 Hello everyone. Hello and welcome to New America. Thank you so much for making it out tonight. My name is Mary Alice McCarthy and I direct the Center on Education and Skills here at New America. So it's my tremendous pleasure to kick off tonight's discussion and let me start by thanking all of you for coming. So thank you for making it out. I know it's a little bit of a drizzle out there, but I know also that you'll be glad that you did and not just because of the excellent snacks behind you, but because we've got really a great series of conversations teed up for this evening. So we're here tonight to talk about a very interesting and important new book. I think you saw it out there in the front. And it's a book about sort of an old topic in some ways, vocational education. I should say that at least vocational education can sound old to American ears. But of course vocational education and training is actually a very hot topic today around the world and right here in the United States. We call it career and technical education here and it is very much at the forefront of federal and state policy agendas across the country. So why is that? I think there's a lot of reasons and we're going to hear a lot about them tonight. But underneath all of that is the fact that I think we all know that in order to achieve sustained economic growth and shared prosperity, we are going to our communities are going to need to be able to build highly educated and skilled workforces. And here in the United States over the past several decades, we have been very focused on increasing our high school graduation rates and expanding access to higher education. And we have been very successful at doing both of those things. But at the same time, we have neglected our career and technical education system, right? And I think people are really waking up these days to the fact that that is a big problem and that to really be competitive in the global economy moving forward, we will need a world class higher education system and a world class vocational or career and technical education system, one that includes opportunities for work based learning and apprenticeships and that really involves industry in the design and development of curriculum. And that's what we're focused on here at the Center on Education and Skills at New America. In fact, we are leading a multi stakeholder initiative to expand access to apprenticeships to high school students. It's called the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship. It includes nine national partners, including some organizations with people that you're going to hear from today. And it's working in over 40 communities to stand up apprenticeship programs that start in high school, bridge into college and give young people paid work experience and on the job training in a wide variety of industries from healthcare to advanced manufacturing to software development. And we, as we have developed these programs and strategies, we have done our best to learn from other countries and borrow wherever we could. So of course, we were thrilled to hear when we learned about the book and very eager to engage with its editor and its contributing authors to help us think through what we can learn from other countries and how we might improve on their models with some of our uniquely American approaches to education and training. So that's the impetus for this evening's discussion. We're going to begin with a presentation by the book's editor, Mark Tucker. I'm sure many of you are already familiar with Mark. He has a long and distinguished career in the field of vocational education and skills policy. Mark is the president, a Meredith and founder and a distinguished senior fellow at the National Center on Education and the Economy here in Washington, DC. He has served in government as the Associate Director of the National Institute of Education and later as a presidential appointee to the National Skills Standards Board in the 1990s under President Clinton. He's also worked in philanthropy, founding the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He has been a visiting distinguished fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, and he has an extensive list of publications and many of which are being read by graduate students today as we speak and including but by no means limited to the book to this most recent volume in the book that is that is out front. So after Mark's presentation, we're gonna we will welcome my boss and new America Chief Executive Officer and really Chief Intellectual Officer Dr. Ann Marie Slaughter to the stage for a conversation with Mark about the book. Now as a political scientist and former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Ann Marie is no stranger to comparative analyses and their value for better understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our own systems here in the US. And as I'm sure many of you know, Ann Marie also served as the director of policy planning for the US State Department under Secretary Clinton. So again, intimately familiar with the value of understanding other countries and their critical challenges. And in her spare time, Ann Marie also manages to write books on a wide variety of topics from gender inequality to international relations to network theory. So I think Mark and Ann Marie are gonna have a fantastic conversation. I'm gonna invite Mark up, but I'm gonna put in right before I do that one plug for if you'd like to follow this conversation on Twitter, we encourage you to do so to tweet early and tweet often and the hashtag is hashtag the ET lessons. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you, Mark. I really like that Chief Intellectual Officer is is not only a great title, it is in this case, particularly apt. My heartfelt thanks to new America to Ann Marie and Mary Alice and her fabulous education team for three things. One is your interest in this book, which was a long time coming. Second was sponsoring this event. And third and very importantly for your leadership nationally on the apprentice issue. I don't care who you are, if you have a serious proposal for VET in the United States, it has got to be built on apprenticeship. And your decision to make that a keystone of your education program, I think was a very, very important contribution of new America. Now I'm going to try to figure out how to balance my machine in such a way that I can see the screen and it won't fall off the podium. Oops, okay. It's not doing anything. No, no, no, I know that. But it's not changing the slides. Is there anyone who knows how to do that? Hmm. It will not surprise any of you to learn that it did it perfectly about half an hour ago. There you go. Hmm. I tell you what, I won't go away. Okay. Well, there is a quick. Nope. Well, I don't know. There is no. I have no idea what's okay. We're gonna try this. Now it'll work. Why do I wish I had their genius? This, the book is an international comparative study of vocational education in training in China, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States. You may ask, by the way, why I decided to call this vocational education training when in the United States it is called career education and training. And the answer is very simple. We have a long, illustrious and foolish tradition in the United States of solving our education problems by changing the names of those problems. The rest of the world calls this vocational education and training. It's called vocational education and training there because it means something good. We changed the name in the United States because we all thought it was very low status. The only mistake we made was thinking we could change the status by changing the name. What the book is about is how you can change the status by changing vocational education and training. Okay, let's talk for a second about the United States. There is an enormous variety of vocational education and training in the United States. You can see a really good example of almost anything somewhere. The only thing you cannot see a good example of anywhere is a high functioning system of vocational education. People come from all over the world to the United States to see our projects, our initiatives. They take the idea away and they build a system around it. That's the part we left out. What this book is about is how you build first class systems of vocational education. You will find my view of vocational education in the United States rather as the Scotch would say a bit dour or they might say do it. That is because, as you will see, I don't think we have a vocational education system. I don't think that's an exaggerated statement and I will explain why. Further, we have no other system for the bottom half of our students. We have almost nothing for them. We live in an age in which, according to the people who have the most expertise on the subject, robots and automated devices are likely to take the jobs of nearly half the people in our working population. Do you know which half that's going to be? It's the people in the bottom half of the distribution of the kids coming out of our high schools. The issue of whether we have a vocational education system worth having is actually an existential issue. If we don't solve it, we will have a very large proportion of our young adult population either without jobs or with jobs that pay next to nothing or are not full time or all of the above. And there will be not much left, I believe, of the United States if that happens. So I think there's a lot at stake here. My purpose here in the next few minutes, and it will only be a few, is to give you a feeling for what I think it will take to develop a good vet system as good as any in the world. Okay, here is a tiny potted history. It's a potted history of a potted history. If you go back 50 years, go back to the 1970s, end of the 1960s, almost every economist in the world and almost every education policymaker or analyst agreed that the United States had the best educated workforce in the world. And there was a growing number of economists who believed that that fact by itself accounted for an enormous amount of our economic success and our political position in the world at large. Today, according to reanalysis by ETS of the most recent reports coming out from the OECD in Paris, the basic skills of the millennials in our workforce when compared to the basic skills of the millennials in the workforces with which we compete are either at the bottom of the distribution or tied for the bottom of the distribution. I put in capital issue letters down on the bottom of this slide what I take to be the central issue. It's actually really simple. Many of us, at least those with gray hair in this room, grew up in a world in which most competition and for jobs was within the region in the state in which we live. Today, labor at every single skill level is is a in a international global labor market. It is a commodity. It is a commodity in a global labor market. What I want you to understand to think about is very simple. If you look at the people in the bottom half of our workforce from an education standpoint, the least skilled, they are among the highest people, excuse me, they are among the highest cost people with those skills in the world. Global employers can go worldwide and get people with the same skills for anywhere between one one hundredth and one one thousandth of what our people in the lower half of the distribution charge for their skills. That fact by itself ought to scare us to death. Okay. Let me share some comments about the high school graduates entering the first year of community college. We have a lot of data on this. The typical high school graduates entering the first year of community college cannot comprehend the texts that they are given in their first year courses. Those texts are written according to our national English experts at the 12th grade level. I will remind you that is a high school level. The instructors told us in the research that we have done on this, which was supervised by a panel of first class research scientists. The instructors told us they had to summarize the points in those textbooks in PowerPoint presentations so the kids could at least get the gist of what was in these 12th grade level textbooks. They can't do middle school math. I think all of you know that the kids coming out of high school have to take a test before they are placed, call placement tests. The majority of kids who take those placement tests are told by the community colleges that they don't have a mastery of mathematics sufficient to succeed in the first year math course. Those courses are called college math or they're called college algebra. They are the same course leading experts in mathematics in the United States told us that about 90% of the content of those courses is algebra one. That is a course in most states which is taught in middle school. What I've just told you is that these kids leave high school not ready for middle school math. We asked the people in this research study, the instructors to send us examples of writing assignments they had given to these kids that they had graded and we got very few back. Our research team called them to find out why. They said these kids can't write. We weren't hired to teach writing. So we don't give them writing assignments. Our community colleges do provide, in fact they are the principal providers of VET in the United States. The way they provide it is in units of what shall I say learning called certificate courses. That's what they take. They take certificate courses. When our community colleges speak of giving kids a credential, they give them a certificate. That certificate basically says they have successfully concluded a two or three month preparation in the subject that they are supposed to be competent in. Hold that fact in your head because I'm about to tell you how it compares to the other parts of the world. Okay. Question. Does the United States have a VET program? That's where I want to begin. The United States government, that is to say the Department of Education, regards high school students who take three VET courses in a sequence as career and technical education concentrators. That is three courses over four years. Okay. A few years back, the OECD was putting together a global report on VET among the member countries and others. And it had a chart of countries and what the proportion of students in each country was that were VET students. When they got to that, they told the US delegation, they were not going to include the United States on that chart. Our delegation was aghast. They said we have all of these VET students. These were the concentrators. The people of the OECD said, according to our definition of vocational education, they are not vocational education students. Vocational education students take years, not months of vocational education training and it is set to a very high standard. That's not what you guys do. We aren't going to put it on the chart. When we use that OECD criterion, when we looked at what was going on in Maryland, we concluded that fewer than 5%, probably 2% of the kids in Maryland, which has by the way one of the most admired VET systems in the United States, were vocational education students by the OECD standard. The last point on this slide was the one I started with. So contrast what I just said with what we find in Singapore and Switzerland. Instead of 1%, 2%, or 3% in a serious vocational education program in those countries, you've got on the order of 60 to 70% in VET programs. Instead of being regarded as what you do if you cannot do academics and therefore the lowest possible stream that you can be put in, it's only open to students who can do academics as those students, as those countries set that standard. The result of all of this is that VET has a much higher status there than in the United States in those countries. It's not by the way because they changed the name. They didn't decide to call it career technical education. They actually changed the status by changing the offering and opening up a world to these students of opportunities that students who can't read, can't do math, and can't write anything will never have. In Singapore, it's the kids in the bottom quarter who go into their Institute for Technology Education. We said, oh my God, they stream students. Really? We discovered that the students in their bottom quarter are performing at an academic level well above the median for all American students. They just set the standard way up here. Our expectations for these kids is down here. Poor kids, they can't do it. That's not what they say. They say they can do it. And they set up a system to do it. They set up a system to do it. Their vocational education programs are not a few months. They're full time for three to five years. They are coordinated work and theory. More than half is work experience, but it's not work experience. It's very highly structured training with state-of-the-art equipment, highly trained instructors. Credentials are set to a very high level. I mean, hey, look, you're comparing a credential that assumes that you've studied something for three months to a credential that assumes that you've studied it for three to five years with a very high level of technical contents. So they have credentials that mean something. The standards for those credentials are put together by the employers. So there's little doubt, but what if you weren't the credential, you'll get the job. Of course you will, because you've met the standards that the employers have set. The most prestigious employers in Singapore and Switzerland can't wait to get their hands on these kids. Because the whole system is knit together. In the United States, what we do in vocational education in our high schools is only loosely connected to what's going on in the community colleges. They're really mostly on different planets. JFF and others have worked hard to see if they can get some of what's going on in the community college to start going on in the high school and giving high school kids access to the community college program. But what you see in these other countries is much more than that. You see a program of training in vet that is three to five years long. It begins in high school and continues in the next institution. And it's knit together like this, right? It's really all one program. So the question is what should we be doing that we're not doing? I have two minutes. Make admission to high school vet contingent on reading at the 11th grade level. Right now it's the 7th or 8th grade level, by the way. Proficiency in algebra one. That's a middle school course. And writing reasonably fluently. Make high school vet the front end of community college vet in one integrated sequence curriculum. Redesign the high school community college vet program to terminate in a sequence of credentials set to standards comparable to their equivalents in Switzerland and Singapore. Make the credentials awarded at the end of community college program the qualifying credential for admission to state polytechnics and applied universities. That's what they're doing in these other countries. So you've got a system that begins in high school, moves smoothly to a post-secondary program that is tightly knit to it, leads directly to a polytechnic or losing my mind again, of course. Structured, a science university. That's what I'm trying to say. Polytechnic, well, it's called a polytechnic in Singapore and it's called a something else in Switzerland. It's the same institution. What it is, is an institution that takes you from a journeyman's level in effect using the Germans way to talk about this, up into the theoretical realm to the point where you can get what amounts to a master's degree in a highly technical subject. And many of those people by the way actually go on for further study in postgraduate programs in major universities. The point is that you have a stream which is not a dead end program for kids who can't do academics. It is easy for parents in those countries to imagine their kids starting out with vocational education and winding up running the corporation. If you want to change the status of vocational education, that's what you have to do. You have to create a governance system for vet that is largely controlled by business and by government agencies responsible for economic development. In the United States, the educators have succeeded year after year, time after time in controlling that and it's not going to work. You have to charge government with involving employers in the development of state of the art skill standard systems. This is a very intricate task. It is easy to set up a skill standard system that will actually rigidify an economy. Germany is not bad at doing that. It is much harder to set up a skill standard system which will drive an economy forward because you cannot take average industry practice and set your standards to it. You have to take state of the art practice and set your standards to it. If you do that you can drive the entire economy forward. It's tough to do and it will only work as the experience of both Singapore and Switzerland shows. If you have either an oligarchy in business that is determined to be state of the art, which is the case in Switzerland by the way, or as in Singapore where you have a government agency that is willing to listen to business that has an idea about how to make Singapore even more competitive tomorrow than it was yesterday, those things are absolutely essential. My last slide. I hear it said that one can't compare the United States with places like Singapore that are so much wealthier and less diverse than some US states. This is 130 percent hogwash. In 1960 when the Melee Federation kicked Singapore out of the Federation and the British pulled out of the only naval yard they had there and the jobs went away, you could put all the people with a bachelor's degree in Singapore in a room half this size. Singapore was a confederation of people who spoke different languages from different countries who hated each other and fought with weapons in the streets every day. Lee Kuan-Hu had an incredible challenge to build a people, a country out of that, out of nothing. Most of the people in Singapore were illiterate. Today it is one of the most advanced societies in the world and has arguably the best education system that has ever been built. If they can do that in 50 years, why on earth can we not build a first class system when we actually had one, had one 50 years ago, which we've now lost. Okay, let's go for it. Thank you and I also have to thank Mary Alice for her introduction. CIO generally means Chief Investment Officer and sometimes Chief Information Officer, but I love Chief Intellectual Officer. I'm going to use that. Well, thank you. Fortunately, we've got lots of time to explore how to get there because you set up the problem very, very clearly and you had to go quickly through the last part. But I want to back up and ask you, when we talk about vocational education and training, and I love that your point about changing the name does not change the system. It's like changing the org chart in an organization rarely fixes the underlying problem. But what are the vocations that kids go into in Singapore and Switzerland or other states? Because we, you know, I think many of us have vocational training Oh, that's carpentry or plumbing or electricians. Let's start with that because I think some of that may be the key to thinking about how you raise the prestige of vocational training. Some of it, as you said, is standards and but maybe we can start there. Two answers to your question. Both answers from Singapore. You read my chapter on Singapore in the book. What you will see is that the Singapore, the development of both education, to some extent, and certainly the economy, to a great extent, was driven by the plan set by the Economic Development Board. And they were they were totally focused on economic development. Their idea was that they would develop education and training in Singapore to support the next stage of economic development. So industrial policy. The answer to your question, yes, was entirely a matter of industrial policy. So when they started out, they had nothing. And their idea was simply to attract companies looking for low-cost labor and a great port. Singapore has, as you know, a great port and strategic location. So they what they went after was what was getting enough people who could train the electricians and the concrete people and the plumbers to build the factory sheds that they would then lease out to these foreign companies. They then laddered their way up the economic development ladder. And at each phase, because this is what Singapore is, asked themselves, how are we going to attract to Singapore the people who are the talent that will be needed here to persuade worldwide companies that we can do the next higher-value added thing. At each stage, they kicked out the lower-value added companies they had brought in in the previous stage and they brought in the higher back. When they got done with doing that, they said, oh, geez, you attracted the top companies in the world. What's the next step? Well, the next step obviously is to make our own top companies in the world. And that's where Singapore is right now. And they wanted to be the regional center for telecommunications, for ship, that goes on and on. You know the story. I think you need to speak a little louder. Is that what I'm hearing? Do people in the back can hear you? No, okay. So in that case, in that case, it is an economic development story, but it's very different from China until recently. Very different from China in the early stages because, although they started by wanting to offer a low-cost, low-skill labor, they did that because that's all they had. Right? And they said to themselves, even from the beginning, they said to themselves, what we want to do is not make our country rich, we want to make our people rich. And they knew that the only way to do that was to build their skills. So, but you had, you had another... So I was asking what vocation people go and do. So if you're saying... So, but on the status point, here's, here's the status. They reached a point where they put the money into vocation, then they put the money into university, then they put their money basically into the academic stream in the schools. And then they turned around and they realized, oh my god, vocational education has become the dead end. It was exactly what it is here in the United States. It was not that long ago. So then they said, we are, what we've now got is a formula for a totally unbalanced economy, right? Everybody wants to go to university. Everybody wants to run the company. Right. Everybody wants to be a professional. There's nobody to do the work. So they, they, it's Singapore. So the, the, the premier and deputy premier themselves basically drove a process in which they reconceived vocational education in Singapore. They took a whole variety of what we would regard as pretty conventional vocational education programs. They basically threw them away. They, they built four brand new institutions. If you visit them, these are the vocational education high schools. If you visit them, you think you're in a modern university. This was their way of saying to Singapore and parents, this government thinks that the most important thing you can do is go into vocational education. So, so let me, let me ask you just again on that. And then I'm going to come back on Singapore generally. But so now when you go to vocational education and training these four beautiful places, what, if they're not the top jobs, because that's exactly, what are those jobs? Are they advanced manufacturing? So, so here's what here's, if you go, here's what you will see. First of all, the Singaporean system is a school-based system. So, for reasons we can talk about later. So if you walk into one of those university-looking places, on the first floor you'll see shops. You'll see coffee shops, grocery stores, it goes on and on. They're all run by students. They're, they're actually run on a business plan. They have to make money. So business is a vocation. So, yes, so what you, if you look more broadly, here's what you see. They wanted to have a culinary program. But at Singapore, it's not the kind of culinary program you will typically see here. They went to Paul Bocuse in Paris, said design us, design us a culinary program worthy of the finest chefs in France. Why? Because Singapore wanted to have hotels in Singapore that world-class travelers would want to go to. Right? They wanted, Singapore was building a, a, it's one of the largest ports in the world. So they, they, they have, they have, they have an oil platform business there that is one of the world's largest. Singapore's a giant factor in the oil business, even though they don't have a drop of oil. So they partnered with the companies, the Singaporean companies that build these giant oil platforms and they built what amounts to an apprenticeship program, much of which is actually cited in the schools, but it's been designed by the platform firm. They, they have a, they have a big business of refurbishing old planes, completely redo the insides, islands in that business, there are a number of other countries. They partnered with the Rolls Royce Engine Company. So you walk into the place where they train these kids, which is in one of their schools. It's not in an aircraft facility. It's got a, it's, it's got a, it's got a Boeing 737, not a MAX, an old 737, right? And that's what the kids are working on. And, and Rolls Royce took the engines apart and they cut them up. So you can see the insides. They, in other words, they rebuilt them for teaching purposes, but those kids are actually working on real Rolls Royce engines, working on real Rolls Royce airframes, the whole damn shooting match. So it's everything. It's, it's, it's cooking, it's, it's running a coffee shop, it's aircraft rebuilding, the whole bloody gamut. Great. So all the, as you were talking about Singapore, I was thinking, you're so, you're describing industrial policy and I'm thinking, yes, the United States doesn't have industrial policy and then you're talking about, you know, sort of setting different levels of economic development. We don't, we don't have that either. And of course it's small and, and so you're reinforcing a number of the reasons I think people say, oh yeah, well sure, that's Singapore or Switzerland. These are small countries and they, they have very different traditions. But, so I, instead of asking you sort of broadly how, how can we do this here, because Singapore is special, you've actually done it. I know where you, you have designed a system for Maryland, right? And I know we're going to hit, here from the former chancellor of the University of Maryland in the next panel, Brett Kirwan, but talk to us, let's cut to the chase about how you actually, what would it look like here. And then we'll go back to sort of explore some of the differences with other places and some of, and elaborate more on what you think we need. Yeah, I actually tried to prefigure some of that, of course, in the end of my, my remarks earlier. And I think it's got, it's got many parts and pieces to it. First of all, we would have Baltimore connect its career and technical education system, if you wish, very closely to the state economic development agencies and have business people in Maryland play a very important role in the design of the system, in the running of the system, in the setting the standards for the system, in providing opportunities for kids to acquire structured work experience. To go high school, community college, apprenticeship. Yes, yes. So all of, all of that, in order to do that, you would have to have a governance mechanism that does not now exist in Maryland or for that matter, in hardly any other American states. And the governance mechanism, there are many variations on all of this that are possible, of course, but in the one that, that, that, that Britain others and our team worked on, we, we had in mind a governance mechanism that built on a body that already exists in Maryland. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's the governor's workforce panel. It's got very heavy representation by top business people in many different lines of work of business in, in Maryland. It also has, it's basically run by the Department of Labor. It's, it's, and workforce development. So it's, it's got the economic development perspective, the labor force perspective and the employer perspective. You got to speak loudly. Yes. The educators would have a role in that certainly. But right now, the actors I've just been talking about are on the outside looking in. They would in fact have a, have a very important role. That's number, number one. Second, you would need to have, you are quite right. The United States, it's really interesting. The United States says, volumely, year after year after year, industrial development, no. Go and talk to a governor. Well, and you will, you will discover pretty damn fast that it's hard to tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans know that the, the people who are going to go to vote are going to look at the state of economic development. The state, if it's going well though, they will credit the governor. If it's going badly, they will blame him or her, whether that was fair or not. They have a big interest. And it's especially true in states like mine and Maine. They know that they can't be good in everything. And so many of them, I think, have a predisposition to think, yeah, it would be nice to be hands off and say, you know, we'll support anything and everything and we can't have an industrial policy. But in point of fact, in every state there are industries that, that form the backbone of that state's economy. And, and so it becomes a technical and political matter to start figuring out how you can support those industries by creating research and development laboratories in the universities. There's a, you know what this list is, right? One of the things on that list is building a very capable workforce. That process has to get married to these other pieces, right? So yes, so no industrial policy, but we have economic development strategies and to have economic development strategies, then yes, you need to engage the employers. But here let's, let's, it's more than that. If the state has a choice to make, it's the same choice that Singapore had to make. Are the, you can't have a system to produce very high levels of technical competence unless you have workplaces where kids can acquire that competence. So the only question is where are those workplaces? Are they going to be in business or they're going to be in schools or they're going to be in a combination. The employers have to be a part of that decision. They have to put together the standard. So even if the places are in schools, the work, the design of the work and the training has to be in the hands of the employers largely, because if it isn't, they aren't going to trust the output, right? So I don't care whether it ends up being a school-based system or a employer-based system, the employers and the government have to drive it. Now there's one other big question there which is, do you really mean Mark, what did you just say about government? Shouldn't just the employers drive it? My answer to that would be no. And take just a second to explain this, but there's an enormous difference among the states in the United States. There are many states in the United States which are in a low-skill equilibrium. The most important businesses in the states are businesses that would go out of business if they couldn't keep wages very low. They don't care about raising skills. In fact, they're worried about raising skills because if the state raises the skills, either their employers will ask for more money or they will go out of state, right? But those are the jobs that will get automated mostly. Yes, but by the time that happens, those kids are going to be in terrible shape because they have no skills. So if you go to the employers in low-skill equilibrium states and you say, what kind of training do you want? I want people who will show up in time, do what they're told and be able to read and write at a low level, thank you, I will take care of the rest. A high-skill equilibrium state is an entirely different thing, right? High-skill equilibrium state is selling high-value added products and services. They die if they don't get highly qualified people. They're willing to pay them a lot. It's a totally different way of thinking. So in a high-skill equilibrium state, you can go to employers and get pretty good answers about how to get an even better economy in a low-skill equilibrium state. It's not worth getting out of bed. It's not going to happen. So even in Singapore, which is now among the most high-skill equilibrium places in the world, the Economic Development Board gets the advice of employers about what the standards ought to be, but it doesn't say, oh, okay, that's what we're going to do because the government says our next big step is going to be going into this business in a big way. So I hear opposition, so not opposition. Obstacles to overcome, so role of the government and getting employers involved. But let me grasp the nettle that I hear as someone who was in school at very elite institutions till I was 30. So I'm just going to own that right up front. And one of them was I went to Princeton, and I still live there, and I'm a Merida professor. And as you are saying, employers involved, every fiber in my being is as liberal arts education. Princeton is the sort of absolute epitome of it. Princeton doesn't even want you to take an economic, well, you can take an economics course, but God forbid you should have pre-law or pre-business or pre- anything vocational. You're supposed to be studying ancient music or things that will open your mind. And I'm well aware, because I have been the head of New America for seven years, and I know that only 14% of Americans go to four-year residential colleges. A fact, I tell people around the country, and people are shocked. But the problem it's not so, OK, it's not Princeton. It's this image of prestige education is education that is affirmatively divorced from ever thinking about getting a job. So how do we tackle that? OK, so my degree from Brown University is with no core curriculum whatsoever at this point. That was not the case, by the way, when I was there. I know, but I just talked us up. But my degree was in philosophy and literature. So what we said to the Maryland Commission was we see a world that looks like this. It looks to us as though the bonds that used to exist between especially large corporations and their employees are largely broken. And they're broken both ways. There's much less allegiance by employees to the employer. There's much less allegiance by the employer to the employees. This is leading many corporations to reduce the rather meager amounts they were investing in employee training, except in very, very high need companies like Google. So that's creating a world in which more and more people are gig employees. They're serving many masters at the same time. And those masters are changing. And what they want is changing. So we've said to the states, if you ask the companies what they want right now, they're going to tell you, we want somebody who has a high degree of technical competence that fits today's needs. If we have to train them once they're there, we're going to look twice unless we're nearly desperate. What we've said to the folks in Maryland was we're now in a point where we have to do two things at the same time. We do have to prepare kids the way they are prepared in Singapore and in Switzerland. That is to say to end up coming out of the process with a very high level of skill in a particular narrow area. This is one part of the T. But the other part is the part you were talking about because what these young people are going to find is what I was describing a moment ago. The jobs aren't going to last long. The next one is going to look like the one you're going to do now. You may actually be having to work in several different fields at once. What you're going to have to offer an employer is precisely that. That is your flexibility, your ability to take what you know over here and apply it over there. That is going to take precisely the opposite of the bar of the T. I was just describing. It's going to take what you and I experienced at Princeton and Brown. It's going to take a deep, broad education. We're going to have to actually do liberal education, right? As part of vocational education. My general view for what it's worth is that what we're going to see is that vocational education is going to look more like what we think of as a liberal arts education in a university. At the same time, the liberal arts education is going to look more like the best vocational education. What we're seeing in Europe now is that more and more kids who went to gymnasium and expected to go to a good university are finishing gymnasium, but before they go to university, they're picking up a credential at a high level out of the vocational education system. I think that's the future. I also think that vocational education is not going to be a three-month certificate course in a community college. I think those days, we'll see what happens to them. The one example we can point to, of course, is coding, right? I mean, at this point, I think it's extraordinary. At Stanford, it's everybody, but even at Princeton, it's 70 percent of people take some computer science. Even those folks who are never going to do it understand they have to know it, but more and more kids are actually learning to code, which is true. I'm mindful of our time, but we've talked about government, we've talked about employers, we've talked about this tension about what prestige education is. Of course, it also makes it very difficult to get the employers onto. You said it's a workforce board, not an educational board. Indeed, Barry Alice is the only person I've ever met who's worked in the Labor Department and the Ed Department. That's a very rare thing. Very few people have done that. Yes, but the other obstacle, I think we see, and you've written about in your book, are parents. Parents, of course, are responding to these general signals about what prestige is, but you wrote, and I think this is so right, that manufacturing work, which if we were looking at it from the point of view of the golden age of companies and good jobs, unionized manufacturing jobs were very good jobs, but you say the 3Ds, that parents see these jobs as dirty, dangerous, and dull, and a fourth, or demeaning, and those dirty, dangerous, and dull, is pretty demeaning. So how do we tackle that? And I'll add that I was just at the California Future of Work Commission. I talked at the Future of Work Commission, and there was somebody there talking about additive manufacturing, the newest, the way we now talk about 3D manufacturing, and she essentially described a kind of manufacturing that was a very white collar job in traditional categories. So, but how do we sort of change that image of what manufacturing is and how parents should think about the larger question of vocational and educational training? About three days ago, I was on my computer, and I was watching about a five minute video that was put together by Bloomberg. They were showing a factory in Guangzhou. They had video from the same factory from about five years ago. The pictures from the same factory about five years ago showed you this great big open hall, full of people working on various machines, turning out whatever the hell this stuff was. In the second video, they showed the same hall, full of robots. There was exactly one person in that factory, and then they made the point that you just made. This doesn't, if you look at American farming, it now employs 5% of the people that it employed about 100 years ago. Right. Those jobs. The Japanese are now turning out tractors that don't need a human driver. They are programmed by the farmer who was sitting in an office in his farm, right? That farmer has to be able to program computers because John Deere is trying to sell them computers that they can't get into, and it's costing them a bloody fortune, and they figure if they can fix the damn thing themselves, they're gonna be able to make a pro. Those computers and those machines figure out meter by meter, how much water, which fertilizer, how much, which insecticide, how much, what the contour's ought to be, while the farmer is working the international commodity markets to figure out where he should be investing to hedge his American crops. That often takes a doctorate, right? The same thing is happening in our factories, basically. It's not that that one person there is the factory. No, no, no, no, no. Where did all those robots come from? Who programmed them, right? It goes on and on. Who fixes them? All those jobs, you're right. We have thought of as white-collar jobs. They are white-collar jobs. Not all of them, they're manufacturing jobs, yes. But, and this was the point I started with tonight, the people who are coming out of our high schools now miles away from being able to get those jobs. Okay. So let me end with the final question. So you've talked about all the different pieces, the joining up, and this, that to me is hugely important to think about how high school joins to community college and then to workforce and to continuing education, whether, however we describe it. But you actually also talk about skill standards. And you say, to be able to do this, we have to have different ways of credentialing. And that means we've got to be able, if I understand a skill standard, just to be able to say, you are able to do this at this standard. So but talk about what they are, why they're important, how we get there. Okay, let's begin with what they are and how you get this. Skill standards in this context simply means the person who is in this program needs to wind up with a certificate that certifies that they know this and can do that. Right. Okay, so the skill standard spells out whether this and that are. Okay, so why is it important to have this? Because if you have a set of skill standards, it communicates to the student what the student has to know and be able to do to get the job they are after, one. It communicates to the training organization in our country, a community college, what the curriculum needs to be in order to give kids a chance of actually acquiring the credential they want. It signals to the employer if they actually get those credentials because they've met those criteria that the person applying for the job actually has the skills they want. None of these things are true now. So a community college can go out there and say, oh yeah, we have an advisory committee and I'll go and talk to the members of the advisory committee and yeah, we meet once a year and we have a nice time for an hour. The community college is putting together a program that its staff wants to teach. That's what happens. I've never heard of such a thing. Professors teaching what they want to teach. That never happens. The first country that I went to that had a skill standard system that I thought was pretty damn good, a lot better than the German one, by the way, was Denmark. And in Denmark, the equivalent institution to our community colleges is run by the mayor. The people who sit on the board are the heads of the companies from the principal businesses in town and the heads of the unions of the people who labor there. The skill standards are negotiated at the national level, industry, labor, governments managing the process. Unlike Germany, which set a skill standard and then left it alone for eight to 10 years, they had a system set up so that at the local level, what I'm just describing, the community college level, if the community college employers, mayor, labor came to them and said, we are now involved in a new industry that has these needs. We need an exception to the rules because this is gonna make us more competitive. If they could make that argument stick, they would not only allow them to do that, they would then and there consider changing the national skill standard, not waiting in eight to 10 years. So what I've said to you, I think, are two important things. One is who is running the show. Our community colleges are basically run by the educators. This is the comparable institutions in these other countries. It's much more complicated than that. In Singapore, they are run by the vocational educators, but the people who have been planted in the key positions are most of them from the economic development board. All right, so Mark Tucker, thank you. I will tell everybody, since I have a blurb on the back of the book, it is an excellent book and it really, it both gives you wonderful knowledge around the world, but it does actually convince you in the end that there is no special magic in Germany or Singapore or Switzerland that the United States can't do. And we frankly need that kind of reminding. So I urge you to read the book and I thank you for kicking off this conversation. I thank you for your support. Thank you very much. Okay, well thank you again to Mark and Emery who's just stepped out. My name is Taylor White. I'm a senior policy analyst here at New America. I work on our pre-K-12 team and work across that team in our Center for Education and Skills at New America. And in this role, I lead a lot of our work for the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship, which Mary Alice referenced earlier. Through PIA, we're working with a number of communities, dozens of communities actually across the country who are working to try to implement a number of the elements that Mark laid out as sort of the gold standard for what he'd like to see in CTE and vocational systems here in the US. Pathways that connect high school and community college and bachelor's degrees into seamless pathways for students and pathways that also include a significant portion of students' time in work-based learning settings through youth apprenticeship. There are a number of others as well but those are two that we see gaining a lot of steam in the work that we do. And I will say that the work through PIA has given us a bit more optimism, I would say, about the state of the US CTE system and in particular the commitment of educators, policymakers, system leaders, and even business to a growing extent to find a better way forward for students for whom this is a destination. So I think that I'm absolutely willing to concede that we have this issue where we love programs and we're a little bit less comfortable with systems development but I think books like this one in international comparative work generally are hugely helpful in providing examples for us and setting a high bar for what's possible if we really are willing to work together to grow these systems. So for that reason we're very excited to be involved in this event today. And we are very pleased to have some of the chapter authors with us to serve on a panel in just a moment as well as two additional people who are working in two very different roles to improve CTE systems and education systems in this country more broadly. So I am very pleased to announce the folks, I will read your bios first and then you can come up and storm the stage and take your seats. But joining us tonight for this panel we have Dr. William Britt Kerwin who is the chair of the Maryland Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education. Dr. Kerwin is the chancellor emeritus of the university system of Maryland, a position he held for more than a decade. Prior to that role he was the 26th president of the University of Maryland College Park and the 12th president of the Ohio State University. Kerwin has served in multiple roles at the College Park campus, including as a professor, chair of the Department of Mathematics, we would have never met when I was a student anywhere. Vice chancellor for academic affairs and an acting chancellor. He's chaired many boards and commissions including the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, the National Research Council Board of Higher Education in the Workforce, the American Council for Higher Education, the Association of the Public and Land Grant Universities and the Business Higher Education Forum. In 2016, Governor Larry Hogan appointed Dr. Kerwin to chair the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, which you may recognize as the Kerwin Commission. Next up we have Nancy Hoffman who is the senior advisor at Jobs for the Future and an author of two chapters in the Vocational Education and Training for a Global Economy book that we are talking about tonight. Hoffman is co-founder of the Pathways to Prosperity Network through which she supports states, regions and cities in efforts to build or improve pathways from high school to a first marketable post-secondary credential. Hoffman has held faculty and administrative positions at institutions including MIT, UMass Boston, Harvard, Brown, Temple and Portland State and she serves on the Massachusetts Board of Higher Ed and the boards of the North Bennett Street School and Build Up Birmingham. She has also written and edited numerous books and is co-editor of Harvard Education Press's New Work in Learning book series. Also joining us tonight is one of our partners in the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship, Janae McLaren who is a program manager with the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity. She is the program manager specifically for the Southeast region of the US and has spent over two decades working in the fields of service, education and youth development. Janae began her career as a law enforcement officer in Arkansas, I didn't know that Janae, serving as a community resource officer and later as a corporal for the state Capitol Police. She was later dean of students for the Kent School District in Washington State before transitioning to the nonprofit sector. And let's see, she worked serving as the director of Impact for City Year in Seattle where she oversaw the implementation of programs focusing on service learning, student achievement and increasing graduation rates. And last but by no means least, we have Ms. Vivian Stewart who is a senior advisor for education at the Asia Society and again an author of chapters in the book that we are celebrating here tonight. Before her role at the Asia Society, Vivian was vice president for education at the Asia Society where she was responsible for its programs that promote the study of Asia in other world regions, cultures, languages and global issues in US school and for building connections between US and Asian education leaders. In the role she developed a series of international benchmarking exchanges to share expertise between American and Asian education business and policy leaders on how to improve education to meet the demands of globalization. She has a number of other accomplishments here that I'm unfortunately going to truncate but I will tell you that her book, A World Class Education Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation was named one of Bill Gates' top 10 books for 2012. So please join me on stage and we can get the conversation started. I think our names. Okay, so thank you again for joining us here tonight. I want to get the conversation started, I guess, by sort of re-grounding us in the conversation around USCTE or VET, if you will. And I know that Nancy, you and your husband Bob contributed the chapter in the book that's on the US system. So I'm wondering if you could get us started with a sort of response to the overview that Mark's provided and in particular to his prescriptions for improving the system moving forward. So it will be no great surprise to Mark that I don't have quite as dim a view about either the systems or the capacities of the young people who are in them or of community college students. But never mind, we'll move on from there. I think in terms of the overview though, it has some holes, but I don't think it's entirely off base. I do think there's something that we should be thinking about and that is do we need a federal system? We have a number of states that are very strong systems. I happen to come from Massachusetts which has a remarkable vocational education system, probably 25 institutions serving about 20% of high school students. They're standalone schools. The unfortunate part right now there are waiting lists of about 3,000 students and these schools which are wonderful at launching people into careers as well as into post-secondary education are now overrun and becoming more of the province of the elite because they answer part of the question that Anne-Marie was asking. They don't just teach carpentry and HVAC and electrical although that's important they teach veterinary science, they teach IT, they run businesses that get people out into the labor market. So Tennessee I would say has a good system, Delaware has developed a very good system. I would be perfectly happy if we had 50 different systems but that they were systems so on the systems piece I certainly agree with Mark's overview. I think it's also worth noting that something else which is that Massachusetts is about 6.5 million people Switzerland is about 8.5 million. So when we're comparing the US to other countries we need to really take a deep breath because the breadth of difference in the United States is different from a place like Singapore particularly where there's a very high concentration of population. To move on to the prescription. I think anyone who's thought about VET or CTE would agree that we really need to have employers engaged and that the culture in this country has not been to engage that's really been to say this is the province of schools. Up until fairly recently most of our employer based skills development has gone to middle managers and above and I'm gonna say word about that before I jump off here. But I think there's a difference in the way I would explain particularly what Switzerland does and the way we talk loosely about employer engagement and I think it's a kind of important nuance that a lot of people miss which is that in the Swiss system the standards the 250, 235 actually 235 career qualifications that that's the whole range from violin making to retail to banking. Those standards are developed first of all by employer associations and there's a big difference between saying employer and employer associations because associations for example the associations in Switzerland that manages all of the manufacturing knows that there are differences among companies but the goal and this is the government's role is to keep the skills training broad enough so that the person being trained owns the skills and can sell them in the marketplace and in fact that's what happens about 30 to 50% of young people in Switzerland who complete an apprenticeship don't stay in the place where they were trained they go elsewhere and this is a really healthy phenomenon because one industry says we have this culture the young person goes to another culture and brings their knowledge and their questions with them so I think that's an important distinction and I know Mark knows this but I think it's when we talk about building a system here it should, we shouldn't assume that we're gonna go employer by employer. So I think that there are some other things though that I would say about the prescription it might surprise people although Mark and Ann Marie were going in this direction I don't think that there should be a separate CTE system and the work that we do with Pathways to Prosperity is to develop career focused education with the notion that we take six year olds to the firehouse and to the grocery store to see how work goes on but once students are in middle school and high school all that disappears so our point of view is that we need a system which is career focused for everyone whether you're getting a PhD and wanna be a research scientist you certainly want a career or an associate's degree. I actually once tried to figure out how we deal with this binary of academic and career and the best I could come up with was crack academics we decided that that wasn't gonna work. So that's one thing. The second thing is there are really big gaps in the way we prepare young people for the labor market. One of them is work based learning experience. The second one is really and I think Mark is going here too. I think our system is really misaligned and structured in an unfortunate way for what we really need. What's so striking in Switzerland is that 16 young people begin to do real work. They're not cynical, they haven't failed, they are treated like adults and they thrive both emotionally, socially and technically in the labor market and so here we are trying to make two systems which are misaligned, high school and community college fit together. The final thing I would say though is again a correction to at least Mark's view of community colleges. In Massachusetts, to go back there, there's no word CTE in post-secondary but the assumption is that when you go to a community college you won't get a career and if you're going to transfer you may be told well you need to take this course in biotech not those five courses but we are very careful to set up all the general education so it's included in the career program and there are relatively few short-term programs if you're going to be in any of the allied health fields those are two year programs with clinical experiences built in so it's not quite as a slip shot as Mark may have given you the impression that it is and the final thing that I would say is that there's something going on in the country right now which I don't quite know what to make of but that is you probably know Starbuck's for example is offering in partnership with ASU a full bachelor's degree and that's only one among many companies that are all of a sudden seeming to be creating these opportunities for incumbent workers and to attract workers. Whether that's going to have a real impact on our current CTE system I don't know but as we look around and we think about learn and earn something very interesting is taking place in the US economy and I think we need to keep an eye on it because as often in the US there are little seeds of things popping up that may turn into a quite powerful innovation. Particularly if we have a system that's there to catch it and put its arms around it and stand it up and make it sustainable. Yeah, I mean I just came away from the JFF office where we were brainstorming about how do you map this landscape. Some of these things are much better than other things. Some of them give you a choice. Some of them are outskilling you so we'll train you but then get rid of you. Right, right. Which is what Amazon is doing but actually better than getting rid of you without training you. So I would say we're in the midst of some small but promising and interesting commitment of employers to work in education. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think we see that too certainly through PIA and our work there but I am interested in this distinction that you've made and Mark made and then we're gonna keep coming back to the programs versus systems piece. Dr. Kerwin in Maryland you've recently led an effort to not set up a whole bunch of programs and kind of let a thousand flowers bloom and see what works but you've been working with a large group of people to redesign a system and really rethink it from the ground up borrowing significantly from international models and trying to glean, take lessons that you can bring back to build a system, not a bunch of programs and maybe a system that can support some of the employer engagement that Nancy's referencing here. Can you share with us a little bit about the changes the commission's recommended particularly with regards to CTE and why and maybe how that vision was influenced by the time that you spent looking at international systems. Right, well it's a little hard to describe our CTE. Yeah I understand, our CTE system without speaking for a moment more broadly about what the commission has done because the pieces all fit together and so I'll try to encapsulate three years of work in a few minutes but what happened in 2016 is that the governor of the state and the general assembly created this commission and asked it to develop policies and practices and a funding formula so that Maryland schools would perform at the level of the best performing schools in the world, an audacious charge and in a weak moment I came out of retirement to take on the most difficult job I've ever undertaken in my life and so the first thing the commission had to do was understand where is our Maryland schools and it was very troubling to find out where they were basically Maryland student performance on assessment scores is very much in the middle of the pack, in the country we all know the country is at best in the middle of the pack in the world so the idea of getting Maryland from where it is to the top performing schools was a daunting challenge we also saw we had huge funding inequity issues in the state, we had tremendous teacher attrition and so it was not a pretty picture and suddenly we're left to, how are we gonna make our schools as good as the best and one of the good things that came into my life I learned about Mark Tucker and the NCEE who spent the last 20 years studying the elements of high performing, creating the building blocks for high performing systems so we brought Mark on as a consultant and worked very closely with him and basically did for two years an intense study of where Maryland is in relation to the NCEE, building blocks and where the high performers are and out of that came five major policy recommendations and I'll get to the CTE in just a second the first is a major investment in early childhood education and early childhood care so that many more kids come to kindergarten ready to learn, secondly rethink teaching as a profession make it a high status profession as they have done, I mean there isn't a high performing school system in the world where teaching isn't seen as a high setting if we don't do that in Maryland and across the country we can forget ever matching these other schools create a curriculum that is benchmarked against the best performers in the world address the equity funding issues and finally to build a credible accountability system for the investment that would be required to make all this happen so going back to the curriculum for just a moment what the commission has recommended to the state is that we significantly elevate our pathetic college and career ready standard right now Maryland college and career ready standard is that you can read at the 10th grade level and do algebra one and here's the shocking statistic fewer than 40% of high school graduates this past year met that standard now think about that that should worry everybody and believe me if you think Maryland's special in this regard forget it you look across the country you're gonna find exactly the same thing so what we did is we wanna raise this college and career we raise the college and career ready standard we recommend it so it is that you reach the college and career ready standard if you can take a college level course without remediation that is the standard that we've set in Maryland and what are the commission has proposed is that we set as a goal that kids reach that standard by the 10th grade and then in the 11th and 12th grade they take advanced placement or international baccalaureate that would be one pathway another pathway is early college and they could end up with credits or a college degree a third pathway would be a rigorous career and technical education or a vet program now keep in mind the kids in that pathway have already met the college and career ready standards so this is not a pathway for underperforming students these are kids who've achieved the skills that they are ready to take credit bearing courses in college so now with that pathway what we decided to do and Mark was very influential at this is take the control, the oversight of that out of the sole possession of the Department of Education so we created a partnership with the trades trade associations, the private sector and education that is the standards board that will have to develop and approve the curricula and the credentials and the goal is that then this pathway will lead to an industry recognized certification or will articulate to a community college if there is some additional training required for that. What's interesting is that how popular this is there was a poll recently in the state incidentally as you can imagine the commission's recommendations have gotten a lot of attention in the state and in the newspapers but there was a poll about the five policy areas they all were overwhelmingly endorsed in the state but the number one most popular path of recommendation in the state was the CTE recommendation so it tells me and I want to agree with you that I think something is changing in the country look people already question is college worth it you hear that all the time and so there's a hunger out there for a pathway for kids where they get a good education but then they have a skill that they can go into the workforce so our goal in Maryland is to get 40% of our high school completers into this pathway. So those students would be finishing 10th grade they would meet a college and career readiness benchmark presumably the plan has every student meeting that benchmark and then they can go in one of three directions. One of three directions and they would be there would be different models there could be in school career and technical education or vet training but we put a tremendous amount of emphasis on apprenticeship. So we're trying to build our program around the notion of apprenticeship for all sorts of reasons but we can go into that. I just spent a week with a woman from the Maryland Department of Education in Germany and she's taking everything back with her so I can confirm that that's really happening. But so I'm curious this idea that you'll have it sounds like the plan is predicated to some extent on this expectation that all students will be able to meet that college and career readiness benchmark in 10th grade which is hugely ambitious it's absolutely the goal we should be setting for students but it's a tough goal to reach. Well we acknowledge that not all students will so we're our estimate our projection is this is a 10 year implementation plan that we have and by year 10 our goal is to have 80% of kids meeting the college and career readiness standard by the 10th grade. So then what happens to those kids who don't? Well they're gonna have special support and tutoring and help so that by the time they graduate they will have met the college at least a significant fraction of them would meet that standard and while they're doing that they could take some career and technical education courses. Okay, neat well thank you for that clarification. I'm curious to see here what Janae our panelists at the end thinks of that. Janae's organization National Alliance for Partnerships and Equity is laser focused on working with education institutions and systems and educators even frontline educators especially in CTE programs to ensure to build programmatic capacity to increase access and make sure that programs are serving students equitably and certainly this idea that over 10 years students would be meeting this benchmark is ambitious and it is a goal we should be setting for our kids. I'm wondering if you have reactions to the plan or thoughts or even advice that you might offer the state of Maryland as they think about working to create these programs and ensure that they're really providing equitable opportunities for students who may not be meeting that benchmark at the 10th grade year or 11th grade year or even beyond. So before I address that particularly I just wanted to say a couple of things that I had heard that coming from the practitioner part of being with the students and working with the students it's a different perspective than those who are at the top down building the systems because when you're on the ground trying to implement them it's easy for people who have studied it and said this is what you do but when you're actually dealing with those students that is a different scenario. So having worked in a school where those students are quote unquote the bottom line that end result of all these great thoughts the practical application that really happening makes me cringe a little and when I hear things and it's again having read the book and I do see all the value that's there being able to look at some of the systems that are in place here in the United States we're coming from a deficit of how we already have our education system set up and how it's not the most equitable environment that we're in and the thought that even though China can move street sweepers to another level we still have some unconscious bias that we look at certain populations and we don't see them moving into that level. So when we start talking about that we're gonna get students to point A to point B even in a tenure is ambition and I'm not knocking anyone's ambition but I just like for us to stay grounded in equity and looking at it through that lens because when we work with our state institutions and agencies one of the things they say to us is we're not getting enough people in the program so what tips can you give us so what are the best practices and the best practices and tips don't work if we're not changing our mindset if we're still using unconscious bias as our lens for thinking of who belongs in those chairs and so when we talk to the gatekeepers whether that's the administrators whether that's the counselors whether that's the admissions officers it even goes back to that ninth grade counselor who sees that student for the first time and makes an assumption that you belong over here or you belong over there I have to say I was the biggest disappointment at sixth grade cause I'm not a basketball player and teachers saw my height and they're like oh there you go I was like I can't make a basket you put it in front of me but the assumption was that that's what I wanted to do I had no desire to do sports I wanted to do something else but because we have preconceived notions of what our students are going to be when we're making decisions about how to deal with our students we have to keep them at the forefront and we have to keep equity at the forefront so I would be interested in what I could give advice to Marilyn is what are your thoughts and planning on how are you gonna get students just up to the level having saw that we have students who are not meeting fourth grade reading and writing and math that's startling enough and that's every student in the United States we spend a time where it was a teach to test model and we're still reeling from that teach to test model then we spend a time saying culturally everyone must go to college so again I heard it mentioned about parents and parents are another factor that we don't consider because in many cultures that we don't think about going to college is the pinnacle so I would love for someone to sit and tell an African-American family who's worked really hard to get their student to college ready to say no, no, no, no I want you to go back and work in manufacturing even if manufacturing has changed so it's a lot of factors that we haven't considered and so when I read the book and looked at it I was like these are all great I think it's wonderful and the biggest one that popped up was the partner of working with industry because again as we train people and they said we want more people involved but this hand is open to say give but they're not giving anything in return whether that's funding for training whether that's opportunity to come in and talk to the students about real-world experience and working with PIA and the whole apprenticeship program has definitely opened up my eyes as far as where we need to go because there's a stigmatism around CTE and what that represents and so to get us to be in the pinnacle of this high-performing system we have to deal with the low-performing system that we created a long time ago and we can't overlook it even if we do change the name we can't overlook the fact that the system itself is broken and before we can think about building it to get people to a higher achieving they need to just achieve at the level that we put for them right now. Yeah, thank you. I think that's an important practitioner perspective and I think the idea too that you mentioned about how are we gonna get kids ready to that 10th grade level something we haven't really addressed today in conversation there's some references in the book and I know Vivian that some of your work in Singapore and some of your recent work in China has opened your eyes to some of the ways that other countries think about these equity challenges and some of the strategies that they've employed successfully and unsuccessfully to try to address some of the challenges that they face that are different than those that we face but certainly related to Janae's point about systems that exist that are very poor and have inequities just sort of baked into the design and also some of the biases that exist in the society. So do you have any thoughts for what lessons we might glean particularly around these equity and access issues from countries that you've studied or the chapters that you've contributed in the book or books that you've written that are on Bill Gates' favorite book list? Let me just come at that. Mark already made some of these joints but let me just come at it particularly trying to address the issue of prestige and stigma and also equity. And I'll talk more about Singapore than China. They're both going down the same direction. They decided, they've always had vocational education but it was low skill, low prestige just like ours. But in the 80s, Singapore and in the 2005 issues, China, those countries decided they were going to make a huge commitment to vocational education and training comparable to the commitment they made to their universities. And they did it for two reasons. One is economic. Mark's already described how Singapore looks to where it wants to go and then builds the skills so that those employers will come there. And China recognized that it's not gonna be the low skill manufacturer of the world or it doesn't want to be forever. And if they're going to go from made in China meaning crap to made in China being as high quality as made in Japan and Korea they really needed to work on these technical skills and they were quite dissatisfied with their universities actually which were producing very well trained, academically trained students whom industry didn't want. They said they can't do a thing, they're just too academic. But the second thrust for both places was the equity concern because they simply was nowhere for the minority students, the three groups that are not Chinese in Singapore to go. They were in the bottom stream of a highly streamed system and there was nowhere for them to go in the labor market as it was evolving. And in China you obviously have rural as a sort of massive people who are not being served by the current very academic system that they've developed over 30 years. But on the prestige side, Singapore's kind of interesting because when the ITEs were set up in the first one was in the 80s the other institutes for technical education which is sort of the new thing in their technical education system. ITE, jokingly, in the public discourse stood for it's the end. The end. So how do you, just because the government decides it's important doesn't mean everybody else will begin to think it's important. So a number of the things Mark touched on I think have been important in bringing about a change in prestige. Certainly these beautiful buildings that you walk into and you think I like to study here was a part of it. The link to economic development and employers which meant that when you came out you actually got a good job. And I think it was actually the high rates of job placement out of the ITEs that turned people's, that eventually made the swing to people seeing it as prestigious and maybe a serious alternative to universities. Work experience, I mean I think parents were glad to see their students working in real jobs as opposed to perhaps the lower expectations they might have had about where they could have gone. And critically I think because it didn't exist in either Singapore or China structural reform so that there was a bridge from a technical institution into a university. So now because they used to be completely separate so one really was literally a dead end. And now in Singapore you can go from a technical college to a technical institute to a polytechnic to a university. And something like a quarter of the students that start off at the ITEs end up going to university later. So I think that was very, very important. It's not that we're trying to say to Princeton you need to offer vocational courses. There's still the university sector there for those who want it. But there's all these other alternatives which have high academic standards. And implications for equity. And another thing they have also done is introduce much more serious career guidance in schools. Not individual counselors but curricula at the elementary, middle and high school level. Nancy talked about that as a big gap here so that students from the beginning were saying oh there are all these other careers over here that I didn't know about. So I think all of those things helped to shift the perception but particularly getting a lot of good jobs. And on the equity front and getting kids up to high standards in both Singapore and China they will tell you they're not there yet but in terms of you can see looking at the more developed parts of China not the rural parts of China. And in Singapore that they certainly don't have as big a bottom as we do. They manage to get more students up to higher levels. They pay a lot of attention to early childhood. And then Singapore, when you enter school if you're seen as being behind or speaking a language not speaking English well enough which most students don't come into school speaking English. You automatically have a longer school day with tutoring until you catch up. In other words you're never allowed to fall behind. So they set the standards very high but they give a lot of support to those who and it's systematic of course because everything there is. In Shanghai they've developed a lot of interesting models in which high-performing schools are asked to help run low-performing schools. And that seems to be both sort of from a principal point of view and from teacher development point of view. That's seen as part of your social obligation if you're in a high-performing school to do that. If you're a teacher in Shanghai and you want to go to the top of a career ladder you have to have worked in a low-performing school at some parts. So they are also kind of working on this. I would just say China only started its big VET push around 2010. So it's too early to say it's very similar sets of ideas. The ideas are all the same. Be much harder to do that. It's huge. Singapore is like some of our states. China you could fit several US's into China. Very varied economic development. Many different levels of government and big bureaucracies that don't communicate. So it's going to be much harder to make that, to build a system in China than in Singapore or in Maryland, I think. So a couple of things that you described there that I think are consistent across some of the leading systems are in the book. The first is the piece that you just mentioned about building these systems so that they are the term that we would use in the states is permeable. That students who start in one track and think that a vocational education is what they want can, at a certain point in their career, kind of make a right turn or a left turn and enter a more traditional academic path and continue to sort of earn credentials in the same field but that might look sort of different than the applied or vocational credentials that they have in the initial institution where they may have started their training. And that's something that you just mentioned that China is trying to figure out how to do that. Singapore certainly made strides in developing that. The Swiss of course are sort of famous for the impossible to read maps that have lines going all sorts of diagonal and same with the Germans. That's something I think that the US might purport to have but the pathways are certainly not clear or smooth or navigable for most people. So certainly a lesson that we can pull. One thing that we've talked about and each of you have mentioned it in a very different capacity though is this question of employers, right? And so what, I just kind of want to leave it there and let you just respond. But the employer culture in the US is obviously very different than in the economies featured in the book. And it's something that we really haven't, like a net we haven't really cracked here and there's certainly a lot of interest but it's kind of disparate and it looks different depending on where you go. They have sort of different thresholds of cooperation with public institutions or really any other institution or systems. So I'm curious whether this is a question about how to get them involved and organized or Janay you made the point sort of about unconscious bias in working with employers, whether it's a question about engaging them in sort of a system and getting them really to come to the table as partners in this work and open-minded partners that are invested in not just developing talent that they need tomorrow but developing systems that allow them to engage with education institutions and really think about how we are as systems developing talent and how they're interacting with not just the individuals but systems, education systems. Are there lessons from the countries that you've all profiled or that you've seen in your work that you think are most valuable for us to take back on this employer question? How do we get them to engage with education systems in developing these models in ways that are promising not just for them but for the students and the education institutions with whom they partner? Well, I'll just start. As I said, we worked for now three years on this commission report. We were, fortunately, almost done. But we had, as part of the effort, we had work groups of commission members and others that were developing the specific recommendations. So we brought the trades, the private sector into the work groups at a very early stage to help shape the recommendations. We didn't hand them the recommendations. We got them involved in, as I say, developing these. And they were very excited. I mean, they were very willing partners. And at the end of the day, we came to the conclusion that they had to be partners in the oversight of it couldn't be just education. They've got to be at the table. In fact, the chair of the oversight board, our recommendation is someone from the trades and the private sector. Educators are on the board, but they, I think, feel ownership of this. And I feel that's the case because we brought them in very early and they helped shape the final report. And they were willing. Oh, absolutely. Very enthusiastic. So I don't think there's a whole lot we're gonna learn from other countries about how to do this. I think we know the lessons that it's absolutely critically important. But I think we're gonna have to develop our own US version of employer engagement. There have been attempts in our work over many years now to get associations interested. What we have seen and somewhat promising is we do a lot of skills mapping backward from employers. And when you have employers in a particular sector in a room and they're actually working on back mapping the skills to what's taught in a community college, they do feel like there's considerable buy-in. But how you do that on a large scale, I don't know. I mean, Jamie Dimon, for example, has been a major voice for engaging employers. We've had innumerable conferences, convenings. There are lots of people who raise their hands, but I think there are some really tough challenges ahead. One of them, I think, is the dim view that most employers have of 16-year-olds if you're thinking about how you get younger people into the bottom of the list millennials. Yeah, well, that's a whole other problem. What am I supposed to say? You're supposed to say, okay, boomer. But I remember being interviewed by somebody from a Swiss newspaper in New York City one day. And they simply couldn't understand why there was such a prejudice against 16-year-olds when what makes the system work so well in Switzerland is that 16-year-olds are actually doing productive work. We saw 16-year-olds advising hedge fund, sitting next to a hedge fund advisor, or working on reviewing home loans. So that's one big issue. We always get asked, the first questions are about confidentiality and liability when we say we'd like to have 16-year-olds in a company. In fact, OSHA says the only thing you can't do is drive a forklift. So there's that set of issues, view of 16-year-olds, and then there's just this work culture. That's why I'm so interested in this new phenomenon because somehow there's a disconnect between what we're asking and what employers now seem to be ramping up themselves. So how we make these connections somehow, it seems like we have to figure this out in a different way. I think the economy, if we hurry up before the recession sets in, the economy will be helpful because people are really hungry for employees, scrambling for talent, but I don't have easy answers to this one. Just a couple of things. Oh, I'm sorry. No, I just have Vivian writing, so I wanted to make sure she... I always write, so I keep myself focused. Just a quick comment on China. China used to have really good cooperation between the ET and employers because it was all part of the state-owned enterprise system. But now that a lot of those are being dismantled, they're actually trying to take that training out and they don't have good contacts between government and the employees. So they have a worse problem, actually, than we do. In Singapore, it's a mixture of the government providing incentives and insisting as a matter of policy that employers who come to Singapore pay into a training fund and then they can take funds out of it if they offer apprenticeship opportunities. But they also provide a lot of incentives to companies to come there, so it's not that the companies are just doing this of their own free will. I actually think it's hard to generalize about U.S. employees. I think you have to look at different groups because clearly there are some that are very global. They don't care what the local labor force is. They'll pick up and move somewhere. You have others like the tech sector in California that thinks, well, we just need more HB1, one lead visas and we don't have to bother about U.S. talent because that's a much cheaper way of getting people who will stay a long time. And then you have others in other states. And I think this is where the state framework is so helpful because you can actually talk to the actual employers in that state about what their needs are. And even U.S. employers who go to other systems and are willing participants in it, right? And one, just on the 16-year-old point, a number of countries, Singapore is one, but a number of the European countries are really now starting to put some sort of policy flesh on this idea of lifelong learning that seems to have been talking about forever but don't have any real policies to incentivize by having skill credits for all employees. And so the assumption is you're gonna need to go back and get some skill at some point. And that's also attractive to employers because then they don't have to pay for the cost of constantly rescaling their workforce. So I'm getting the sign that we're out of time here. I wanna make sure that, see, if Janae has any, a comment she'd like to close us with and then I'm gonna try my luck to see if people are gonna let us take questions. But do you have a last word? Well, I'm getting a head shake. I'm just gonna say we were talking about employers, just the idea of the connecting with them and the return on their investment. I think that's important. So when you look at the book, you see that connection and employers have to see, what am I gonna get out of this? And I think being able to invite them to the table early and actually interact with the students as well is gonna help to change some of that mindset about working with younger people. Sure. Yeah, and I think pushing them too to think about not just being consumers of the talent education produces but partners in producing it, right? And that can be sort of part of the ROI conversation but also it requires us to kind of flip that a little bit in some ways and involve them in the production process. So I don't wanna cut you off. I could continue this conversation for a long time. We are at seven o'clock. I am gonna wait for someone who's out here organizing to see if we can take one or two questions. Yes? Okay, we have someone lined up. First question in the back. Sir, if you wanna, we have a mic coming for you but if you have a teacher voice. Oh, here, will you speak to the mic just so folks, thank you. What we are forgetting frequently is our money. What I mean here, and you probably know it, at least to my knowledge, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark as well. The companies are offering significant tax incentives and that is a boost, obviously, to accept as many as possible those apprentices. That's what we might use here in the US which would significantly help. Now, the second one, maybe radical, maybe too radical. We have those community colleges. 70% of those kids are going to work anyway. Why we not more partially those community colleges to apprenticeship? They are going to work anyway. They're basically going to wrong work maybe. But maybe we can realign and we will have an excellent education, two years, two and a half years apprenticeship and we can produce immediately excellent quality. Now, and then my comment, my comment. I'm still struggling with the comparing. United States of America and the small countries. I'm in Switzerland, eight million like New York. On the other side, we have the United States of Europe. Obviously, they will never confirm that they are going in our direction. I think it would be fair to compare maybe Massachusetts to Switzerland, Denmark to Tennessee, whatever is it. And then we are looking slightly differently. Okay, so let's start with the first point, the tax incentive question. Nancy, you had a comment right off the bat. We've tried it. But I don't think we've tried it in any really significant way. But the other thing is that Switzerland, the employers pay the wages completely. They pay a sum that is less than they would pay for a full-time, well-trained, entry-level worker, but they still pay the wages. There is, however, a huge investment that remains somewhat hidden of infrastructure from the government and the local cantons to make it possible for all of that to happen. But I don't know the tax incentives. I only think that we are gonna have either huge pressure because of the demographic shifts and the talent pipeline problems or we're not gonna get where we need to go. There are several companies, we've worked with one for years, the wonderful company in California, employers who put huge amounts of their own money into working with high schools and community colleges, but they are a rare example. They're both a philanthropy and they're in need of a workforce. So I don't think tax incentives will do it. I was gonna say on the point, oh, do you wanna stay on the tax incentives? Nope, no, go for it. So I think the point of looking at the state as the entity is a really good one because all these high performers, they have a single ministry of education that controls everything all across the country. Well, we have that in the state. We're never gonna have it at the national level, but we have it in each state. So I think the focus of attention should be on the states developing these CTE folks. And that's what we've, in our pathways, that's what we've been doing for 10 years. I agree with the focus on the states, although not, so there are a number of federal systems that are high-performing too, just like Germany and Canada is certainly much more high-performing than the US. So they're not all small, unitary. And most of them have decentralized from their ministry of education. This image that is all driven from the top is not true anymore. I think we have time for one more question over here unless Janae, you wanted to get a word in? No? Okay, one more question, and then I know we've got folks who have to scramble through the airport, so. Thank you, and it'll be quick. Question for Bill. First of all, just so I don't mistake the goal that you put forth. Do you say something like the goal should be 40% of high school? Right. Could you characterize it just so I don't misstate it? Oh, so the target in our report is that 40% of the college and career-ready students would follow the career and technical education pathway. My question for you is that seems to cannibalize the community that is aiming for college. Janae made what I think was a critical point about that when people are shooting for that for however long. Instead of 40% of that group being the target, why not make the target be 80% or 90% of those who don't opt for college? Well, basically it is because the other two tracks or other two pathways are early college and the advanced placement baccalaureate, national baccalaureate, so two thirds of the students are headed towards a college track and many of the ones on the career and technical education will also be taking college courses because they've met the college and career-ready standard. Yes. So we could go on and I know that there are other questions, but we are over time in there. We will not be the ones to stand between you and the bar, but if you could just join me in thanking our panel and also thanking Mark and NCEE for bringing us together. Thank you. Don't be late for that birthday. Get the system in this world. We've got to start all the way. And next we'll tell what we have to do. And so we'll act like that's the end to start over. So just want to thank everyone for coming and please.