The Trump administration wants to roll back rules for collecting data on state career and technical education programs instituted in the final days of the Biden administration and align the largest federal CTE program with the president’s first-day executive order making it federal policy to recognize only two sexes.
The rules, finalized in December 2024 but never implemented, would be “massively disruptive and result in significant administrative burden at the state and local levels,” the Education Department said in its justification of the proposed repeal, posted on Aug. 28 on the regulations.gov website. Comments will be accepted through September 26.
The proposed repeal has been met with relief by state and district CTE leaders concerned over their capacity to make changes to state CTE plans quickly. But other advocates worry rolling back reporting requirements could mean educators, employers, and the public will be less able to understand and evaluate the nation’s rapidly expanding career and technical education programs.
The movement to slim reporting requirements comes as CTE emerges as one of the final remaining areas of education bipartisanship. Both Republican and Democratic governors have prioritized CTE programs as national data show changes in students’ post-high school plans.
The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act provides roughly $1.5 billion a year in formula grants to states to develop job training and career-exploration programs for grades 5 through higher education. The first Trump administration oversaw its reauthorization in 2018, and it is now due for another update.
Perkins requires states to train students for “high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand occupations.” In December 2024, the Biden administration added reporting requirements that states define and report the size, scope, and quality of their CTE programs, determine what makes a job “high skill” or “in high demand,” and provide more comprehensive evaluation measures. The rules were finalized but immediately put on hold by the incoming Trump administration.
The Trump administration’s proposal would remove these new requirements, potentially making it harder to judge whether Perkins-funded programs are helping funnel students into well-paying jobs.
“Ultimately we’re asking states … what are the standards and expectations for what it means to have meaningful workplace learning and authentic engagement?” said Amy Loyd, the chief executive officer of the education advocacy group All4Ed. As a former assistant education secretary for career, technical, and adult education under the Biden administration, she helped develop the rules up for repeal.
“For some places it’s more compliant, check the box … [while] other places might be setting really high standards, like 250 hours of on-the-job workplace engagement,” Loyd said “We want states to at least publicly shine a light on how they’re calculating their numbers, how they’re thinking about definitions of high-skill, high-wage jobs.”
In addition, the administration would specify that any reference to gender in the law refers to biological sex, stating that the word “is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’”
State capacity problems
State CTE leaders, however, had balked at the prospect of adding new definitions and data collections just after states had finalized new four-year plans for the program last year.
“Don’t make states literally restart the process they just had completed,” said Kate Kreamer, the executive director of Advance CTE, a nonprofit representing state CTE directors and leaders.
Changing state CTE plans requires input from stakeholder groups, state boards of education, governors, and the public. So, the Biden-era rules, Kreamer said, “would have required for some states a tremendous amount of work and time to rerun their data, change some of their indicators, change their collection, and then lose longitudinal data because it’d be changing the indicators midway through implementation.”
As an example, the Biden-era rules call for states to include middle school students when reporting CTE program participation and completion. Most states allow districts to use Perkins money for middle school CTE programs, but they differ widely from state to state. For example, while Ohio allows students in grades 7-8 to enroll in high school-level CTE courses, other states create separate middle school programs focused more on career exploration than training. That means it can be tricky to include middle school students in participation counts.
Jimmy Koch, government relations manager for the Association for Career and Technical Education, which advocates for local CTE programs, said it makes more sense for new definitions and evaluation measures to be hammered out in Perkins’ next congressional update and rulemaking for the newly created Pell workforce grants for short-term job training.
“We are at a point right now, I think, where a lot of really smart people are recognizing that we need to begin meeting the students where they are, and not asking the students to meet the needs of higher education,” Koch said.
As states and districts expand CTE in general and the use of short-term workforce credentialing in particular, Loyd argued, they need clear ways to compare and evaluate the programs and occupations they target.
“Short-term credentials are all over the place in terms of whether or not they leave people better off in the labor market than when they started,” Loyd said. “The pendulum’s swinging right now heavily to workforce credentials and not taking into mind the complexity of what CTE is really seeking to accomplish in terms of preparing students to make meaningful career choices.”
