hi everyone welcome to South by Southwest it's I know it's one of the earlier sessions so I'm excited to be here my name is Kayla HZ and I'm a reporter with USA Today I specialize in covering education so I'm really excited to be having this conversation with these lovely panelists especially because we're talking about Middle School career um education a lot what I've been covering our the student loan debt crisis has been big thing in the news um I think a lot of students and schools are rethi
nking how they're talking to their students about Career Education and what Pathways there are After High School and I think sometimes we start in high school where we're going to talk about what we want to do now at the end of senior year or junior year but we're going to I think there's sort of an innovation that we're going to talk about today um starting in middle school earlier so I'm excited to introduce my panelist I'm going to have each of you introduce yourselves if that's okay and then
talk a little bit about yourself and where you're from great thank you so much Kayla hi everyone I'm Julie Lamers I'm the senior vice president of advocacy and corporate social responsibility for American Student Assistance we are a national nonprofit that focuses on ensuring all young people have the opportunity to explore uh careers at an early age and then chart a course to education and Career Success um and our work we focus on how we um provide more opportun for young people as early as M
iddle School to begin Start begin to start thinking about careers uh and uh in the high school years really test and try those uh that that learned knowledge about themselves and what they're interested in uh through work-based learning through internships and Project based learning um and then help them think really critically about how that that leads to long-term um education and career opportunities for them so I focus on our advocacy and policy work as well as our philanthropic giving uh we
do do a lot of work to try to change policies at both the state and federal level around uh what is uh possible for young people and what opportunities exist and then on the philanthropy side really trying to support organizations that are doing this work well uh to ensure that every young person has opportunity uh around career exploration and career connected learning hi uh Paul Herdman and I run an organization called Rodell which is based in uh Wilmington Delaware and we sit at this interse
ction between education and the economy we work to what we say is convene connect and scale transformational ideas in uh those spaces and you part of uh the framing for me really comes as being a former teacher um and I I don't know if we'll get into this but in terms of you know why we're doing this work um I mean it really comes for me uh in sort of a two-fold frame one is that my dad was single you raised in a single single family household first generation College goer and it really changed
his life so you school was important right from the beginning but then I became a teacher in New York City where I worked in a school um where 90% of the kids were not making it through and uh we were able to create a program that was um built on the Outward Bound model and in essence we had uh 90% actually uh making it through and going on to college career Etc and for me that was a realization that the system was messed up and not the kids and so um have worked to pursue that that that work an
d so another role I play in addition to running this nonprofit is I chair uh the strategic planning committee for Workforce Development board so I try and connect the dots in that way as well thanks I'm excited to be on the stage with with you and excited to be with you'all today my name is Danielle angart I'm the executive director of the student Pathways unit at the college Colorado Department of Education uh and I'm here to share a little bit about some of the um Investments that we've made i
n middle school and high school career advising um we've made some pretty historic Investments recently uh and also we are really prioritizing stakeholder input including students families focus groups in multiple languages and really trying to make sure we're hearing from folks that are the most directly impacted um and then on a personal note I'm here for similar reasons um I'm a first generation college student and also a first generation high school graduate my father grew up on a um a ro Fa
rm in Thailand um and my mom uh went to um a career fair and figured out she wanted to work for the government um well before uh she was able to uh graduate from high school so none of my grandparents went to college um and I had a kind of a tough time figuring out what to do um and how to make sure that that uh College investment that my family ultimately made in me uh was able to result in now this me me being this uh government bureaucrat if you will but hopefully I can bring a little a littl
e levity for that um and explain some of the great things that we're doing so so thank you thank you and I look forward to learning from you all today at the top line of the panel today is about State policy and practice that can change the way that students think about their Futures and Julie I know American Student Assistance has done some research on the ways that different states are approaching this and I would love to hear from you some Topline research best practices and policies that you
've seen and if you want to give us an overview of the most starking findings of the research that would be great yeah sure absolutely thank you so much so yes we um just conducted a research survey that is out today um it's available at asa.org for those that are interested um we did this work in in collaboration with education strategy group and our Focus was really to try to understand how states are uh both implementing policy um and what policies really exist around uh Middle School career
exploration because it's very fairly new uh in most places uh and we wanted to get an understanding of what is happening what is happening well uh and as states begin to build systems around career exploration what should they be thinking about as they move down this path so we conducted this survey as I said with um education Str strategy group we looked at 13 different categories um over three main areas of policy infrastructure and state vision um to try to understand what states were doing u
h every uh policy was looked at that we looked at things that the uh leaders of the states were saying and how that was translating into policy what was happening on the ground in all of these states how funding systems were set up what data collection systems were set up and what we found broadly was that a large number of states about 72% of States actually do have policies around career exploration um where we found the the biggest challenge was that only about 20% of states are actually trac
king data or understand the quality of those programs um and the thing that was starkest for us was when we actually asked students what was happening because we know that there is a huge disconnect between policy and what's actually happening on the ground um and what we were seeing from students was uh that while they talked these policies may exist uh they are generally seeing them as paper and pencil exercises in schools uh may happen once a week um one day out of the year uh they talk about
it they move on uh and then it's never mentioned again and so that's how a lot of these policies are actually translating what young people are saying they want is Hands-On experiences uh they say that in by and large they're still largely learning about careers from their families which we know is limiting when it comes to the access that families have to Social Capital and certain careers um and so there's a huge disconnect between what we're seeing in this sort of nent stage of policy develo
pment in the states um and what's actually translating into schools so I think we um are happy to see that there are a lot of states that are are talking about this as a real priority issue for them that that uh leaders are saying this is something we need to do uh but there is a huge disconnect in how they're actually doing it at the moment um and so the upside is there's a lot of progress that can be made lots of room for improvement um and we will uh try to help States see where some of those
best practices are that are happening in States um the the report that we put out not only has a summary of all of this work um but education education strategy group broke down by State uh four pages for each state exactly where their policies lie um and where there are um opportunities to make some changes uh in in that way so we're hopeful we're hopeful that it'll be a very useful um resource to States as they're thinking about what they can do uh and where precisely they can lean in to make
some change uh over the next months and years yeah thank you maybe we can pull up back and explain what um Middle School career actually looks like on the ground what you're aspiring and why American students assistant decided to do this research now sure yeah so this is a this has always been a priority issue for us um so ASA is really focused on ensuring that young people have the opportunity to explore careers in a much earlier age you know we see um fundamentally that if young people don't
have exposure to careers by the time they get to towards the end of Middle School they've already started foreclosing opportunities for themselves so this is not about um having someone pick in Middle School what they want to do it really is how do we expand the um vast variety of possibilities available to them help them think about some key things including what they're good at what they like what the world will pay them for and what the world's needs and somewhere in the connection of those f
our things really is something that they will um be able to thrive at and we try to help them uncover what those that Myriad of career possibilities are based on those sort of key factors so I've really trying to think of how do we expand opportunity for young people at an earlier age they're not foreclosing opportunities providing them with the chance to see things that they might not have uh experienced in their Community or in their family opening up that uh Social Capital to them so that the
y can start thinking differently about what's possible for themselves um is really critical at a middle school age when they're still uh much more open to exploration uh young people have not yet started to stress about the future which tends to happen in later high school years and so they are much more open to what are the possibilities for for me so that's one of the reasons that we really focus on Middle School uh and then we like to think about the trajectory from middle school and trans an
d and how do those experiences Middle School the opportunity to understand a little bit more about yourself and where you fit in the world in Middle School how can we then take um much more in-depth actions in high school to let them explore some of those things whether it's Project based learning or an internship or an entrepreneurial experience um and really start to narrow down um their career identity and think more critically than about what the post-secondary education and career path migh
t be for them uh based on understanding what they like what they love what they hate um through Hands-On uh experiences internships that those types of things but really starting those Middle School years is really critically important to begin that journey of self-discovery and um really as we say sort of you know lengthen that runway for what the what understanding those possibilities are uh we're starting those conversations far too late right now in the education um uh uh in the education Jo
urney for most young people to really take advantage of of opportunities that are available to them and I'm glad we have two education leaders from very different states here to tell us what they're doing in their states and what middle school career exploration means there so we'll start with you Paul how are things going in Delaware sure and it's probably helpful a lot of people probably I can't really see people but uh many of you probably have maybe passed through Delaware on your way up 95
but don't really know it very well it's a pretty small state and just to give you a quick context because Colorado is a much more complex uh bigger state so it's you know two hours top to bottom about a million people only 140 ,000 students uh within the system um so we could work with all of our middle-grade students you know in in a relatively short order we're going to try and get there in the next several years um but that's about 30,000 students um but the interesting thing for Delaware is
that uh it's just as diverse as the country there's more kids of color than not uh there are special ed numbers are similar Etc and the politics are you while they lean uh left you know the home of Joe um they are you just as crazy as any place else it's polarized uh red to blue um so it's a it's a microcosm and the advantage is that we could potentially move a little faster um so the example of that is um I mentioned that we convene connect and scale uh transformational change um we've been on
this journey around Pathways for about a decade and um I'll sort of just give you the quick overview of how that's gone and how it sort of ties back into why we got into the Middle grades level um so about 10 years ago we started to we were actually facing a crisis in in the state it was on the heels of uh the the the economic downfall of 2009 to about 2011 and being a very small state we're kind of our our economy is kind of like New Zealand you know it's it's pretty fragile if we lose one majo
r company we are in trouble you know if we were in New York or maybe even Colorado we'd be much more sort of flexible but we're not and so our major employers said hey we need to deal with this like ASAP in terms of the pipeline of folks and so we uh went with Educators from our department of education and uh Business Leaders to go visit Finland Singapore Switzerland Germany Etc to try and learn from the best in the world uh and we came back and partnered with uh a national intermediary jobs for
the future uh and built out a strategic Plan Building off One Pilot with 27 students uh with one of our regular high schools a community college and a um Advanced manufacturing firm 27 students one pathway long story short that was sort of the convening piece of this we got the governor involved the business people Etc um the connecting side was then we connected to some national resources like ASA uh Bloomberg Foundation um walon Foundation others and also some federal dollars to scale it so n
ow we have about 30,000 students uh about 65% of our students are in our high schools are involved in career Pathways which for us means three things uh a meaningful work-based learning experience access to indust an industry recognized credential and up to 15 college credits um so we're at a bit of a scale and and this is sort of the transition back to the Middle grades one of the things we realize is that we do actually do a decent job our department does on looking at how students are place a
nd um there's actually a nice case study by Belle weather about this that goes into much more detail and it's in in the resources but basically we were able to say hey we're doing a pretty decent job in terms of the representation of students in Pathways um you know but then we actually looked at the completion rates and we realized uh that the completion rates as it related to uh the high demand jobs uh did not reflect the diversity of our students students in the way it should um and you know
whether it's gender race Etc and so part of what we realized is that if we back up you know these students are not really able to make informed choices and are kind of on a tram ride you know from 9th grade on that they may not realize and I'll just give you one last concrete example and I'll I'll I'll pass it on but uh one of our my colleagues is Kelsey in in the audience and I won't call her out specifically I did call her out but I won't like make her stand up or anything but one of her colle
agues that's working with her on this is Kim and Kim uh is brilliant first generation College goer lived nearest to The Vocational School uh in her neighborhood and even though she wanted to go to grad school was suggested to go to her local Vocational School unfortunately some random teacher said hey where do you want to what do you want to do later and she said well I want to go on to grad school maybe you know go to Penn University of Pennsylania in Philadelphia uh and she said you have the g
rades to kind of move in that direction but going to the local vocational school it's great but you're not going to get the courses that you need in order to prepare you to go to college fortunately she went to just the Comprehensive High School she did amazing she went on to pen Etc but had she not just randomly run into that teacher she would have been on a very different path and so part of what really drives our work around the Middle grades is uh equity uh that we're sort of creating a syst
em that not not only in high school but in career does not reflect the diversity of our community and we need every single person to maximize their potential um so if we could back it up a little bit we felt like we could provide students with uh sort of a a mix of the self-efficacy agency um by looking at uh how they were ready what what a ready High School ready student would actually look like and we I can go into that process in more depth but we actually kind of backward maap from that to b
uild out some standards and a strategy and some pilots and I'll I'll expound on that but that's where we ended up thank you Paul yeah D Danielle I'd love to hear how things are going in Colorado great thank you yes um as you mentioned Colorado is a bit bigger we we have approximately 900,000 students about 60,000 students per grade level in Colorado 178 school districts and um we're pretty purple so we definitely have like lots of Democrats lots of Republicans also have lots of Libertarians uh a
nd so we really firmly believe in local control and making sure that the decisions um are made hopefully by the folks that are impacted and most closely related to those decisions um and so from uh the Colorado lens from the state level we try to provide some Frameworks um we try to provide some free tools and resources um and then also to provide opportunities to hear from Educators industry uh students and families about how those are working for them and how to improve them uh so we do have u
m a couple Frameworks that I think are particularly helpful in um the Middle grades conversation one is a work-based learning Continuum uh it's written into our Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act state plan our CTE Perkins state plan um and it shows uh the these three big buckets learning about work um learning at work and learning through work and so with the learning about work that's kind of where we're focusing in the Middle grades so we've got um the bulleted list career coaching um c
areer planning Career Fairs presentations Etc uh but we also have some quality standards related to those uh as well as some best practices and playbooks so that way we can help um school counselors and Educators actually do that in the Middle grades with their students uh we also had um a multi-million dollar investment from our state legislature from our state legislature in career advising um so we have created a career advising framework uh we invite not just Educators and school counsellors
um but really anybody who works with students as well as with um higher education and Workforce to participate in these trainings uh it's a pretty simple framework it just has three pieces engage explore and Empower um but we offer that to everybody um throughout the state uh and then there are resources related to that so um we do have a Statewide platform called my Colorado Journey that has a lot of Labor Market information on there it has career Pathways information um and we the goal is tha
t we are providing that to students and families so they can see if I'm interested in this career how much money am I going to make uh which I think is pretty important for decision- making uh so we have these resources but we found that um middle schoolers were not really using uh the platform and so uh we worked with um what this grant program that we got from the legislature to provide a now career tool that middle school students are able to take it's it's much more visually friendly uh the
language is more friendly frankly it's just cooler than some of the other career interest inventory surveys that um we've had on the platform uh and we've really seen a great uptick with u both middle school and high school students taking it and what's great is it's not just hey the these are kinds of things I'm interested in this is what I'm passionate about which we know genen z um really cares about right having that values base uh but then at the end it shows you not just the careers but it
also shows you job descriptions for current roles like that um and it is related also to that labor market information so that way students can see that financial pieces so instead of students having to click around multiple places uh or try to go to their um educator and then school counselor hopefully it's all in one place um and it's also accessible to families so we know that some parents have taken it as well uh and are able to do that kind of alongside with their student which has been re
ally great um to make sure that the whole family is involved so happy to talk about any more of those resources uh and I believe that they are linked uh in the app as well yeah great well I look forward to coming back and asking you a few more questions about that but I'm going to come back to Julie because I know this analysis looked at all the states and I want to know what states are doing well and what barriers are some states facing yeah so I think there are um every state is at a different
stage uh and so we didn't necessarily rank the states uh we sort of over the 13 categories um ESG went through and put them into uh stages of U building emerging and advanced based on a 13 different uh criteria and so it really is looking at things very specifically like the basics of do you have a definition of career exploration do you track data um do you have training program in place so there are um the looking at the report you can see that there are some states that are doing specific th
ings very very well um and then there are some areas where they still are lagging on no I don't I don't think we came across any state that is doing everything perfectly we still have a lot of room for improvement um with a lot of things besides Colorado and Delaware of course they're doing everything perfectly um so you know I think there is there are definitely things that we need to be focusing on um across the board which and I think the biggest one is that data collection piece we don't hav
e a good sense of of what program quality looks like in Most states only about 20% of States actually track data on their career exploration activities um and so it's hard to say what is actually happening on the ground in a classroom when we don't have data um and it's not necessarily tied to accountability systems some states are doing that fairly well um they have included them in their uh their Essa accountability plans um and so they are constantly looking back and saying this is something
we're we are willing to hold ourselves accountable going to on going forward there's only a handful of states that are doing that though so um when it comes to Big policy and uh and ideas around career exploration I think a lot of states are there they're on board with the idea that this is something that needs to happen when it comes to actually putting it in place and holding States accountable for it that's where we have the largest uh way to go to make sure that states are doing a good a str
ong job there and what what are the barriers states are facing so there are some uh basic policy barriers that are still in place so when you think about for example um in 2018 the federal government opened up uh Perkins 5 funding uh to be for an allowable use for um Middle School career exploration for the first time federal funds could go into the middle school grades well number of states had in policy in their states that uh Perkins funding started in grade so there are states that need to g
o back still there are still some states that need to go back and address polic basic policy issues with in their legislature to extend that allowable use of federal funds into middle school so there are things there uh that um each state needs to look at to understand are there actually policies in place that are prohibiting our ability to either access funds um or do this uh do this across the board yeah I know that funding was a key point in um the findings yeah and Delaware I think we sort o
f called out Delaware um as an example of how they have very um strategically uh tapped into many sources of funding to get their project off the ground um Federal funding State funding philanthropic funding so I don't know Paul if you want to talk a little bit more about how that works well I'd love to hear about the model that delor is following and overcoming any of those barriers yeah sure um so maybe just to kind of reiterate one of the findings real quick um I have three kids who are now t
hrough school and um they had a sort of a framework that they were supposed to fill out about their career and like I asked each of them about it you know they like I don't remember doing that you know like so I think the reality of just doing some kind of rot exercise without sort of the deeper follow-up um I think is you consistent with your findings but anyway in terms of uh the big picture uh we started this work uh around 2014 and and we got to Pathways 1.0 we kind of got about 9,000 studen
ts engaged and um we had a good start but we wanted to get to a much higher percentage and so we put together a comprehensive plan and this is for those who might be intermediaries in the audience folks who kind of connect the dots between public and private players which is kind of what we see ourselves doing what we wanted to do is um even though we have some of our own resources we're an operational Foundation we wanted to build a bigger nest egg to do something more comprehensive and rather
than going out to individual funders to say hey I think you're interested in this can we develop an individual plan we talked to our stakeholders and uh basically said what would the next generation of this need to look like to be successful what would wild success look like uh in the next three years and we came up with uh what felt like a pretty big plan about $15 million plan um and we had not really raised near that much money before um and so we went out to a range of funders uh the Bloombe
rg Foundation ASA Walden Etc um and they were able to put together about half of that and then we were able to go to um our our state our governor and say there's all this arpa money can we marry that to that um and then we also have some local corporate funders we about 20 of them who on a smaller scale uh have contributed to that as well but having Bank of America dupon Etc at the table with us is helpful in terms of building out work placements as well as their Investments so we came up with
this comprehensive strategy um and a piece of that was around uh the Middle grades work which obviously is asa's focus so that's how that sort of came together one thing I just would maybe want to throw out just build building on the research piece of it could I throw on you because there's there's a body of research that um I think ESG uh education strategy group did a great job of of laying that up but I just for those who are interested uh there's you know I the the Nerds of the you know arou
nd this stuff uh it was interesting I was when I was taking my Uber ride in uh he's like you going to Southwest you know South by Southwest and I was like well we're going to kind of the nerdy part of South Southwest it's sort of like the cool part starts I don't think anyone here is offended by that no no no so the cool part starts on Thursday but this is still we we still count right um but part of my role I got a chance to do some work uh in partnership with the oecd the office of economic co
operation and development which is based in Europe and does intern research and there's research that corroborates your work which I think is just helpful there's a whole uh body of work in a group called Career Readiness if you just look up oecd SL back SL career Readiness they did um looked at 10 countries over 10 years and looked at uh what factors impacted their future life outcomes and so at 15 if they were able to think about uh explore and experience career Readiness efforts very similar
to your framework um they had better life outcomes in terms of wages uh College access Etc or just um sort of broader escalation of their careers so there is a broader body of research that basically echos the notion of doing all these things um that may be helpful as you think about um digging into this work great and Danielle how what model does Colorado follow and how are they does this overcoming some of the barriers that Julie had mentioned absolutely thank you um so I'm pretty proud to say
that our Career and Technical um education programs have expanded to the Middle grades we have 153 programs across the state it's almost every school district um and the majority of them uh 89 of them are um the more kind of General career exploration which is very exciting um after that that there's 21 programs in agriculture and so clearly the career exploration um there's really been an uptick in that since um Perkins was able to expand that funding um so that's been really exciting um and o
ut of that we've been able to provide some I think some very tangible resources uh we've got a series of um sentence and conversation starters based on grade levels uh so that's pretty great uh we've heard a lot from our school counselors that that was helpful as they're building and expanding these programs um but in terms of barriers uh in Colorado we've got I think at least 15 post-secondary Workforce Readiness related programs uh and they're out of four different state agencies for example o
ur Career and Technical education is run out of our community college system not out of the state educational agency which frankly um we think actually helps pretty significantly with CTE ensuring that we've got qualified instructors as well as having that very clear and direct connection for students to uh post-secondary uh but you know we're all trying to manage different things from different funding sources um serve different folks and so we recently our state legislator C legislature create
d a um task force uh we call it the 1215 task force CU that was the bill uh but it's the the secondary post-secondary and work-based learning integration task force which is why we call it the 12:15 task force CU it's so long never get it right usually um but we spent 18 months uh talking to students and families industry professionals and Educators uh and the task force members came out with a series of recommendations there are 13 legislative recommendations uh and uh the main Crux and point i
s exactly what you were saying earlier that we want to make sure that all students uh by the time that they're 21 have access for free to three things college credit attainment uh work-based learning and Industry recognized credential attainment so exactly on the same page um and then the recommendations get into having a single source of information online that is even more robust than what we may currently have talking about making sure that we're involving middle school students Etc so I thin
k um we've identified a fair number of barriers um some of which is just this is a lot of stuff and it's kind of complicated for people to take advantage of also when we talk to kids they don't care about what program it is they they have no idea you know really what the name is or the funding source or this or that um and then we had principles coming with a binder full of one pagers that they would share with families um which you know that's that's just that's too complicated so we're trying
to simplify we're trying to Umbrella um and we're also trying to create a Statewide longitudinal data system hopefully um that was one of the recommendations so that way we can then really truly track this uh in a way that could be meaningful and hopefully uh will help to inform the students and families can I um also you know one of the things that Colorado does really well the grant program that you've put out around training training of training for counselors and teachers is a huge barrier t
hat a lot of states are struggling with um you know I think we have seen early on a lot of career exploration programs are sort of a pet project of a particular teacher that's really passionate about it um and so one of the questions is how do you make that passion uh Statewide how do you make sure that every district and every student has access to that and uh there is not a lot uh when it comes to teacher training that is being done um to make sure that the teachers have resources to um incorp
orate this work into things that are already happening because no one has more time in the day to build in something else uh so how do you add it on to to the high quality um make sure it's a high quality program and add it into things that teachers are doing already um and really train teachers and support them as they're trying to build that infrastructure for their schools uh so I don't know if you want to talk about how the Colorado Grant it's working absolutely yes um so four years ago uh i
t was during during Co that was the first time the legislature wanted to invest uh and so we were able to get a vendor and create the career advising framework uh so we started trainings we were planning on training 5,000 people uh because of covid I think we only got to 3,000 but I think that's still a pretty significant number um and so we had both we started out with in person and then also um online both as synchronous and asynchronous trainings uh and then 2 years later we got an additional
investment so we were able to go back to the same vendor um modify update it make it a little bit I think friendly or frankly um you know the second time around uh and so now there are trainings that are going on across the state um we're also working to do some train the trainer models with our individualized career and academic plan facilitators that we've got that are throughout the state um and then having the online training as well but again just having the resource available and there's
a a common message across all of the different state agencies that this is not like it's not just for a school counselor it's not just for an educator of course those are important audiences but it's we want bus drivers to come we want principles to come we also want um higher education advisers to attend uh Workforce professionals so also um throughout hopefully someone's career journey in Colorado they're getting that highquality advising um and are also getting um exposure and practice with s
ome of the most important tools that contain that labor market information that contain the cost information for training and higher education um and so also that they can become familiar and manipulate them as they need to to then help them throughout their path great and Danielle I'm glad you mention that students don't really care about these big words that we're using so what does it look like on the ground if I'm a middle schooler who does is not sure what I want to do going forward I would
love to hear from we'll start with you Danielle yeah great question um I will say that we don't necessarily have um we we are trying to reduce the uh school counselor to student ratio in Colorado we have a Colorado we have a um school counselor core grant program that helps to pay for school counselor FTE at schools um and I think that we are close to the ASA 250 uh to one school counselor ratio in the schools that have that Grant um but I will admit there it's not that every single Middle Scho
ol unfortunately has a school counselor at this point so we are trying to figure out with some cost studies uh how we could do that as a state and whether or not um we want the legislature to PRI to put that information to the legislature to see if they want to prioritize that um but we think it's not just school counselors It's really also the Educators um and then infusing it into the Colorado academic standards so um part of our academic standards are our essential skills um and then also our
work-based learning Continuum that we try to really put out in front of the Educators so that way we can say hey what are the ways that you're connecting your careers throughout all of the academics um we're about to embark on revising our essential skills um using some public input uh as well as advising uh um revising individualized career and academic plan state board rules we're just we're just really doing a lot you know um and so we're we're working to make sure that things are better emb
edded in the state standards as we are doing this whole revision um you know there's icons there's footnotes there's there's things that connect it but it's not necessarily fully integrated at that standards level and so that I think is a next big phase of work that we'll be undertaking great yeah just provide a little more context so if you think about how you change systems you know our system is you know one of the few things that looks fairly similar to um what it did a thousand 100 years ag
o you know um maybe a thousand but 100 years ago anyway um it's very difficult to change and the way we tend to do it is either through piloting something and then seeing if that works and then trying to scale it or we try from the upside the the the policy side and say all right we're going to create this environment and then hope that the implementation is good you kind of need both right you need the the policy environment that enables and then you need strong implementation and so I would sa
y we started from the bottom up um so the way this has worked for us we've started we're two and a half years into this the first two years was really design and stakeholder engagement um so we started with all right so what does a high school ready student need to look like and um we had a broad stakeholder engagement group that included employers Educators Etc folks who were actually one student one of the the teachers we had for example was in our te one of our teacher acmis um in in the care
er Pathways but we had some some veteran teachers as well and we had students of course throughout this process um that steering committee developed that definition then built out uh based on the domains of that which I would say strongly align with what you were saying so it's kind of a combination of sort of the academics social emotional learning and career Readiness kind of merged together and uh we have domains you can look at it online uh and there are standards in relation to that and now
what we're doing is saying all right now we have a highle definition we have sort of some standards and we then piloted uh we did a fairly rigorous review process um to identify 10 schools uh and we're now in the process six months in of implementing with each of them and they have very different approaches but part of the criteria was that they had to students engaged in this uh that there was an equity framework that all of them had to uh uh engage in and and and support um and this is very m
uch a student Le and teacher-led design process from the ground up and so um in terms of what this looks like I'll just give you one example from one of the charter schools it's called Kumba Academy it's in downtown Wilmington it's an art Space School um and they sort of went through this threep part process uh for grades 5 through seven that they're now engaging in but one was sort of an exploration of self and sort of how they fit in uh and also what their parents do to kind of understand like
kind of build on that community and use them as resources um and then the second phase was because they are Arts related they started to figure out what are the Arts related careers that sort of fit into what they might be interested in they did some exploration engaged with some folks in those spaces and then they had projects they had to develop so one project was to actually do a production where they intentionally worked on different um roles or occupations with in that production um and re
ally had some active conversations about what that entailed and then dug deeper with folks who were adults who were doing those types of things um they're also looking at for example a campaign around the environment and then using their Arts related uh careers in terms of communications um production Etc that would go into those in their eighth grade year they're going to be doing more direct experience like internships and things like that job shadowing Etc um so it's early days um but I'd say
the big thing that's that we're trying to work towards is have this student driven teacher-driven design process building off a common set of Standards um but that from that we're going to develop an imple implementation strategy or a set of strategies that folks can build on but candidly um I see this as an iterative process it's going to continue to grow um I mentioned uh to Julie early on that I got a chance to go with to British CL colia and they have a k through 12 uh career Readiness curr
iculum and they started it in 2011 and I talked to the equivalent of their Commissioner of education and she said we're still evolving you know we're still like every year we kind of tweak it and evolve and it it gets better and stronger so I see this as an ongoing ongoing process but that's a bit of how it looks on the ground and I'd say one of the things that's unique about the process that they undertake undertook in Delaware and that we saw in our research was that they are making sure is no
disconnect between what the students are saying and what the policy is that they're trying to implement you know uh the the research really um focused quite a bit on how policies are being translated to students and what they're feeling about the uh policies that have been implemented and that they are not experiencing them in the way and any that anyone envisioned or would would like to ultimately see so Delaware has really taken a very deliberate approach to say what do students want and need
need how are they being heard in this process and how are they part of this journey with us um so really well and I might build that a little bit in the sense that um it's a very difficult mindset shift right and so you mentioned about challenges you know and I'd say that mindset shift is is difficult um and it takes time you know and the professional development you're offering is amazing and so I think part of the challenges is that even if you have a group of Educators who want to go from po
int A to point B uh and they said they understand point B is important you know a much more integrated sort of amazingly engaging student driven Middle School experience they don't know how to get from point A to point B and um so and also the incentives in the system are still largely driven around sort of academics Etc they're not really kind of incentivized to do anything different and yeah so there's this tension between sort of the world that we live in the world want to get to and how do y
ou support folks in that change management process so I would actually add that to our you mean I think you alluded to it but I mean it's just name it that change management is a a huge part of this and really providing the time and support uh needed to help people move along the journey yeah and I think it's interesting this takeaway of um asking students what they're feeling and what their communities are doing what their parents have done is an interesting way to look at it rather than what d
o you want to do and we're going to go on this path yeah um I think we touched on Equity a few times here Danielle I'm glad that you brought up that not every school not every district has a counselor how are your States ensuring Equity to resources in this area and what barriers are there in that as well because I I'm interested in whether low-income or high income schools are getting or getting this access over another school district so I'm curious to hear from both of you I can try to start
um I think there's a there's a couple tactical pieces and like translating things honestly so making sure that um any websites that we are building or other materials that we're building especially if they're remotely parent facing are translated into at least five if not more languages because we clearly have more than five in the state um so making sure that parents are really a part of it has been pretty important um and so it's trying now to find and prioritize the resources to make sure tha
t that's able to happen um and that's why I'm like so proud that we were able to do some focus groups in multiple languages with students and families cuz it's so we we've got to hear from all of our parents um and then it I think in in Colorado right now it's a lot of um it's a lot of carrots frankly and so we have a number of Grant programs the student Pathways unit itself overseas 40 compet 4 Z competitive Grant programs uh and so a lot of what we do in Colorado is we say okay well we see tha
t there's a need so in some ways we're going to consider this grant a pilot uh so we're going to offer this um see you know how many folks are applying for how much what what really are the things that they're trying to focus on and then hopefully if we see that it's something that is really truly needed and important um then the legislature can see that um and provide some additional funding for that um of course we also look um you know to Federal funding sources like Perkins uh and then also
when possible some philanthropic funding so that way we can at least um really bolster the pilots um but I'm I'm not going to pretend and say that we are you know super far along and that every student in our state has equal access to all of these opportunities because they don't um but that was also the focus of that task force that I mentioned we really really do want to make sure that students have access um especially in our rural areas because of course there's some challenges there too yea
h I mean I started out my comments that Equity was really how we got started on this whole Middle School journey I mean we we've been looking at the data and you could look at you know I mentioned I was I chair Workforce Development at the Workforce Development board's strategic planning efforts and you you can see the same sort of demographic inequities um that exists you know I we actually started an organization called the tech Council of Delaware um and one way that one of the things that th
ey're they're trying to do is actually build a more inclusive Tech pipeline by intentionally trying to build more women and uh folks of color into that space But as it relates to the Middle grades work I mean I think part of what we're trying to do is better prepare young people to take agency and sort of control their own decision- making because there are some uh implicit biases um that folks may not even see like um there are folks if you were to go to a particular school and I you know some
of our staff and myself have gone to them where they say there is no bias in our school you know we look at every kid the same way but then you look at sort of the distribution of where kids are and their coursework uh it doesn't reflect that and so I'm not sure if this is part of The Suite of professional development that you've you alluded to but uh some of the schools that are part of the pilot are doing implicit bias training um and um there also resources around additional resources around
special needs students and uh students of color trying to get uh more students into fields that they're underrepresented in um but we're looking at this Middle grades piece as sort of a foundational start to having students sort of drive this conversation from that ground up I I think one of the additional things that is so important when we're thinking about Equity is do we understand uh who is participating in the programs and the the lack of data that we have available on most of these progra
ms um makes it really hard to understand where those inequities exist um and so once States can be pushed to try to think differently about what they're being held accountable for and what they're tracking we will have a better sense of how they can drive policy to ensure they're not actually creating more inequity uh and and that these programs are being used as a way to help some of the inequities that we see Julie I'm curious because you talk about the lack of data do you anticipate there bei
ng more data in the future are there any state lawmakers or leaders talking about collecting data yeah absolutely there are and there are a handful of states that are actually doing it um you know Pennsylvania does it fairly well they have it included in their um Essa accountability systems uh few other states Michigan um Utah uh there there are states that are doing it um but it's just not Universal yet um and I think it's because because the programs are so new um and they're being built um so
metimes classroom by classroom if not uh you know school by School uh it's and they're not generally Statewide Frameworks yet for what the standards are um it's really hard to hold schools accountable for them at the moment uh so very few people are collecting that data we're hopeful that that's the direction States will move in um but we have a ways to go got it and I'm curious because both of you have put so much work into this area what is the ideal your state has all the resources and studen
ts are prepared or what what is the ideal Jo first I mean for us that you know it would be consistent with that High School ready profile that I alluded to and is in the resources that every student is walking and is an ideal uh walking into High School uh informed about what their choices are um but most importantly understanding themselves uh I mean it's it's as much about who you are as much as what you want to do or be um and so a good understanding of that uh as well as what the the career
opportunities are Etc uh so that they can make an informed choice to start that that process we're not expecting kids at 14 to uh know what they want to do um you know there are systems around the world that that start folks in that space But I think we want to just help young people uh position themselves to make good choices and uh be prepared to really own their own Journey um so the the structure of that you know we're building it um and part of what we're trying to do now is through these P
ilots is sort of say all right let's build out what this could look like organically um from this we're going to start to build out the Frameworks that we're going to scale um and our and the other piece of this in terms of the barrier is around funding um um so one of the things that uh we're looking to in terms of policy change is um there are CT funds for example right now in Delaware that uh are available for seventh and eighth graders but people don't really use it for that um and we're loo
king to pass some legislation which would modestly you know move that needle down to fifth and sixth grade so we could actually have those resources available and we already know Perkins is available but again we're not utilizing it in that way so um there are some some organic sort of design pieces that we're working on that would really reflect that High School ready uh student and then there are some structural policy changes uh around funding and scale that uh we're working through got it Da
nielle yes so somewhat similar um the task force I mentioned earlier uh the recommendations were organized into four buckets and I think that that really helps to set the vision and so the first is program modernization um it would be easy for a student um a family member for uh a principal a school a school district all to take advantage of the available funding at the state level and it would be really easy for them to report those data um so not you know duplicative reporting um we would have
a Statewide longitudinal data system that would connect all the that information uh the second bucket was access and awareness so it's making sure that students and families have what they need the information they need um a single source of information as well as um advising and hopefully some tech enabled tools uh that could make sure that the time of students are spending with humans is really focus focused um and helpful and that some of the other things that may or may not be a little bit
more check boxy could help could hopefully be taken care of maybe by AI um intrusive advising via text message things like that um the third bucket of recommendations funding consistent reliable guaranteed um and so we are undertaking an effort to see how we could fund based on those three outcomes uh college credit work-based learning and Industry recognized credentials we do that in various ways peac meal but not holistically um and then lastly the Partnerships uh which not last but not least
of course So community- based organizations out of school time programs um intermediaries uh obviously our business Community all of that uh would need to be coming together and kind of be all on the same page about what we want for the Youth in our state um and then lastly I think we're trying to take a really overall ecosystems approach so we can tell students there's no wrong door there's multiple Pathways um you know we want you to be able to pursue um what you good at what you're good at an
d what you value uh but if we don't do things like skills based hiring as a state then it does then that's not going to help right I mean students will can only get only to a certain point so I do think we're also trying to work in particular with our Colorado Workforce Development Council to look at the entire ecosystem um and we've got um executive orders from our governor about skills-based hiring um and also um increasing apprenticeships so I think that helps so that way when students are ar
e to the point where they're getting those jobs those things are available to them so I'll just add you know one other that um some states have done I know in Utah for example there is actually a requirement that sth and eighth graders take um a Career College and Career writin class uh it is taught in sort of collaboration between a work-based learning um teacher a school counselor um and uh the CTE teachers so it's really a team approach uh to making sure that all seventh and eighth graders ha
ve it as a requirement uh so some states have gone that path certainly not something I don't don't think Colorado would do is to to mandate um but it it comes down to the differences and nuances between states and their level of local control and their desire to have local control and enabling uh certain activities to happen rather than uh setting up a a Statewide curriculum that would actually put in place very you know clear accountability metrics and all of those things and requirements for i
t to happen so there is certainly differences between states and their their level of interest in doing mandates versus um local control efforts uh but some of them have been been pretty successful that's great and I'm curious since we have a room full of Education wonks here that are going to take this information back to their states what advice would you give anyone who wants to implement a middle school career Pathways in their schools or in their districts or States happy to hear from both
of you I think it's it's really hearing from all of the folks that are impacted and related um so uh we we had some human Center design sessions with students and we were able to better understand who the messenger should be what the message would be literally what time of year is the most helpful for them to hear these messages um during the the kind of Traditional School year uh and so now we're able to take that and able to update our um career advising framework work um and our trainings bas
ed on that um so I think it's yeah it's really hearing from stakeholders yeah I mean I I would Echo that I mean I think the Student Center design was something that was kind of woven throughout our process um I do think it's also trying to connect the dots uh in terms of what employers are going to need you know one of the things that um we've been involved in as uh the Workforce Development board is sort of saying where are the jobs going to be and then how do we kind of backward map to uh the
Middle grades as well as high schools and we do a pretty poor job maybe labor market information might be better in Colorado but our labor market information is often looking backwards and and um there is a a bevy of new exciting industries that folks don't even know about like there's on the University of Delaware campus there's Gene editing that high school and middle school kids can to go check out um so I think part of it is yes here from the bottom up in terms of what stakeholders from stud
ents uh through to Educators and employers uh need and want but it's really sort of trying to connect the dots and seeing if you can kind of build um a coherent system uh from top to bottom and so I think that's to be involved and ideally trying to build more of a a demand driven system that really reflects the needs of employers but to Danielle's point you know some of that is driven by skills right so you might not necessarily need to know what jobs are available but you will need to know what
skills the employers are looking towards and those tend to be fairly standard right there's America succeeds that you know durable skills 70% of them show up in all all uh job uh postings so really thinking about how we're training young people for those durable skills that will be there regardless of what job um someone might be creating in the future I think it's really really important yeah I just Echo that I mean we interviewed 300 Employers in Delaware and they basically said exactly what
you said like they need those durable skills and digital literacy um and then they they can teach them the technical skills beyond that yeah great I think we have a few final minutes is there anything that we didn't touch on that you wanted to close out with each of you I'd love to hear from you sure I mean I can start I you know I think this is a great start of a conversation uh clearly the the research and and data that's out there shows that these are conversations that are beginning to happe
n in States throughout the country that uh educators are certainly focusing on this that as you say employers are desperate for understanding how we're developing a type a pipeline of uh future workers um and that there is a lot of room for improvement when we think about how the policy is actually translating uh into the schools and how do we make this uh really sustainable really work for students in a way that is not currently uh and provide them with the Hands-On learning experiences that wi
ll really teach them the skills that they need to be Workforce ready yeah I mean I think we kind of hit on a lot of the key issues around um sort of the design strategy I love you know the launch stal data system is very consistent with what we're trying to do because we we have a K12 system that's very good we have a higher ed system that's decent and then trying to really connect to with what kids do later on is is a challenge um so connecting those dots is is is hugely important um I'd say yo
u know one thing that we didn't really talk about and we talked about a little bit in the prep um was that there is this huge Federal opportunity right now um that uh there's literally $2 trillion dollar that are in the ecosystem uh that they're going towards semic semiconductor development like the chips work the bi the by um partisan infrastructure law Etc we there's a ton of money out there and I think if you thinking about sort of taking things to scale I think getting creative about how do
you braid your resources uh and create a coherent strategy that sort of pulls on multiple federal dollars there's a lot out there and I think a lot of our state agencies are overwhelmed with actually how to do that and if you as an intermediary potentially or a state agency can help folks navigate that there is a a rich set of resources that um can be drawn upon I was going to say something similar we we definitely collaborate a ton at the state level in Colorado um and different state agencies
we're aware of the funding sources we do try to blend and braid as much as possible um also you know there's a year when somebody might not be able to afford to pay XYZ amount into the um the online platform but another state agency can and so we've got inter agency agreements going um and we I think we really do understand that like all coloradans um that's who we're all trying to serve and so um being aware though of what those funding sources are um other funding opportunities uh we have agre
ement that um if there is a funding opportunity available that's a competitive Grant like we come together and decide together is it a go or a no-o um because we know it's going to take each other to really make it successful so I think you know just like meeting folks and making sure you're kind of up to date on what everybody is doing no matter what um kind of like sphere or level you're at is super helpful because sometimes folks have something available and they don't they don't even necessa
rily know that you've got that need so being able to express the need and sharing is fantastic well great and thank you all for your comments I think we're at one minute but Julie I want to close out with where can um everyone here find the research so it's available on our website today um www.a.org perfect thank you all it was great [Music] [Applause] conversation
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