’s been really great and I hope this is the beginning of more good work to come. So thank you all.