Career and Technical
Education (CTE) has reemerged as a strategy for advancing college and career
readiness, workforce preparation, credential attainment, and economic mobility.
However, for Black students, the promise of contemporary CTE must be understood
alongside the historical legacy of vocational tracking and the continuing
racialized distribution of educational and labor-market opportunity. This
conceptual article develops an Equity-Centered CTE Opportunity Framework to
examine how Black students experience opportunity across the secondary CTE
pathway. Drawing from literature on contemporary CTE, opportunity to learn,
vocational tracking, program quality, credential value, and workforce outcomes,
the framework organizes CTE opportunity into six interconnected domains:
structural opportunity, educational opportunity, relational opportunity, career
opportunity, credential opportunity, and mobility opportunity. The article
argues that CTE outcomes are not produced by student participation alone, but
by the quality, sequencing, and distribution of opportunities students
encounter across the pathway. By centering Black students’ experiences, the
framework provides researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with a tool for
assessing whether CTE systems expand educational and economic opportunity or
reproduce racialized stratification.
