A Call to Action featuring Education, Labor, and Commerce Secretaries June 1, 1:30 p.m. ET
By: Amy Loyd, Senior Advisor
This is our moment to truly reimagine education. This is our moment to lift our students, our education system, and our country to a level never before seen. As the great Congressman Lewis said, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
-Secretary Cardona’s Vision for Education in America (2022)
Imagine a high school in which every single student is energized, excited, and engaged in powerful learning that connects them to their communities, nurtures their career aspirations, and provides them with a head start on college. These students are thriving in rigorous academics, earning several college credits before graduating from high school—including their first college math and English classes, and two classes connected to their possible future careers. These students, along with their families, receive personalized and ongoing career and college advising and navigation supports so that they make informed decisions about the classes they take, the pathways they pursue, and the goals they set for their lives.
These students also earn industry credentials that today’s employers seek and need, so that they can successfully launch careers with valuable skills and confidence. They apply their knowledge and skills in real-world settings, extending their learning beyond the classroom and into the workplace and community. They explore the world of work through paid internships and apprenticeships with leading professionals who mentor them; provide them with ongoing feedback and support to help them grow; connect them to networks of other professionals; and honor their knowledge, skills, and experiences by engaging them in meaningful work that shapes their futures. Then, after high school, they all go on to earn postsecondary credentials that open the doors to future education and rewarding career possibilities. These career and college pathways are option multipliers for students, and through them, students become young professionals who transform our workplaces, our economies, and our communities for the better.
We believe that this is our moment, and our responsibility to reimagine and redesign our education system so that it better prepares every young person for a successful and joyful future. There are already exemplary policies and practices across the country that align with and advance this bold vision. Our goal is to move from a nation of great pathways programs in some places to a nation with transformative systems of multiple pathways to success for every young person.
The pandemic has laid bare longstanding inequities in education and exacerbated them further. Far too few students—especially students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, students from rural communities, students with disabilities, and students who are first-generation college-goers—have had the opportunity to get a leg up on college and career pathways while they are still in high school. We want all students, not just those fortunate to be in high-quality Career Technical Education (CTE) programs or strong dual enrollment and early college programs, to be on pathways through higher education that lead to rewarding careers.
Postsecondary credential attainment rates remain unacceptably low and inequitable, with slow growth despite concerted efforts and investments over many years. Further, the decline in enrollment in higher education—especially in our community colleges—throughout the pandemic is only widening the equity gaps in outcomes. These trends are troubling because postsecondary credentials are essential for our students, our workforce, and our economy: 70% of today’s jobs require a postsecondary credential, as do the majority of new jobs created in the post-recession economy.
The pandemic has also reshaped labor markets and the world of work, yet our education and training systems have not kept up with the dynamism of the economy. We are leaving good-paying jobs unfilled and too many hard-working Americans continue to struggle. Given this reality—and particularly as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law creates good-paying jobs in in-demand fields—this fundamental reimagination of education is more important than ever to students and the future of our nation.
To that end, we ask you to join us June 1 at 1:30 p.m. ET for a call to action virtual event focused on growing pathways to success. This event will feature remarks from Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, as well as students, parents, educators, and employers. They will all share their perspectives on the value and need for career and college pathways. Additionally, leaders from the Department of Education will provide an overview of the core strategies of this initiative and ask you to consider what commitments you can make to it.
Over the coming months, we’ll be working to galvanize a coalition of educators, employers, and community leaders committed to transforming how students transition from high school through postsecondary education and into careers. We need your leadership, partnership, and commitment to advance this critical work.
This effort builds on the proposed investment in career-connected high schools in President Biden’s FY 2023 Budget. The proposed $200 million investment in Career-Connected High Schools would support competitive grants to grow and build models of this bold vision. Funding would support partnerships between local educational agencies, institutions of higher education—including community colleges—and employers, to support early enrollment in postsecondary and career-connected coursework; work-based learning opportunities; and academic and career counseling across the last two years of high school and the first two years of postsecondary education.
The Department of Education looks forward to supporting states and communities stepping up to embrace this vision and working in partnership to build an education system through which our students fulfill their endless potential. This includes:
Working closely with the Department of Labor, the Department of Commerce, and other agency partners;
Convening students, educators, employers, and other stakeholders to learn about practices that have led to success and challenges that must be addressed;
Providing resources and tools to support strong pathways approaches.
The success of these pathways relies on the interdependence of diverse stakeholders: students and families, PK-12 education, higher education, business and industry, workforce and economic development, community-based and faith-based organizations, government, and other community leaders.
Whatever your relationship in this ecosystem may be, we want to hear about your work in career and college pathways. Please reach out to our team at pathwaystosuccess@ed.gov. We welcome the opportunity to connect with you more about this. Additionally, you can get news about the Department’s work to strengthen career and college pathways through the OCTAE Connections newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe.
We have before us a powerful opportunity for transformation. If ever there was a moment for us to hit a reset button in education and transform how education bridges young people to their futures, and to “lift our country to a level never before seen,” it’s now. And if not us, who? If not now, when? We look forward to partnering with you in bringing this bold vision to life.
Adnan Syed, who was freed in September after he spent 23 years in prison fighting a murder conviction that was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” has been hired by Georgetown University as an associate for an organization whose work mirrors the efforts that led to his release, the university has announced.
Mr. Syed, the subject of the 2014 podcast and pop-culture sensation that raised questions about whether he had received a fair trial after being convicted of strangling his high school classmate and onetime girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, will work for Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative.
Mr. Syed, who was 17 at the time of Ms. Lee’s death in Baltimore, has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
The university said that Mr. Syed, now 41, will help support programs at the organization, such as a class in which students reinvestigate wrongful convictions and seek to “bring innocent people home” by creating short documentaries about their findings. The program, founded in 2016, “brings together leading scholars, practitioners, students and those affected by the criminal justice system to tackle the problem of mass incarceration,” according to its website.
Georgetown University, which is in Washington, said that in the year leading up to his release, Mr. Syed was enrolled in the university’s bachelor of liberal arts program at the Maryland prison where he was incarcerated.
“To go from prison to being a Georgetown student and then to actually be on campus on a pathway to work for Georgetown at the Prisons and Justice Initiative, it’s a full circle moment,” Mr. Syed said in a statement. “P.J.I. changed my life. It changed my family’s life. Hopefully I can have the same kind of impact on others.”
He added that he hoped to continue his education at Georgetown and go to law school.
The new job this month culminated what has been a remarkable year for Mr. Syed, whose case has again received widespread public attention after a flurry of recent legal activity.
In September, Mr. Syed was released from prison after a judge overturned his murder conviction. Prosecutors said at the time that an investigation had uncovered various problems related to his case, including the potential involvement of two suspects and key evidence that prosecutors might have failed to provide to Mr. Syed’s lawyers.
In October, prosecutors in Baltimore dropped the charges against Mr. Syed after DNA testing on items that had never been fully examined proved Mr. Syed’s innocence, officials said.
Ms. Lee’s family filed an appeal with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals after prosecutors dropped the charges.
On Nov. 4, the court said in an order that the appeal could be heard in court in February.
Marc Howard, the director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative, said in a statement that Mr. Syed’s “commitment to the program and to his education was clear from the moment he stepped into the classroom.”
He added that Mr. Syed “is one of the most resilient and inspiring people I’ve ever met, and he has so much to offer our team and the other students in P.J.I. programs.”
In a Georgetown University article about the hiring, Mr. Syed said that he was in disbelief when he first saw a flier for the program.
“It became this domino effect to see us be accepted,” he said. “It made it become something real in the eyes of others, that there are opportunities. There can be a sense of hope: a sense of hope that things can get better, a sense of hope that I can work hard and still achieve something, a sense of hope that I can still do something that my family will be proud of.”
His attachment to the school was evident on Sept. 19, when he walked out of prison for the first time since he was a teenager.
Amid a throng of reporters and his supporters, Mr. Syed walked down the courthouse steps in Baltimore, smiling. He gave a wave.
And in his hand, he carried a binder with a Georgetown sticker. His graded papers and tests were inside.
“Supporting Palestinian liberation does not mean opposition to Jewish people or the Jewish religion,” the group said in a statement to the Berkeley law community. Members of the group did not respond to messages seeking an interview.
After learning about the bylaw, Mr. Chemerinsky met with the university’s Hillel rabbi and spoke with several Jewish students, but, aside from concerns within the law school, the reaction was relatively muted, he said.
That changed, he said, after Kenneth L. Marcus, the civil rights chief of the U.S. Education Department during the Trump administration, wrote about the bylaw in September in The Jewish Journal under the explosive headline “Berkeley Develops Jewish Free Zones.”
Mr. Marcus wrote that the bylaw was “frightening and unexpected, like a bang on the door in the night,” and said that free speech does not protect discriminatory conduct.
The article went viral.
Mr. Chemerinsky said he learned about Mr. Marcus’s article, which he described as “inflammatory and distorted,” while he was in Los Angeles for a conference. Mr. Chemerinsky said he typed out a response to the article, which was appended to it, and then didn’t think much of it. That afternoon, he was deluged by emails. At an alumni event that night, the law school’s perceived hostility to Jews was “all anyone wanted to talk about.”
In an interview, Mr. Marcus, a Berkeley law school alumnus, said that he was contacted by law students there who were concerned about the bylaw. He said he spent weeks trying to support them and wrote his article after Berkeley did not “rectify the problem.”
Not allowing Zionist speakers, he said, was a proxy for prohibiting Jews. The provisions, he said, are “aimed at the Jewish community and those who support the Jewish community,” even while acknowledging that the policy could allow Jewish speakers and bar those who are not Jewish.
“People with learning differences are human,” wrote Deanna White, a neurodiversity advocate and parent learning coach in response to a question we posed on LinkedIn. “Unique individuals and wonderful humans that are better defined by their strengths. So stop focusing on the weakness.”
We invited our social media followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to weigh in on the most effective way schools can better support students with learning differences.
Responses ranged from shifting educators’ mindset—like highlighting student strengths—to more far-reaching changes that would require schoolwide or district support.
Focus on students’ strengths
There are many ways of encouraging students to play to their strengths, as educators Winston Sakurai and Phyllis Fagell demonstrated in an August 2022 article by Education Week Assistant Editor Denisa Superville.
They detailed how they shared their own learning struggles as a way to connect with their students. Their personal successes show students, who may be struggling academically or socially, that anything is possible.
Here’s what other educators had to say.
1. Help them understand their learning strengths and challenges and growing them as strong self-advocates.
2. Devoting time and money to developing teachers’ abilities to differentiate.
– Amy S.
By having high expectations and giving them exposure to high-quality materials and experiences, even ones that seem “above them.” They will shock us with their insights every time.
– Angela P. 😒😒🥴
Meet students where they are
In a 2015 primer on the topic, EdWeek Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks wrote about how “differentiated instruction”—the process of identifying students’ individual learning strengths, needs, and interests and adapting lessons to match them—became a popular approach to helping diverse students learn together. Respondents largely agreed.
Time to work with every student. If you can meet with a child for a bit of time to help with exactly what she or he needs, it might ignite both learning and understanding.
In a 2017 Opinion essay, former teacher Marc Vicenti wrote about “the daily wear and tear on educators when trying to juggle a full teaching load and meaningful relationships with lively young people who all have different needs and experiences.”
“We can either choose to be less effective in our practice or exhaust ourselves—neither of which is beneficial to students or our own well-being,” he wrote.
Smaller class sizes are one way of mitigating the risk of burnout while working to meet each student’s needs.
Small classes, small schools, local control. I am the principal in a pretty small school in a small community and I know every child, and every family and we can build programs to meet our students’ needs. A country run or state run school system can’t do that.
Standardized tests have long been criticized for narrowing instruction and for holding all students to the same standard when “students enter school at varying levels and learn and grow at different rates.”
The backlash against standardized testing renewed interest in alternative ways to evaluate students’ learning progress, like “performance assessments—the idea of measuring what students can do, not merely what they know”.
Sometimes it’s best to go to the source to discern how to best tackle an issue. Giving these students a voice can not only empower them in their learning, but also help educators understand how to have the biggest impact.
Ask them how they learn and what helps. Give them a voice!
Yes! Listening to what students need and giving them a voice is something we need to do for all students, but especially those who need more help in the classroom.
