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Fall 2021
New Skills ready network Quarterly Newsletter
This is a quarterly stakeholder newsletter for the New Skills ready network. It provides updates and celebrations from the six sites involved in the network: Boston, Massachusetts; Columbus, Ohio; Dallas, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Nashville, Tennessee.
Renewing & Engaging around Big Bets
Last month Advance CTE and Education Strategy Group (ESG) convened the six New Skills ready network sites at the annual Fall Convening. As part of the learnings that occurred in the two-day virtual meeting, each site presented a SWOT analysis of one of their previously identified big bets. The process allowed sites to understand the work that is happening across the network while also offering individualized feedback to the sites based on their own leadership team’s journey.

Boston, Massachusetts and Nashville, Tennessee each focused their presentation on the development of more equitable advising systems, aligned across secondary and postsecondary. Boston, Massachusett’s advising model is anchored in equity and cultural wealth and has a strong footing in their current College, Career and Life Framework. While decentralized advising resources and lack of buy-in were identified as threats to the holistic model, the leadership team sees opportunities in expanding the access of advising tools to middle grades and deepening the collective understanding of all practitioners around equity. 

Nashville, Tennessee’s advising model is currently in the research and development phase, starting with gathering practitioner perspectives in a baseline advising report and building buy-in across the three sectors, secondary, postsecondary and the workforce, through breaking down silos. While the work has not accelerated to the pace that they would like, the team understands that you have to move slow to eventually go fast in building trusting relationships. For Nashville, Tennessee there is an opportunity in braiding stimulus funds through the New Skills work and utilizing the advising model framework to build out greater alignment in other areas down the road. 

Indianapolis, Indiana and Columbus, Ohio spoke to their work in developing evaluation frameworks for their site’s identified pathways. Columbus, Ohio’s leadership team has shown considerable strength in partnering and collaborating across secondary, postsecondary and state agencies. In the work on pathway quality review and alignment that collaboration was seen in the development of a review rubric, which includes both secondary and postsecondary pathways. There are still hurdles in the work, especially around data sharing agreements and differing definitions and benchmarks, but the team believes there is a new opportunity in this work to drive more curricular alignment. Indianapolis’ evaluation framework was developed with extensive stakeholder engagement across diverse perspectives. Just like Columbus, Ohio, the lack of data-sharing agreements across institutions in Indianapolis is an identified threat but they are open to the opportunities of developing a systemic and annual processes criteria are better defined and as data reveals opportunities to engage external stakeholders like community-based organizations in the work. 

Lastly, Denver, Colorado and Dallas, Texas shared an update on their big bet concentrated around expanding career exploration opportunities for all students across the educational continuum. Dallas, Texas has launched work to build out a 7th grade career exploration course to inform choices about high school enrollment. The team had to first build buy-in and trust at the Dallas ISD leadership level and then pilot the program to develop the curriculum and teacher supports. The team quickly realized the weaknesses within their big bet, especially that career exploration is not a curricular requirement, making instruction inconsistent across the district. However, the model has potential for scale and it creates an opportunity for Dallas ISD to collect a rich dataset of student interests and pathway trajectory

In Denver, Colorado, the leadership team looked to work-based learning (WBL) as a way to accelerate learners along pathways. The team already had strong partnerships with policymakers already bought into the work. Unfortunately, the team ran into threats in lack of alignment across secondary and postsecondary systems and varying definitions of WBL across each system. Looking ahead, the team hopes to find opportunities in the elevated focus on the intersection of education and work and the ability to link data systems from education to the workforce.
New Skills Sites in the News
New Skills ready network communities continue to make news for their efforts to strengthen college and career readiness. Links to recent articles are below:

Whites’ Creek High, Nashville State partner on Early College program | (Main Street Nashville)

The future of Dallas’ public education system is the future of Dallas | (DallasNews)
Indiana State Board of Education Shares Characteristics of new school performance dashboard | (Fox 59)

STEAMM Rising Initiative announced to better prepare Columbus City students for careers | (The Columbus Dispatch)

Colorado Community College system Announces Lead Colleges for CO-TECH Apprenticeship Grant | (GlobeNewswire)

Let's Resolve to Make Boston Schools Work for all | (Commonwealth)
Site-Specific Updates
  1. Working groups continue to drive action toward key milestones. Through dedicated cross-partner working groups, the team: created and shared institution-specific data profiles, agreed upon a strategy for cohort-level analyses of student pathways experiences, synthesized a list of barriers to measuring work-based learning opportunities for postsecondary students, and began strategy development on increasing measurement capacity in work-based learning
  2. Career advising remains a major focus. The Boston Public Schools (BPS) team continues to push forward in creating a robust MyCAP experience for students in grades 6-12. Following a review of school participation data and stakeholder feedback, BPS launched the school year with goals to: (1) deepen the student experience through high-quality classroom activities; (2) expand the reach of the MyCAP to be a whole school initiative that engages core academic teachers, CTE and pathways programs, and school-based partners; and (3) develop a practitioner community that can elevate best practices and implementation strategies that are responsive to students' needs and school resources. The BPS team has refined grades 9-12 MyCAP milestones, developed curriculum resources reflective of the district's essential instructional practices, launched a working group to codify a middle grades approach to advising through the MyCAP, and hosted a series of district-wide professional development sessions on both the MyCAP framework and the Naviance platform.
  3. Partners are integrating conversations around cultural wealth into their program practice. For example, the Professional Apprenticeship Career Exploration (PACE) program at UMass Boston launched this school year with over 90 students/apprentices and over 60 Supervisors/Mentors, showing steady semester-to-semester growth since its program launch with 12 students in Spring 2020. This fall, PACE launched the “Professionals in the Field Speaker Series” designed to provide professional development to students/apprentices and supervisors/mentors through guest speakers. In October apprentices received training on cultural wealth that highlighted specific strategies supervisors/mentors can take to amplify their apprentices' cultural wealth during their work experience. Students also learned how to leverage their own cultural wealth to tell their career story.
  1. Pathways Review: Columbus completed its review of Healthcare and Information Technology pathways against rubric criteria to help identify strengths and opportunities for growth and improvement. Plans to enhance and transform pathways and communicate pathways to students and families is underway.
  2. Stakeholder Communication Design: Warhol and Wall Street, the communications vendor for the Columbus initiative, is facilitating workshops with students, parents, and educators to co-create communications messages and assets. Student workshops are completed while workshops for other stakeholders are being scheduled.
  3. Work-Based Learning Toolkit: Columbus developing a work-based learning toolkit to complement and connect existing resources for educators, employers, students, and families. Columbus is interested in connecting with other NSrn sites to share assets, identify gaps, and learn lessons to shape the toolkit.
  1. Baseline Data and Goal Setting: DEAN partners reviewed baseline data related to enrollment of Denver Public Schools students on pathways and transition to postsecondary. Partners then reviewed the data internally to develop enrollment and transition goals and strategies in alignment with organizational priorities, which they presented to the Pathways Leadership Community of Practice. Goals and strategies will be refined through the end of the year to ensure alignment across partners. The next phase of goal setting will incorporate new baseline data yielded from unit record data sharing agreements and will focus on student progressions along pathways, retention, and completion of postsecondary credentials.
  2. Alignment of High School Career Counseling and College Advising: DEAN is leading a pilot for which specific indicators from a student’s high school ICAP (Individual Career and Academic Plan) are shared with postsecondary academic advisors upon matriculation. Students and advisors are currently being surveyed about the value of this shared qualitative data to inform first-semester advising activities, and we will also conduct interviews and/or focus groups in the spring. We hypothesize that by connecting career interest and exploration from high school to college, students will accelerate their career conversations with advisors and more quickly and effectively connect with high-quality pathways.
  3. Coordinated Professional Development Training: This fall DEAN will convene FTE hired under the NSRI grant to learn about each other’s roles, strengthen coordination and partnership, and identify key collaborative strategies to drive grant outcomes together.
  1. CTE Regional Collaboration Meeting: In October 2021, NSrn stakeholders convened with local CTE district leaders, postsecondary providers, and workforce development boards to discuss how all of these teams are working in unison. The meeting attendees discussed gaps in the alignment of program demand and workforce demand and also worked to identify appropriate shifts in programming to create better alignment. EmployIndy was able to utilize the national workforce demand data presented at the all-site NSrn Fall Convening to help frame the current state of the workforce and highlight the growing economies.
  2. Statewide Equity Lab Implementation: The IN Office of CTE has begun the statewide implementation of Equity Labs, modeled after the Ohio Office of CTE Equity Labs implementation in Columbus, Ohio. The labs will be taking place virtually through December 2021. Each lab will have approximately 25 participants across 5-6 CTE districts, and the stakeholders will participate in activities including Equity Audits, CTE enrollment and participation data review, and root cause analyses. Ultimately, the Equity Lab participants will walk away with a team of stakeholders who are more prepared to plan for strategies that focus on access and equity in their CTE programming.
  3. Student Advising Experience – Journey Mapping: The Indianapolis NSrn team convened for their monthly touchpoint to discuss the current student advising experience from 6th grade through postsecondary through the lens of academic advising, career advising, and social emotional advising. After identifying the existing student advising milestones, actors, and processes, the team discussed barriers and challenges to seamless transitions from middle school to postsecondary. The team has begun to develop a Student Advising Journey Map to document the connections between the advising goals, processes, and opportunities to best inform the Year 3 Action Plan.
  1. Collaboration – Nashville has adapted the Systemness approach to move key action areas forward and build a shared framework for transparent collaboration. We now have five work teams focused on Work-based Learning, College & Career Coaches Framework, Equity Goals, Pathway Certification, and Draft Pathways Advising. Each work team began with ‘What’ by establishing a guiding question. What system do we want to improve? Work teams then identified stakeholder maps. The work teams are now identifying ‘Why’. What information and data, both quantitative and qualitative, do we need to understand? In order to change the system, we have to understand it and make it visible.  
  2. Staffing – Hiring the right individuals to support the community college’s advising and work-based learning coordinator has proved to take much longer than anticipated. 
  3. Employers – We are experiencing early success in engaging employers to offer work-based learning and pre-apprenticeships to students in IT and health care pathways. We are braiding WIOA funding for wages for qualified students and appealing to employers that this is a strategy to build their talent pipeline. 
Reminder
Remember that Advance CTE is always available to provide research on topics your New Skills ready network teams are working on. To submit a research request please fill out this form.
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