The purpose of this report is to underscore the impactful work being done across the state to prepare students for high-demand careers while supporting educators with teacher licensure, professional development, mentoring, and retention programs. We describe our methodology for how we conducted this research here. We present and summarize these data as described by districts during STAR reporting to PELSB. Two districts with CTE programs did not submit STAR data during the reporting window for 2025-2026, we collected their data directly by working with district staff. During analysis, we noticed several errors made by districts (e.g., submitting the wrong teacher’s name, discrepancies in age, years of experience for the same teacher working at two different districts). That said, these data still have high face validity. We estimate a less than a 1% margin of error.

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Past Reports/Download

We will conduct a similar analysis for 2026-2027 after PELSB publishes STAR data (estimated August 2027).

Methodology

For 2025–2026, 538 Minnesota districts and charter schools submitted data through the Staff Automated Report Web Edit System (STAR-WES; PELSB, 2026). PELSB reported 534 submissions, but the data file contains 538. STAR-WES opened for collection on October 1, 2025, and closed on November 14, 2025, with a snapshot date of October 1.

Four districts did not submit a completed report: two traditional districts, Rochester (0535-01) and Climax-Shelly (0592-01), and two charter schools. This was Rochester’s second consecutive year without a submission. PELSB estimated a negligible difference from the previous year’s numbers; we disagree. We estimated that both traditional districts had CTE programs and teachers and that neither charter did, so the STAR data undercounted CTE teachers by approximately 54. Rochester’s data alone are large enough to shift key statewide indicators, such as teachers of color.

MN CTE staff created this annual report through a secondary analysis of existing data, including PELSB Staff Automated Reporting (STAR) data and PELSB File Folder licensure data. We included teachers whom districts reported in their 2025–2026 STAR data as teaching a CTE assignment (i.e., “District Notes” of PELSB’s Licensure Assignment Table). We also included teachers reported in assignments that a CTE license allows them to teach but that PELSB does not classify as CTE (e.g., 200300 – Horticulture/Animal or Crop Production).

To align with MDE Program Approval and Perkins reporting, districts generally should not use these non-CTE assignments for CTE courses. In prior years, however, we found that excluding them omitted many appropriately licensed CTE teachers, so we have continued to include them. We counted teachers in these assignments only after confirming they held a CTE license appropriate to the course.
 
In this analysis, we presented and summarized data as the sources originally reported them. To evaluate reliability, we re-collected a sample of records and manually audited one content area against a teacher directory. Through these checks, we identified potential reporting errors in less than 1% of the data, which we acknowledged rather than corrected.

The exception was Rochester Public Schools (0535-01), which did not report to PELSB for the second consecutive year, and Climax-Shelly (0592-01). Because their absence affected statewide results (e.g., BIPOC teacher statistics), we collected their data directly by working with district staff. These records did not come through STAR, so they lacked employment details such as salary, and we excluded them from those figures. 

We confirmed each teacher’s license for these assignments using PELSB File Folder data. Because districts report STAR assignments by school, we combined each teacher’s records into one per district and identified a primary school. Within each count, we counted each File Folder Number once, so a teacher who worked in two districts was not counted twice. Using each teacher’s reported data, we then summarized sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, and teaching experience for each content area.

We calculated average years licensed from the date each teacher first obtained a teaching license through June 30, 2026. Because this measure counted all time since initial licensure, it included breaks such as leaves of absence or careers outside education, so it generally served as an upper limit on years teaching. Average years teaching came from district reports, but districts reported this information for fewer than 20% of teachers.

We calculated salary figures only for teachers with full-time contracts, so the figures reflected compensation for full-time positions. Within that group, we also excluded records likely to misstate a full-time salary:
– Teachers reported in more than one district, because employment reporting can differ across districts.
– Teachers with 230 or more contract days, because these contracts often include administrative or extended-year duties.
– Teachers with 110 or fewer contract days, because this falls well short of a typical full-time contract and suggests a reporting error.
– Salaries below $34,724 or above $150,075, which likely reflect reporting errors or misclassification. We based the lower bound on district contracts and union step-and-lane schedules.
By excluding these records, we aimed to base salary figures on typical full-time teaching positions.
 
Although some teachers worked in multiple districts, we counted each teacher once when we analyzed demographic and other individual characteristics. Salary was the exception: as described above, we excluded teachers reported in more than one district from salary figures.

Some districts reported a teacher’s gender/sex, race/ethnicity, or birth year while others left those fields blank. In those cases, we filled the blank fields with the values another district reported for that teacher. We did this only for characteristics of the person, not for salary, contract days, or other employment data, which legitimately differ by district. This affected 15 teachers.
 
Finally, we used the previously described procedures to calculate summaries of school districts and the teachers within each district per service cooperative (as defined by the Minnesota Department of Education in alignment with Economic Development Regions).