In April, I had the chance to moderate a discussion between former U.S. Secretaries of Education Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. It was quite an honor.
At one point, Duncan expressed frustration that America has, in his words, “zero education goals.”
Notwithstanding the progress of a growing number of states moving the needle on educational outcomes, I understand where he’s coming from.
We are no longer in the midst of a standards and assessment movement. Gone are prescriptive federal funding programs like Reading First. College access and completion is not the singular focus it once was, and Common Core standards have been, for the most part, metabolized into state policies. And as I wrote last week, turning power to the states, however beneficial, is the inverse of a singular approach.
But if an event this week is any indication, we may be in the early stages of a bipartisan movement to redesign K-12 so that students are equipped to pursue a multitude of “pathways” after high school.
Sound vague?
Well, the practices, definitions, and policies that undergird the pathways movement are becoming increasingly well defined.
In February, the XQ Institute provided us with the first 50-state analysis of the policies that need to be in place to evolve the high school experience. The Carnegie Foundation published definitions for the durable skills we know are so important for success post-graduation.
And the Commission on Purposeful Pathways (a bipartisan group of K-12 and higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, and students), has provided a definition for pathways: “high-quality advising, accelerated coursework, and career-connected learning that cultivate purpose, belonging, and social capital—ensuring that students graduate high school with agency and momentum on purposeful pathways toward economic mobility.”
This week, the Pathways Impact Fund, housed within StriveTogether and led by John Garcia III, brought together more than 200 philanthropic, policy, and industry leaders at the National Press Club to discuss how place-based organizations are strengthening and scaling pathways to better serve students in their communities.
As John shared, the Pathways Impact Fund is “pooling philanthropic resources to invest in and scale the sort of evidence-based practices needed to ensure that every high school graduate can say with confidence, ‘I know who I am, I know where I’m going, and I know who can help me get there.”
The Fund’s initial investments total $7.5 million and include Learn to Earn Dayton (which brings dedicated career advisors to schools across Ohio to expose students to their options for life after high school) and EdVestors (which aims to ensure that all 45,000+ students in Boston Public Schools graduate with a career-connected learning experience under their belt), among others.
Part of what I like about the pathways work is that it acknowledges the complexity of the challenge.
The challenge isn’t simply acquiring proxies—credits and credentials that might matter—but ensuring students have the guidance, insights, and experiences they need to build real skills and translate them into labor market outcomes.
After all, none of us walk down to city hall and cash in our diplomas and degrees for a monthly stipend. We have to translate accumulated knowledge and experience into something that actually has value. Teaching students the skills to do that takes a very different sort of approach (like, connections with real employers) than most K-12 schools and systems have historically been set up to deliver.
At W/A, we’ve referred to the increased emphasis on the intersection of learning and work as the “fifth wave” of reform.
With good reason, some have expressed concerns that focusing on shorter-term economic opportunity, alongside, say, college attainment, poses a risk of marginalizing already underserved students’ populations. Or, as Duncan put it in the same panel: “Where I worry on the alternative pathways is that it’s almost always for ‘other kids.’ ‘That’s for Black and brown kids.’ ‘That’s for poor kids.’ If that’s what they want to do, fantastic, but I don’t want to say that path is for you, and this path is for kids that look like me.”
I understand and appreciate that critique.
But it’s one that thoughtful pathways champions like Garcia are working to address. The national report was intentional in explaining that alternative pathways are not about steering students toward short-term economic gains at the expense of pathways that may take longer, cost more, and require the sort of delayed gratification that seems to vex many of us these days. Creating that sort of balance in practice, however, requires that we celebrate more than college access and attainment after high school.
Of course, the tension between what we often think of as “higher education” and the range of other valuable pathways other than college isn’t entirely new.
When we invest in public education, toward what end? How do we reconcile inherent tensions between shorter-term economic opportunity, and the cost and delayed gratification associated with certain pathways? How do we ensure that our focus on skills doesn’t undermine the sort of rigor that comes through engagement with complex and important canonical texts? In a world of imperfect data, what can we do to unblock informed choice while avoiding the risks of shadow tracking and outcomes-distortions that break along racial or economic lines?
None of these questions have easy answers. And there are no clearcut, national “solutions.” But the pathways discourse is taking on these and other hard questions and I’m encouraged that the work happening today may very well represent the seedlings of a new and—perhaps even cohesive—national agenda.
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