When the welding booths at Thomas Edison High School in Philadelphia light up for a new cohort of pre-apprentices each fall, the instructor is not just teaching a weld procedure. He is teaching the language of a registered apprenticeship — a 2,000-hour curriculum that, if students stick with it, ends in an industry credential recognized by IBEW Local 98, the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, or one of the city’s mechanical and industrial contractors. The Philadelphia School District’s CTE office has spent more than a decade building those pipelines, and they are now part of a federal policy fight that, on paper, has nothing to do with a single welding booth in Logan — and everything to do with it.
The Trump administration has moved career and technical education oversight, plus more than $1 billion in annual Perkins funding, out of the U.S. Department of Education and into the U.S. Department of Labor. The change was formalized through a May 2025 interagency agreement that keeps the Education Department’s nominal authority over CTE while handing day-to-day administration — grant distribution, compliance monitoring, technical assistance — to Labor. The stated goal, per the April 23 executive order, is to align “fragmented Federal workforce development programs” and prepare more young adults for the workforce.
Whether that goal is good for Philadelphia’s CTE students is the question now consuming state CTE directors, Philadelphia School District administrators, and Perkins coordinators across Pennsylvania. The federal pivot creates real opportunity for districts like Philadelphia that have already invested heavily in employer-aligned pathways. It also creates a genuine risk: the Labor Department’s primary mission is short-term job training for adults, and CTE advocates worry that mission creep could tilt high school programs toward terminal credentials and away from the dual-track “stepping stone” model that gives students a credential and a path forward.
What the federal shift actually does
The transferred responsibilities are not abstract. They include:
- Distributing more than $1 billion in Perkins V funding to states for K-12 and community college CTE programs.
- Conducting compliance monitoring visits to ensure state Perkins plans meet federal law.
- Providing technical assistance to states, school districts, and community colleges on program design and allowable uses of funds.
- Reviewing state plans that determine which career clusters each state invests in.
Federal law — the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act — already requires CTE programs to prepare students for jobs that are “high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand.” That language is preserved in the new arrangement. But the implementing agency matters, because how “in-demand” is interpreted, and how aggressively Labor audits state plans, will determine whether programs like Edison’s welding pathway or the Philadelphia School District’s Health Sciences Academy continue to be treated as college-aligned career exploration — or as feeder pipelines into specific high-demand occupations.
The Philadelphia stakes
Philadelphia’s CTE system is one of the most employer-aligned in Pennsylvania. The District runs career and technical education programs through high schools including Edison, Mastbaum, Kensington, Saul, and Randolph, covering welding, electrical, carpentry, automotive, health sciences, culinary, and information technology. Most of those programs are organized around industry-recognized credentials — NCCER, OSHA-10, EPA Section 608, CompTIA A+, ServSafe, Certified Nursing Assistant — and are paired with work-based learning hours that count toward registered apprenticeships.
Two specific examples make the federal shift concrete for Philadelphia:
- Pre-apprenticeship pipelines into the building trades. The recent ApprenticeshipPHL HS Pre-Apprenticeship Directory, published in April 2026, catalogs 16 state-registered pre-apprenticeship programs available to Philadelphia high school students. They include the Community College of Philadelphia’s Industrial Welding program that feeds directly into Rhoads Industries at the Navy Yard, and IBEW Local 98’s pre-apprenticeship track that recruits from Career and Technical Education programs at Edison, Mastbaum, and others. These programs are registered through the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry and rely on Perkins-funded instructional time during the school day. The federal change does not threaten those registrations directly, but it changes which Washington office answers when Pennsylvania’s Perkins coordinator has a question about how to count a high school apprentice’s supervised lab hours.
- Health sciences pathways that ladder into college. The Audenried High School Healthcare Pathway, one of the District’s flagship CTE programs, stacks a Certified Nursing Assistant credential onto a high school diploma and feeds graduates into associate degree nursing programs at Community College of Philadelphia. The same model exists at George Washington High School and several others. Amy Loyd, who served as the assistant secretary for CTE during the Biden administration, warned Chalkbeat that an overemphasis on short-term job placement could “steer more students toward in-demand jobs that don’t pay very well, such as certified nursing assistants or home health care aides” — the very credentials Philadelphia CTE students earn on the way to higher-skill, higher-wage roles. The risk is not that CNA disappears from Philadelphia’s CTE catalog. The risk is that the federal posture stops encouraging the college-credit articulation that turns the CNA into a stepping stone.
What Pennsylvania gets to keep
The Education Department maintains legal authority over the Perkins Act, which means Pennsylvania Department of Education CTE staff continue to set the state’s program approval standards, define the Pennsylvania Career Education and Work Standards, and approve new programs of study. Pennsylvania has been a leader on credential quality — the state’s approved CTE credential list explicitly values credentials that ladder into both employment and postsecondary credit. That state-level architecture does not change with the federal handoff.
What does change is the speed and tone of federal guidance. Labor, with a smaller CTE staff than Education historically maintained, may be slower to answer state questions, less likely to approve experimental program designs, and more focused on placement metrics than on long-term career mobility.
What CTE directors in Philadelphia should do now
For the Philadelphia School District CTE office, the practical moves are short and concrete:
- Document every existing employer partnership, every pre-apprenticeship registration, and every articulation agreement with Community College of Philadelphia or one of the local four-year institutions. Federal data transparency is increasing under the new rules, and Philadelphia’s CTE office should be ready to show, in writing, that its programs are producing credential and degree pathways, not just placement.
- Coordinate with the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Bureau of Career and Technical Education on a unified state response to any new federal monitoring guidance. The state has a stronger voice than any single district.
- Engage the Philadelphia Workforce Development Board and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation on a citywide CTE-employer alignment plan. If federal capacity shrinks, regional capacity has to grow.
The bottom line for Philly students
For a 17-year-old Edison welding student walking into a summer pre-apprenticeship at the Navy Yard this year, the federal shift is invisible. The same instructor is teaching the same NCCER module. The same employer partner is signing off on the same competency checklist. The same IBEW Local 98 application is sitting in the student’s guidance counselor’s office.
What the shift will eventually change is whether the federal government treats that student’s career pathway as a credential program that ends at graduation — or as a career-long pipeline that ends at journey worker status and, eventually, at a contractor’s license of his or her own. Philadelphia’s CTE system is built for the second outcome. The question is whether the new federal architecture will support it, or quietly redirect it.
Originally reported by Chalkbeat | PhillyCTE editorial analysis
Source: Kalyn Belsha, “Trump gave the Labor Department more control over career-technical education. Will students benefit?”, Chalkbeat, October 3, 2025. <https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/10/03/will-students-benefit-with-career-technical-education-at-labor-department>
