White House Nomination to Support STEM

I was honored and pleased to be asked by the Biden Administration to join the board of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Fund. The formal press release is here, but in short, should I be confirmed, I would take on a voluntary role on this federally-funded scholarship program designed to advance Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). The board’s primary role is to meet annually to review and approve scholarships to undergraduate students looking to pursue graduate studies in STEM.

This will not impact my current role other than to expand Rodel’s impact on this important, global area of study.

Career Pathways in a Rapidly Changing World

Part 1: A Trip Down Under and a Conversation with Andreas

On April 7 of this year I took off on an amazing adventure. As this blog explains, for the last three months, I have been on loan with the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in France. I worked with a wonderful team there in Paris, and while there, I took week-long study visits to Australia, New Zealand, and Scotland to talk to young people, practitioners and employers about the transition from high school (or senior secondary overseas)  to whatever young people decide to do next.

In the wake of COVID-19 and the growing uncertainty of climate change and artificial intelligence, this is an incredibly interesting time to be looking at these transitions. I learned quite a bit, and over the next few months, I’ll be sharing a series of blogs and podcasts.

For now, here are:

  • Highlights from Disrupting Futures 2023, an international conference hosted earlier this spring by the OECD. Along with Bob Schwartz of Harvard, a senior advisor on this project, I got a chance to share more about this exciting project. The broader link provides dozens of presentations from around the world on career readiness; it’s worth a scan.

  • Leveraging Tech to help in career navigation. Helping young people make good decisions about their courses and postsecondary plans is important, but the ratios between students and guidance counselors are often impossible. Around the world, schools are now leveraging tech in exciting ways to address this issue. Check out the new Career Readiness Observatory on the use of Digital technologies in Career guidance for Youth (ODiCY).

 

I look forward to sharing more over the coming months and please reach out if you want to catch up.

What Can the Rest of the World Teach Us about Career Pathways?

Back in 2014, I went to Switzerland and met a young man with a big smile and a ponytail named Luke Rhine. He was a new employee at the Delaware DOE and who knew at the time that that trip would be so catalytic in helping the state build out a new effort that we collectively called, “career pathways.”

Today, we are at a new pivot point and I’m excited to exercise a couple of Rodel’s core values—“listening” and “learning”—by going out and seeing what we can learn from some of the world’s leading-edge countries.

Back then, we were there to learn about the Swiss VET (Vocational Education and Training) system. Mark Stellini, a Delaware employer and school board member, and about 25 other education leaders from around the U.S., joined us. That trip, coupled with trips to Germany and Singapore, gave our team a glimpse of some of the best systems in the world in terms of helping young people transition from high school into a career.

The timing was good in that we were also in the midst of working with the Vision Coalition leadership team in engaging some 4,000 Delawareans in the creation of Student Success 2025, a 10-year plan for world-class schools. As a part of that work, we built an international advisory group that included amazing leaders from Singapore, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and France, chaired by Joanne Weiss, former chief of staff to former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Andreas Schleicher, the head of the Education and Skills group at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was an important member of that group in that he brought a deep knowledge of what was happening to improve public education globally.

I kept in touch with Andreas, and this spring, through the generosity of Rodel’s board and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, I plan to take some time to learn about another mix of countries, in partnership with the OECD, to deepen our understanding of how to help our young people “launch.” Here’s a link to a synopsis of the project, but in short, from April 7 to July 7 of this year, I will be “on loan” to the OECD, learning about where we are as a nation on career pathways and getting a chance to see firsthand what’s working in several other countries.

This project builds on the first-of-its-kind longitudinal analyses by the OECD that shows “career pathways,” broadly defined, can routinely be associated with better employment outcomes for youth. This new project will mark the first time that a comparative international study has been attempted.

Over the course of the next three months, I’ll be working with my team at Rodel, the OECD, and Robert Schwartz at Harvard, to better understand what’s happening in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, and here in the U.S. These countries are not only doing some leading-edge work, but their governance models are more similar to the decentralized context that American policymakers find themselves in, so the lessons learned might be more transferable. Later this year, we’ll share what we learn in some publications, podcasts, and webinars.

A decade after that first trip, Delaware and the U.S. are at another important moment. In Delaware, we launched Pathways 2.0 in 2021 and by 2024, we’re hoping to expand our work into the middle grades, deepen the work in our vocational schools, engage 80 percent or 32,000 of our high schoolers (from 27 back in 2014), and strengthen our collaboration with employers through new sector partnerships like the Tech Council of Delaware. See here for a snapshot of where that works stands today.

And as I discuss in Pathways’ American Moment, there are amazing pockets of excellence throughout the U.S. and exciting efforts, like Launch, looking to accelerate innovation and impact across states. This broad body of work is supported by leadership from the top-down (see U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s comments), and even in this polarized political world, this is one of the few things that leaders in red states and blue can agree on from the bottom up.

In parallel, what we call “pathways” are exploding all over the world. Just like in the U.S., countries often have more jobs than job seekers. With billions of new dollars going into green jobs and infrastructure (for which training pipelines are often not yet built), the competing pressures of climate change, the need to build a more diverse workforce, and an economic landscape that seems to shift hourly, the need to rethink how we create more seamless connections among school and work (what Jobs for the Future describes as “the Big Blur”), has become more important than ever.

Moreover, it’s important to step back and acknowledge that the world our young people are entering today is far more uncertain, volatile, and polarized than it was in 2014. It is our collective responsibility to do our best to help them navigate and thrive in this new world. My hope is that, in a modest way, this project contributes to that effort.

I look forward to bringing these findings back to Delaware and continuing to learn from and with our partners from across the country and overseas.

If you want to keep tabs on this project, listen to podcasts from the road, weigh in on what’s working here, or raise a question about what you want to learn from these other countries, please send a note to info@rodelde.org and we’ll keep you in the loop.

Note: During this time out of the office, I’ll be keeping in touch with my team weekly, but won’t be responding to most emails. Nancy Millard (nmillard@rodelde.org) on our team will be able to reach me in the event of an emergency or to connect to the appropriate person on our team to follow up, but otherwise,  Madeleine Bayard will be leading our work on policy, advocacy and communications, Mark Baxter will continue to lead our work on pathways and diversifying the teacher workforce, and Nancy will be my overall point of contact and manage our operations.

Career Pathways and the Future of American Education

In the last couple weeks, Opportunity America, in concert with the Walton Family Foundation, released a compendium of essays entitled, “Unlocking America’s Future.” See here for the 12 essays and a video of the release. This is a provocative mix of perspectives from the right and the left. I wrote one of them, here, entitled, “Career Pathways: An American Moment.”

This is a strong collection of work, and many of these big ideas may just stick, but as I was reading these essays, I was reminded of what David Tyack and Larry Cuban shared with us in their 1995 book, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform.

The message I took away from their work was not that change was impossible, but that in any complex, democratic system, large-scale transformation is often slower and more incremental than most of us want to see.

This is especially true in a time of divided, polarized government. As I write this, I’m taking the train from Washington, D.C. and was reminded of the battles that are brewing in our Supreme Court around college access and that the divide in the House and Senate doesn’t bode well for sweeping change.

However, there’s something to be said for steady, incremental change. While progress often feels glacial at the time, the system has moved. Standards, and disaggregation of data by race and gender are now accepted practice. We now have universal kindergarten and are expanding toward universal pre-K. Online courses for K-12, and college-level courses and industry-recognized credentials in high school are now common place. Access for all races, language speakers, and abilities, after hard-fought civil rights legislation, are now the norm. These are major shifts, but they didn’t happen overnight.

Career pathways is an idea that, in relative terms, is fairly rapidly changing what it means to become a young adult in this country.

We’re seeing our middle schools rethink their approach and the walls separating high school, college, and work melt away. Parents and educators are seeing this play out in real time. Students are engaging in meaningful work-based learning experiences, earning advanced college credits and industry-recognized credentials while still in high school.

So, even in divided government, when there is bipartisan support and the incentives for parents, students, policymakers, practitioners and employers make sense, things tend to move. As I wrote about in the American Moment, the recent growth of the career pathways effort nationally has been powerful, but there’s still a lot we don’t know.

For instance, since the ratios of students to guidance counselors are often 300:1, we don’t tend to do a very good job of helping young people make informed choices about their lives, what some call “career navigation.” And because the world of work is moving so fast, we often don’t do a great job of collaborating with employers to ensure that what we’re teaching is current and relevant.

To that end, this April, I’m going to be visiting some countries outside the U.S. to see what we can learn. More about that in the coming weeks.