 Today's episode concerning ESSA, Well-Rounded Education and College and Career Readiness. I'm Caitlin Howley, the director of the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center, or the ARC. And I'm really pleased today to have David English join us. David is a senior technical assistance consultant at AIR supporting his work on college and career readiness, accountability, and the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. At Accountability Lead for the College and Career Readiness and Success Center, David's current work focuses on supporting ESSA state planning for accountability, assessment, and providing a well-rounded education. Previously, David worked for the U.S. Department of Education under the ESEA Flexibility Waivers collaborating with states on accountability, systems, college and career readiness standards, and educator evaluation systems. So thanks very much for joining us, David. So let's begin by learning a bit about your center, the College and Career Readiness and Success Center. What is the center's mission and what sorts of products and services do its staff provide? Sure. Quite simply, our mission is to ensure that all students graduate from high school, college and career ready. We are a federal content center, and we build state capacity to develop career pathways and also to support other statewide systems, including accountability and assessment. With the goal, ultimately, that these systems all develop three sets of skills in students, academic skills, technical and employability skills. These employability skills are also called 21st century skills. These are going to include interpersonal skills like collaboration and effective communication, as well as interpersonal trade, such as grit, which has gotten so many headlines in the past few years. Our services are going to include workshops, state level consulting, and other types of collaborations. And we also develop and disseminate a lot of different products and tools, as well as research briefings that really help states to digest a lot of the research that's out there in an efficient way. Why is College and Career Readiness such an important goal for state districts and schools? Right. Right now it's an important goal. Unfortunately, one large reason is that our current high school diploma requirements across the country are not necessarily rigorous enough nor targeted enough to ensure that students are college and career ready. Groups like Achieve have identified rigorous academic pathways, the completion of which will lead to mastery of academic standards. One example of this is the completion of four years of English and three years of math in high school. But unfortunately, only seven states, for example, require this particular pathway. So as a result, you have as many as 43 states out there that don't even necessarily require the academic foundation that other research has identified as necessary for success in college, including enrollment without remediation. You see that evidence in attainment rates of college degrees, while we're experiencing record highs with graduation rates, just 60% of students entering traditional four-year colleges are attaining their degrees within six years. The numbers are even lower for Hispanics and Blacks. You see 54% of Hispanics and just 41% of Blacks attaining their degrees within six years at a four-year college. We know that remediation is a big stumbling block for many of these students, and over half of these students who go to two-year colleges are actually remediating. And as many as 20% of students going to four-year colleges are remediating. But the bigger picture there is that there is a misalignment of resources going on. The area of demand among employers that is enjoying the highest growth is really for those middle skills that can be provided through post-secondary degrees that aren't necessarily a bachelor's degree. So this focus on a high school graduation diploma leading to college success is in need of more context, especially for those kids who are more appropriately engaged in developing specialized skills that can be attained through credentialing at either community colleges or other post-secondary institutions. So while we can see the funnel kids towards this traditional college path, this focus on college and career readiness is really about broadening that perspective to multiple pathways of secondary success. And do you see states moving towards providing those multiple pathways? We do. And it's going to be isolated examples in terms of how sophisticated their approaches are. But if you look, for example, at accountability systems alone, a number of states have prioritized participation and performance in those pathways in their accountability systems. The question is whether or not they have parallel systems in place to actually support participation. And what we see is that the actual pathways are often more of a local issue. So what's important is that the local, the either local school districts or the local workforce development boards in the states are having a conversation about this. So that we're moving forward with accountability for college and career readiness and actually providing the actual curricular and programming and educational experiences that support college and career readiness. I want to turn now to the Every Student Succeeds Act and its role in supporting college and career readiness. One of the insights that your center has had is that the, that ESSA offers state education agencies a policy vehicle for their efforts to support college and career readiness. Can you tell me a little bit more about how ESSA does that, especially via its provisions for a well-rounded education? Sure. What's interesting is that the phrase college and career readiness doesn't even matter in the new law, right? And that might be partially due to the fact that it was a somewhat loaded term after the whole common core debates raged for a few years. They've synthesized down a bit. But it's possible that was simply a political term that they didn't want to insert in the law. But regardless, you see many aspects of college and career readiness embedded in the law, from AP, IV coursework, for work-based learning, mentions of employability skills, et cetera. But when you really break it down and analyze the law, the different components of college and career readiness can be grouped into three policy areas, which are going to be accountability, assessment, and a well-rounded education. Accountability and assessment, people are very familiar with because they're tried and true components of states, a federal oversight, rather, for many years, and somewhat infamously under NCLB. But accountability and well-rounded education are really just two sides of the same coin that I alluded to before. We know that with accountability we can prioritize the outcomes at the student level that we want our students graduating with. And one way to do this under assays through the additional indicator or the fifth indicator that it's so often referred to, which states can use to embed college and career readiness. But as I mentioned, simply measuring something doesn't necessarily provide the incentives to actually provide support. It will provide some incentive, but as we see in the past with NCLB, there can be many unintended consequences of simply measuring something without providing support. Well-rounded education describes the actual input and support around curriculum, educational experiences, and conditions for learning. So for example, when we talk about the APIB coursework itself, the curricular planning that goes around, that falls under the umbrella of a well-rounded education. What do we include in a well-rounded education? And ESSA includes various requirements for both states and LEAs to ensure that a well-rounded education is provided. So what we're really trying to do is to get states and local entities to think about a well-rounded education in terms of how it could include college and career readiness components. There's somewhat of a tendency for individuals to think of additional liberal arts-related courses. And certainly well-rounded education can mean including more arts courses for children and foreign language courses, et cetera. So we really want to get states anchored in thinking about how a well-rounded education supports our college and career readiness goals. Because the intent of the law really is as a broader umbrella around curriculum, educational experiences, and conditions for learning. What should states consider as they integrate their college and career readiness efforts with their well-rounded education efforts? How can those two play together before the state's goals? Sure. And here's where we're really getting at the heart of how you think of what a well-rounded education should include. And we've come up with a framework at the center that really draws from examples in the law and guidance, as well as the flexibility provided to help states connect the dots. And the first thing we want to think of when formulating what a well-rounded education might include is we want to think about alignment with the state definition of college and career readiness, right? We don't want states starting from scratch, looking at a long list of courses and saying, what constitutes a well-rounded education? Start from the state definition itself, which ideally is going to include, again, academic, technical, and employability skills. And think about how curriculum writ large can include those pieces. We also want to think about alignment with other policies like standards, high school graduation requirements, if those are at the state level, college entrance requirements, credentialing requirements. So there's a whole host of policies that describe expectations around college and career readiness that states can first look to instead of simply starting from scratch. Secondly, the second dimension we think about is employment-focused content. And here I use the word content, which is what people intuitively think about when they're thinking about, oh, what should a well-rounded education include? Right? What are the courses? What are the programming? That's the content. And again, it goes beyond our notion of a liberal education. We really want to focus on employability skills, which are going to include the soft skills like collaboration, growth mindset, et cetera, that I mentioned before, that employers are both demanding as necessary for professionalism and collaboration in the workplace. And that also scaffolds learning itself, right? Things like growth mindset and career obviously scaffold learning. But also under employment-focused content, we want to make sure that STEM is included in a robust way for two reasons. One, it's the second fastest growing cluster of jobs in our country right now. And STEM also scaffolds very important other skills, career technical education skills for one, which is the third component of an employment-focused content, career technical education. I alluded to those skills you can acquire without necessarily getting a bachelor's degree. And to a large extent, that skills demand is emanating from these CTE career pathways. Thirdly, we want to make sure that the content is rigorous, right? It's not just about including that. It's including rigorous opportunities all throughout an educational trajectory, including APIB coursework, including Algebra 2. And yet we know that Algebra 2 is not necessarily offered at up to 25% of high schools in the country that serve the highest populations of Blacks and Latinos. So this is particularly important because a rigorous pathway has been identified as one of the strongest predictors of future success after high school. So that's why this rigorous element is so important. And finally, when we think about well-rounded education, we want to think about the context of learning. And here we focus specifically on work-based learning. And work-based learning is often thought of as just internships and experiential opportunities. However, we like to think of work-based learning as encompassing a continuum of activities, everything from field trips to attitude assessments around careers, and as well, internships. Because all of these activities are going to help students connect learning to their interests and career opportunities. And we know that this is really important to ensure that students persevere in their study and pursuit of future success. This idea of grit and perseverance is really fueled by ensuring that students are being connected to their passions with what they're learning and what the career opportunities are. So in summary, you can think of these four elements as alignment, content, rigor, and context. It goes beyond just a list of subjects. We want to hit at all these different dimensions of learning with those four components of a well-rounded education. Okay. So you certainly made a strong case for the importance of work-based learning. I want to ask you a follow-up question. I think it's unfortunate that career and technical education has sort of been regarded in some senses as a consolation prize. But your center is clearly making the case that work-based learning and employment-focused content are an important element of a well-rounded education, and the new federal law provides an avenue for states to explore those possibilities. But I want to get down to a little bit of a finer grain and ask you how employment-focused content can be embedded in curriculum and instruction. What does that look like? Sure. So when we think about employment-focused content, again, we're talking about employability skills, as well as STEM and CTE skills. So work-based learning is a key context for embedding employability skills. I alluded to the importance of work-based learning in terms of it really fueling the perseverance of students and keeping them engaged. But the other reason it's important is because it is the ultimate context for practicing and demonstrating employability skills. Internships and other unpaid opportunities by their very nature go beyond that classroom scenario of doing a practicing skills in the classroom and really force students to demonstrate those skills in an environment that has real-world consequences. So work-based learning experiences are very important for employability skills. But also that's complemented, for example, by social-emotional learning curricula that both can be both discreet and integrated into academic content. And there are many opportunities in ESSA for supporting the integration of social-emotional learning into academic content. In fact, on the subject of integration, this is one of the most important ways that STEM and CTE can also be embedded in learning experiences as well, aside from there being opportunities to develop pathways. We talk about career pathways and CTE coursework being planned in the context of a career pathway. But there are many opportunities in ESSA to train academic teachers, for example, to integrate CTE coursework into their lessons and vice versa, CTE teachers to embed academic content into their coursework in the same holds true for STEM. So you're really seeing this horizontal alignment across courses, as well as this vertical alignment along career pathways with future opportunities and secondary opportunities. You alluded earlier to the sort of learning opportunities for college and career readiness, how curriculum and instruction are actually enacted, that it takes place often at the local level and that there's some fragmentation as a result. But we've been talking about ESSA in terms of state planning for better alignments and assessments that match college and career readiness definitions and standards. But is college and career readiness primarily a state policy issue or are other layers, I guess, in the system important to the efforts as well? Sure, so as we know, curriculum is largely thought of as a local issue. ESSA recognizes that in requiring that a well-rounded education is embedded in the district plans for Title I part A subgrants as well as the school-wide program plans for Title I part A. So right away in ESSA, you see this acknowledgement of the local nature of curriculum planning within a well-rounded education. But we also know that there are elements of a well-rounded education at the state level, for example, academic standards. So that's a state-level policy. Now that a well-rounded education has been broadened, though, the question remains, what is the state's role in providing that curricular and programming support? And particularly in the college and career readiness space, we see a lot of opportunities for local entities to work with states because states can lend a lot of leverage in terms of resources and relationships. On the one hand, you want local entities forging relationships with regional employers, determining what the regional needs of their local employers are. But on the other hand, it's helpful for states to leverage their partnerships, for example, with state community college systems. You don't necessarily... Well, you could approach a community college as a locality and form partnerships, and that happens all the time. But the effect can really be multiplied across the state if a state is having that conversation with its community college system and creating opportunities across the state, not just with specific localities. And secondarily, a lot of the technology that undergirds the CTE pathways, you can imagine it's quite expensive. And so there's a lot of opportunities for states to help fund that. So while the needs from a content perspective should really be driven at the local level in determining what sort of pathways are appropriate at the local level, the actual implementation can really be supported by states as well. They can... States can play a particularly supportive role given their position, their policy levers, economies of scale, that sort of thing. That's a really good point. Economies of scale, economies of scope, absolutely. Yeah. Well, you mentioned funding, so I want to ask a question about that. How can states fund their college and career plans via ESSA? Sure. Well, the primary levers are going to be titles one, two, and four. I mentioned that Title I plans for LEAs and for school-wide programs have to support a well-rounded education. By virtue of that requirement in those local plans, that grant money can be used in a variety of ways to both expand access to coursework as well as provide capacity-building for educators and organizations to both develop pathways that can be a part of a well-rounded education as well as develop curricula and instructional methods around CTE and other college and career readiness components. Additionally, targeted assistance schools, which don't have the same poverty levels as school-wide programs, may also use funds to support a well-rounded education as long as it's supporting the ultimate goal of higher attainment of academic standards. So Title I is a massive new opportunity for states here as well as localities. Title II has many opportunities embedded in it. In general, Title II Part VIII funds are very flexible. There aren't a lot of required uses around Title II per se because they're generally quote-unquote allowable uses both around capacity-building and recruitment and retaining teachers. But we see lots of explicit examples in that of how to provide professional development using Title II funds by integrating CTE and academic coursework. Again, I alluded to this before. This idea of integration is very prolific throughout ESSA. There's also Title II funds to build capacity to deliver APIB coursework and also to integrate work-based learning. And then finally, we see in Title IV requirements at the state level to support a well-rounded education. Specifically, under NCLB, Title IV referred somewhat narrowly to safe and drug-free schools. And under ESSA, Title IV has been greatly expanded to target a well-rounded education, conditions for learning writ large as well as the integration of technology into instruction. And so a large portion of the state funds for Title IV have to be used to support a well-rounded education. So these are all going to be important supports for a well-rounded education going forward in terms of both expanding coursework opportunities, right? Funding coursework because it's expensive to develop these pathways to even launch an AP course cost somewhere around $10,000, some estimates. So these are really expensive endeavors that are going to require some creative funding. One of the things that strikes me about the notion of preparing students for being to be college and career-readyness is career-ready, is that it's a really long game. You know, it starts from cradle all the way through career. How can states align and coordinate at the funding across agencies and other funding sources that touch on college and career-readyness? Sure. So you really can't talk about funding or supporting college and career-readyness at the state level or local level without talking about the Perkins Act and WIOA or the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Specifically, Perkins really provides a lot of opportunities to fund CTE pathways specifically. Perkins is designated specifically for CTE students. So when you're talking about articulating a pathway across secondary and post-secondary institutions, right, identifying a sequence of courses and training from high school to community colleges or other post-secondary colleges, that's really where Perkins comes in, funding that development process, including curriculum development, as well as developing the programs themselves. WIOA focuses on a somewhat more narrow population of students, specifically at-risk students in and out of school, particularly dropouts, students being reintegrated into the workforce after incarceration or institutionalization, and it also focuses on reintegrating adults who have been out of the workforce who need both job training and basic skills training. And these laws can be used to develop the pathways, but particularly in the case of WIOA, provide funding for basic skill development that are going to be necessary in terms of math, English, as well as computer skills, computer literacy. What other issues should states consider as they build out their college and career readiness plans under SF? So, I think one thing I would mention is it really does all start with that state definition of college and career readiness. Many states have a statement around what it looks like to be college and career-ready at the student level, that embeds academic, technical, and employability skills, but that is really going to provide an anchor for other policies around college and career readiness in terms of thinking about what goes into a well-rounded education or what should accountability measure. It goes back to, okay, what does success look like at the student level? So, that's very important. And as I mentioned before, aligning these components across accountability and well-rounded education in particular is going to be very important because otherwise you're going to have accountability in a vacuum or curriculum in a vacuum and some disconnect between accountability and the educational experiences that are actually being provided on the ground. So, how does accountability for college and career readiness relate to as well-rounded education provisions? Right. So, accountability in a lot of ways should mirror the components of a well-rounded education, both from a content perspective but also from that rigor perspective and from the context for learning perspective. So, we see a couple of states like California and Illinois which have actually embedded the completion of a rigorous pathway in their accountability systems. In other words, schools accumulate points for every student that achieves, for example, an advanced diploma that embeds four years of English and three of math in high school. And again, that's a very strong predictor of future success. So, that's a very strong way of embedding accountability. When we think about how to embed employability skills, that's a little trickier, right? Because we know that, for example, the social-emotional traits that undergird employability skills are difficult to assess. We do see California doing that right now in the court districts. This past year was their first year, including it in accountability. So, everyone's really going to be watching to see how it plays out to try and capture social-emotional learning via student surveys in a high-stakes situation. We don't know how well we can do that yet, so people will really be watching. Kind of anonymously, somewhat anonymously, New Mexico has been doing that to a lesser extent measuring student engagement with student surveys for many years. So, we can look to them. The California is really measuring things like growth, mindset, the ability to adapt to different learning environments that are directly transferable to the workplace. But even though we can't measure these outcomes real well, you can measure proxies for it. For example, chronic absenteeism is on the rise. I'm sorry, the use of chronic absenteeism is clearly widespread in the first batch of essay plans that we've seen. And the supports that address chronic absenteeism, such as adult mentoring, are really supports that also directly support these soft skills and social-emotional learning that go along with employability skills. And again, we can also talk about work-based learning. A couple of states are now including participation in work-based learning in their accountability systems. Because work-based learning provides direct opportunities to practice employability skills and demonstrate employability skills, while we aren't necessarily measuring the, quote, unquote, quality of those traits in students yet, we can at least measure their participation in those activities. And actually, states are now working on assessments of students' work-based learning experiences in terms of how they grew in terms of social-emotional traits during those experiences. So there are states working on those assessments, but those efforts are nascent. So we can still look at participation in work-based learning. And then, of course, there's other more traditional college and career radius indicators like APIB participation, DTE participation and credentialing that are absolutely necessary for states to consider when they think about how to include college and career readiness and accountability. It'll be really interesting to see these, how these new assessments play out. Yes. The plans themselves from the states that they're submitting right now are really interesting. They're using the FIT indicator to approach college and career readiness from many different ways, some more sophisticated than others. But as you mentioned, the testing itself that underpins some of this, which is nascent and trying to get at these more intangible skills that are difficult to measure are going to be interesting to see developed. So far, in low-stakes situations, we've seen that some of these instruments are valid and reliable. California had a lot of success in the low-stakes situations around this, and we've actually seen student surveys be used validly in teacher evaluation settings. Specifically, in some cases, student survey results have been shown to be more valid than the results of classroom observation. They've been shown to be more directly connected with achievement scores. So there's promising evidence around their use and accountability, but it's certainly too early to make any judgment calls around what will actually happen in terms of ensuring their validity. I have one last question for you, which is, what advice would you give states as they continue planning and preparing to implement college and career readiness work in the context of ESSA's well-rounded education provisions? So the key word is flexibility. There's a perception challenge that we all face right now, and there's a perception battle going on that a well-rounded education is about including a liberal education, what we consider a liberal arts education, or a liberal education, and obviously that's a very important piece of it, expanding arts opportunities, et cetera. But just because of the perceptions attached to that phrase don't match reality, the reality being that it's really an opportunity to embed college and career readiness in a well-rounded education. And states can see many examples in ESSA itself, but in general they have the flexibility to align it with their college and career readiness definition. And by having this conversation, they can ensure that they're moving forward together with local entities around what a well-rounded education looks like so that systems at the state level and at the local level are aligned and moving towards the same goals. Otherwise, we'll have a situation where it's possible we'll have a situation where accountability measures are measuring things that localities don't find important to providing a well-rounded education or vice versa. And that's really where you're going to get backlash and new policies. That's where the rubber's going to hit the road in terms of unintended consequences. So it's really important that states have this conversation even though there may be a perception that curriculum is a local issue, which it is to a large extent, obviously. And even though there's this perception that a well-rounded education simply means expanding more courses that are addressing the liberal arts. That's very sensible. I appreciate the advice to states. Thank you very much, Dave, for taking some time to talk with us today. I think that there's a really key connection that you've helped unpack for us between today's college and career readiness work and the sort of new opportunities that the well-rounded education provisions of us offer states. So we appreciate your sharing that with us. Thank you so much.