COVID-19 was tough on the U.S. education system, and it faces ongoing challenges as the pandemic ebbs. Along with widespread learning loss, an alarming number of students are exhibiting deteriorating mental health; teacher shortages are common, and culture warriors, initially mobilized by school closures and mask mandates, are now blasting educators for everything from the way history is taught to the books on library shelves.
But not all the education news is bad. The disruption of the pandemic has also opened the door to pursue alternative and innovative education strategies. One of those strategies puts greater emphasis on college and career readiness to make school more relevant to students and their communities.
It’s an approach backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which recently announced funding for college and career readiness programs in New Mexico and California (the funding totals close to $5 million). Initiatives that better prepare kids for life after high school have attracted increasing attention from philanthropy in recent years. Major funders like the the Walton Family Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Annie E. Casey, Joyce, and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundations, have all supported versions of this approach, as IP reported last year. And according to Grantmakers for Education’s most recent Trends in Education Philanthropy: Benchmarking 2023 report, published in June, over half of grantmakers surveyed (55%) said that they “provide support for workforce development and career pathway programs. Two out of five of these respondents (41%) expect to increase related giving in the next two years.”
The goal of college and career readiness programs is not just to prepare students for life after graduation, but to deepen their engagement while they are still in school. Gabriela Lopez, CZI director of research to practice measures, points to research showing that providing hands-on experience based on students’ interests and involvement in their communities increases school success. The grantees in the recent round of funding all share this goal. “That is consistent across all of these partners: They want to make sure that kids are staying in school and that they feel a sense of purpose and agency,” she said.
Of course, remaining in school and doing well there helps shape a student’s future. As Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, put it when the grants were announced, “Communities across the country are charting a new course for education that includes rigorous academic preparation and recognizes the critical roles that student wellbeing, purpose and agency play in achieving a life of success and fulfillment after high school.”
Future Focused Education
Tony Monfiletto, the executive director of New Mexico-based Future Focused Education, one of CZI’s grantees, thinks a lot about student wellbeing, purpose and agency. In 2019, with funding from the Walton and Gates foundations, Future Focused Education partnered with New Mexico’s Public Education Department to learn more about disengaged students — that is, kids who had either been pushed out of school, or were barely skating by. In surveys and focus groups, Monfiletto and his team asked young people about their school experience.
“What we found was that, by and large, these students were not good at what school was asking them to do — they just didn’t feel like they were suited for it,” he said. “They were bored; that alienation was pretty pronounced. When we took stock of what these young people were telling us, we realized that a lot of what they could do wasn’t being captured in school, but they were perfectly capable of making a contribution to their community. School was misaligned with who they were and what they were capable of.”
In response to these findings, Monfiletto proposed an alternative to the state’s graduation requirements. Instead of being required to pass a test as a measure of competency, students could instead do a capstone project — an in-depth, months-long research project aligned with the students’ interests and values that would culminate in a presentation to the school and wider community.
New Mexico’s Public Education Department agreed to this proposal, and with funding from Walton, Gates and CZI, Future Focused Education built out a framework for implementation. This framework became part of New Mexico’s Innovation Zones Initiative, a collaboration between local communities, including Tribal communities, as well as the Public Education Department, Future Focused Education and other nonprofit organizations. Under the initiative, participating school districts and charter schools receive grants to implement innovative learning experiences including graduate profiles (which outline the knowledge and skills prioritized by the local community) capstone projects, career and technical education, and work-based learning.
New Mexico’s legislature approved a $30 million expansion of the Innovation Zone Initiative earlier this year. Forty-seven high schools will participate in the initiative this year — more than twice as many as last year. Three of the high schools are tribally controlled.
Mentorship is an important element of Future Focused Education programs. “We’re really committed to the mentorship role,” Monfiletto said. “There’s no substitute for the connection to a caring adult who you can learn from. Not just a caring adult, but someone who actually knows about the thing you want to learn, and they can mentor you and bring you along with them.”
These kinds of mentorship relationships not only provide guidance and support, they help students build networks — the “social capital” that helps young people get jobs and other opportunities. According to a Getting Smart report, which highlights the work of Future Focused Education, “Social capital, not just skills, is a leading predictor of economic mobility. An estimated half of college internships and full-time jobs come through networks.”
The recent funding from CZI will support what Monfiletto calls field-building work, that is, preparing teachers in participating schools, and supporting local nonprofits that will be working with school districts to implement the programs. Walton and Gates have also provided some support for this ongoing work.
TED Talks and civic engagement
The Cajon Valley Union School District, another CZI grantee, is largely low income — 70% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch — and “beautifully diverse,” according to Superintendent David Miyashiro. It includes many English language learners, and the largest Middle Eastern refugee population in the country.
Students in the district learn about careers beginning in kindergarten. Miyashiro, who has led the district for over a decade, invites local business and community leaders to speak to students about their jobs and local workforce needs, and students regularly visit the nearby Qualcomm campus. Those relationships have helped the district, which includes 28 K-8 schools and a new charter high school, to shape its World of Work career-development program.
Along with the regular curriculum, students are taught to identify and articulate their passions and are introduced to careers that might suit them. They also learn concrete skills; resumes are introduced in third grade, for example, and by fifth grade, students learn to prepare a full resume and cover letter and participate in a job interview. Beginning their freshman year in high school, students sign up for internships at local organizations and businesses.
Cajon Valley students learn important soft skills, as well. Beginning in kindergarten, students learn to give TED Talks in front of an audience. The district has a partnership with the TED organization and the talks are part of its core curriculum.
Students address different themes in their talks, depending on their grade; fourth graders, for example, focus on rites of passage. One of the TED Talks Miyashiro showed me when we spoke was by a fourth grader who described the experience of wearing a hijab. The talks are very short in the earlier grades; older students are required to prepare increasingly longer presentations. In every grade, students receive feedback for how to make their presentations more effective and compelling.
Miyashiro introduced the idea of TED Talks to help students learn to develop and articulate an idea, grow comfortable with public speaking, and work to improve their presentation based on the feedback they receive.
“We were hearing things like, ‘Kids don’t shake your hand and look you in the eye, they haven’t developed those kinds of life skills. And they give up on the first or second try, these kids are not resilient,’” Miyashiro said. “So we thought, well, if those are the goals, what would school look like? And that’s how we developed our presentation literacy program, our World of Work Program, and actual hands-on doing, where kids can fail and break things and then pick themselves up and learn to fix things over time. It’s a curriculum that doesn’t use a paper and pencil test to measure everything.”
The Anaheim Union High School District, also in Southern California, is a third CZI grantee. The district’s Career Preparedness Systems Framework includes career and technical education programs, as well as initiatives to promote student voices and civic engagement. The district will use the CZI funds to partner with the University of California, Irvine, to evaluate the impact of the framework.
According to CZI’s Gabriela Lopez, part of the goal of the new round of grants is to measure the impact of the college and career readiness programs. CZI will provide funds for assessment tools that will allow grantees to track program effectiveness.
Not just voc-ed, rebranded
While I was writing this piece, I was nagged by a memory of shop classes and other vocational education programs years ago at my public high school. At that time, many disadvantaged students and kids of color were tracked into voc-ed programs, and many of them ended up dropping out of high school. I couldn’t help wondering if the emphasis on career pathways is putting a new gloss on an old idea. Are we steering certain kids away from college and into dead-end futures? With tuition price tags soaring, are we perpetuating a system in which colleges are enclaves for the elite — while everyone else learns a few skills and then labors away in service of capitalism?
I asked Lopez what is different about the new programs, and she drew a sharp distinction. “When we think about vocational ed, and the history of vocational ed, one of the assumptions was that some kids didn’t need to be college ready,” she said. “The reality is in our current world, you need to be college ready. You may not exercise the option of going to college and choose to move right into a career. But you still need college-ready skills and knowledge in order to be successful. So all of our partnerships have standards that are academically rigorous.”
Another difference is that programs like those in New Mexico and California grow out of the interests and priorities of students and their wider community, versus traditional voc-ed programs. which typically weren’t driven by student interests or aligned to community needs. “The capstone projects, for example, bring together academic standards and performance demands, while allowing young people to choose what projects and problems they want to solve,” Lopez said. “They take ownership of that, and it’s helping their community at the same time.”
Future Focused Education’s Tony Monfiletto emphasized the importance of providing support — and letting students take the lead. “When we give students agency to shape their education and provide support to meet their unique needs from a network of caring adults, they rise to the occasion, becoming leaders for healthier and more prosperous communities.”
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