The objective of New Skills ready network is to scale high-quality career pathways to give underserved students access to higher education and real-world work experiences that lead to high-wage, in-demand jobs. As New Skills ready network leadership teams have progressed through their first year of work, equity has arisen as a priority for each of the sites. As part of the project’s needs assessment process in 2020, each site completed an equity analysis to understand their community’s strengths and opportunities related to equity in career pathways. Sites have begun to take action on equity challenges building on the findings from their equity analyses and utilizing the skills and knowledge of their leadership team. Through that knowledge and capacity building, sites have taken a variety of approaches and solutions to closing their equity gaps; this quarter’s newsletter highlights two of the sites’ approaches.
Indianapolis has chosen to take an early focus on equity in career pathways, beginning their work at the intersection between two key priorities of the New Skills ready network project. To guide their work the leadership team focused on three high level questions:
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Are ALL students able to enroll and succeed in ALL pathways and programs?
- Is there equitable representation of the district’s population in each pathway and program?
- Do pathways and programs provide a springboard for postsecondary success?
To begin answering these questions, the leadership team combined the data from their equity analysis with a new comprehensive review of each of the 42 college and career readiness pathways and programs at four Indianapolis Public School high schools. The Indianapolis team will use this combined data to identify pathways to sunset, pathways to merge, and pathways to consider promoting more heavily to learners to increase equitable enrollment.
In Nashville the leadership team’s early focus has been to create a shared understanding of equity and systemic barriers to racial equity. The team worked collaboratively to establish a common definition of equity and a common language to use in all of their current and future work on career pathways. The leadership team, along with various community stakeholders, defined specific terms including: equity, race, institutional racism, implicit bias, systemic racism, white privilege and cultural representation.
The group will continue to grow and develop a shared understanding of equity throughout all the institutions that are partners in the project, not just the individuals who are members of the Nashville leadership team. To achieve this goal, Nashville’s leadership team is offering a racial equity training to staff at partner institutions and other key community organizations. As of early February, more than 275 individuals including partners, school staff and other stakeholders have participated in the training and built a shared foundational knowledge of equity. The leadership team recognized that in order to sustain the work on equity in career pathways following the end of the grant, a foundation for systems transformation had to be developed through engagement and collaboration with community partners.
To ensure that equity remains a focus of the Nashville team’s work, the equity subcommittee engaged the full leadership team in developing community norms to surround the work and encourage trust and vulnerability in tough conversations that the team will likely face in the future. Those community norms are shared at the beginning of every leadership team meeting to set the stage for the discussion and to serve as a consistent reminder.
