Our Purpose

Most of the people behind the CTE Science Project built forts as kids, and most of the children they’re raising haven’t. That is the observation we started from, and it led to a single claim: hands-on CTE, taught well, is applied-science education, and it demands what a childhood of screens rarely asks of a child — working with your hands, thinking, showing up, staying with it, owning your mistakes, working with a crew, and finishing the job. Why that matters now is a story worth its own page.

The CTE Science Project exists to change what families believe about skilled work while their children are still young enough for it to matter. It does not recruit students, write school curriculum, or train anyone. Instead, it makes two things impossible to ignore: the science inside skilled work, and what that work gives back to the student who takes it up.

Its flagship program, the CTE Science Teach-In, is how. High school CTE students show young children the science in the work they’re learning, and the children carry it home to their parents.

Who we are

John Doyle and Megan McDonald founded the CTE Science Project. Their Washington strategic communications firm, Doyle McDonald, runs it.

The Project grew out of the Jump$tart Teen Teach-In, which Doyle McDonald developed with Joel Chrisler, a retired high school personal finance teacher. Campaign after campaign, the Teen Teach-In has drawn local television news in roughly six of every ten markets it runs in. The CTE Science Teach-In carries that model into skilled work.

In 2023, Jenny Kerr Schroen and Chris Eccleston of Delmarva Veteran Builders, a commercial construction firm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, wrote a children’s book. Grit Leads to Greatness follows a brother and sister through a crumbling city whose people have stopped building because they are hypnotized by glowing stones. The children learn masonry, carpentry, welding, plumbing, and electrical work from the tradespeople they meet along the way — an ogre mason, robot welders, an electrician magician — then come home and repair the city themselves. Jenny and Chris read it aloud in elementary classrooms and send each child home with a copy, so the parent across the kitchen table sees the work differently too. Nobody asked them to. They saw the problem and decided to do something about it. The CTE Science Teach-In borrows what they got right: a lesson in every kid’s hands and a parent to bring it home to. Where they bring a tradesperson, we bring a high school CTE student. You can find their book at gritleadstogreatness.com.