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 this coalition started from. It unites the industries that depend on skilled workers around a single claim: hands-on CTE, taught well, is applied-science education, and it demands what this generation has stopped doing — working with your hands, thinking, showing up, staying with it, owning your mistakes, working with a crew, and finishing the job. Why that divide exists, and why now, is a story worth its own page.

The CTE Science Project is a communications and convening coalition. It does not recruit students, write school curriculum, or train anyone. 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. We pair research, labor-market data, and the work itself to document the physics, chemistry, and engineering already in skilled occupations, and turn what we find into material the industries, classrooms, and communities can use.

Who we are

The CTE Science Project is a coalition of national trade and industry associations, now forming. Its partners are the associations that fund it and decide where it goes. Doyle McDonald, a Washington strategic communications firm, runs the Project.

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 Project exists to carry it into every industry that depends on 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 Project's elementary work 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.