technology in education

The State of Career and Technical Education, in Charts

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More than 8 in 10 high school graduates completed at least one course in a career-education field in 2019, according to new federal data. However, it’s unclear how much secondary career pathways really link to students’ work after graduation.

The U.S. Department of Education’s annual Condition of Education , released last week, highlighted detailed data from 2019 to give an updated snapshot of career and technical education teachers, courses, participation, and postsecondary degrees.

Career education remains somewhat skewed to male students, 87 percent of whom earned career-tech credit in 2019, 5 percentage points more than female students who earned CTE credit. Each credit, or Carnegie unit , represents 120 hours of class time in a particular subject.

More students took information technology courses than any other field. Technology and health sciences have gotten boosts in recent years, as more school districts offer “pathways,” or multi-year curriculums focused on high-need career fields.

In 2023, every state except Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York passed career-education laws , with a majority of the new laws adding accountability measures for the programs and supporting more industry partnerships and work-based learning for schools. The legislative push was part of a more than decade-long state effort to make career-focused coursework more challenging and build pathways from school to work, regardless of whether students go to college after high school.

The federal data show that career-tech pathways may still funnel students into shorter-term degrees after high school. Among public school graduates in 2013 who entered a college degree program by 2021, those who had concentrated on career-education courses in high school were nearly twice as likely to earn an associate degree (14 percent versus 9 percent) than those who didn’t focus on CTE. However, 54 percent of non-CTE students earned at least a bachelor’s degree, while less than half of CTE-focused students did so.

The federal data also show school districts continue to struggle to recruit and keep high-quality career-tech-education teachers across a multitude of fields.

For example, the 42,000-student Kern High School district, in Bakersfield, Calif., offers—and must recruit teachers for—some 40 career pathways, from finance to medical research to industrial robotics.

Dean McGee, Kern’s deputy superintendent of educational services and innovative programs and a 2023 EdWeek Leader to Learn From , launched a special teacher-induction program to move industry professionals like welders to the classroom, which McGee said has helped them keep up with demand.

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• Understanding Poverty
• Education and Technology
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Reimagining Human Connections: Technology and Innovation in Education at the World Bank

• Education technology — or ‘EdTech’, the use of hardware, software, digital content, data, and information systems in education — supports and enriches teaching and learning and improves education management and delivery.
• EdTech can create new connections between teachers, students, parents, and broader communities to create learning networks. Investments in EdTech can make education systems more resilient to future shocks and help reform and reimagine the way education is delivered.
• The World Bank supports the appropriate, cost-effective use of EdTech at all levels of education and supports countries in expanding access and improving quality, both inside and out of the classroom – so that education reaches all students.
• Education is, at its heart, about human connections — between students, teachers, parents, caregivers, principals, and broader communities.
• Education policies and initiatives that utilize EdTech should embrace an inter-related set of five principles to maximize human engagement. 
• The use of EdTech should be guided by a clear purpose and focus on educational objectives; reach all learners; empower teachers; engage an ecosystem of partners; and rigorously and routinely use data to learn what strategies, policies and programs are effective to maximize student learning.

Principles The World Bank advocates attention to five key principles when education systems invest in EdTech.

Principle 1: Ask Why EdTech policies and projects need to be developed with a clear purpose, strategy and vision of the desired educational change.

Principle 2: Design and Act at Scale, For All The design of EdTech initiatives should be flexible and user-centered, with an emphasis on equity and inclusion, in order to realize scale and sustainability for all .

Principle 3: Empower Teachers Technology should enhance teacher engagement with students through improved access to content, data and networks, helping teachers better support student learning.

Principle 4: Engage the Ecosystem Education systems should take a whole-of-government and multi-stakeholder approach to engage a broad set of actors to support student learning.

Principle 5: Be Data-Driven Evidence-based decision making within cultures of learning and experimentation, enabled by EdTech, leads to more impactful, responsible and equitable uses of data.

3Ds The World Bank works to discover evidence-based technology solutions in education; deploy solutions, at the pilot level and at scale; and diffuse this knowledge widely across policy makers and support capacity development to better use this new knowledge.

Discover : Identifying innovations and building the evidence base for EdTech

Deploy : Projects, pilots and digital global public goods

Diffuse : Capacity building networks and partnerships  

(note: This publication is often referred to as the 'World Bank edtech approach paper')

• Reimagining Human Connections: Technology and Innovation in Education at the World Bank (full report)
• Réinventer les interactions humaines: Technologie et innovation dans l’éducation à la banque mondiale
• إعادة تص ور الروابط البشرية:التكنولوجيا واالبتكار بقطاع التعليم في البنك الدولي
• Realizing the Future of Learning report
• Press Release: Pandemic Threatens to Push 72 Million More Children into Learning Poverty—World Bank outlines a New Vision to ensure that every child learns, everywhere (2 Dec 2020)
• World Bank Group and Education