LAUNCHing the Next Generation of Pathways

The two and a half years since have been busy for ESG and for LAUNCH! The initiative has welcomed a new funder and new states, concluded our first phase of work, published a national report, and recently announced a second phase with even deeper investment in six “Accelerator” states. Last month, ESG kicked off a two-year technical assistance deep dive with two states positioned to accelerate their nation-leading pathways work: Tennessee and Colorado. These states are both poised to take their lessons learned from the first phase of LAUNCH into the future we envision for college and career pathways. 

How did we get here?

It was more than a decade ago that I sat in a conference room at the then-brand new Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A diverse group of workforce, education, and academic research professionals sat around a table, all hoping to answer the same question: How can we prepare our students for the great jobs of our shifting economy? The plant had just been christened the year before and the need to recruit thousands of trained workers was great. The possibilities for further growth in the region were even greater. Tennessee schools didn’t know how to keep up. Influential national research had been recently released and a great call to action reverberated through the country: Are we doing enough to prepare our young people for the changing economy? The answer, we agreed together in that conference room, was “no.” 

Tennessee, at that moment, decided to embark on a deep interrogation of its systems. What was working? What wasn’t? Which students were being successful? Which students were being left behind? Who needed to be at the table and what did we need to do, together, to ensure our students were set up for success? The decade that followed brought much progress and success: a significant increase in ACT participation and scores, a continually rising high school graduation rate, a significant increase (68%) in students participating in early postsecondary opportunities in high school, and a steady increase in postsecondary enrollment. Tennessee invested in free college, revised their Career and Technical Education programs and set clearer expectations around literacy. The state’s journey has been laudable. But when COVID hit and state leaders took a deep look at their data, despite all the gains of the past decade, they noticed groups of students were still being left behind. 

We can tell a similar story in the LAUNCH states of Rhode Island, Colorado, and Texas. States who have gone on years-long journeys to revise their graduation requirements and career and technical education programs, develop comprehensive policy plans and recommendations, changed their funding formulas to incentivize student success and credential attainment, and invested in partnerships and credentials. These few leading states across the country have a lot in common: increasing CTE enrollment, increasing college credit attained in high school and credentials attained in postsecondary, stronger relationships with employers. But they also still have challenges; notably opportunity and access to high quality programs have not been equally distributed across schools and districts. Gaps between race, socioeconomic status, and disability status are still prevalent (or even growing) in many measures of student success. Even the leading states, with the strongest enabling conditions for the work of college and career pathways systems are looking at their progress and asking for help.

How did LAUNCH set up a process to help states move forward?

When we came together in the spring of 2023, ESG walked several LAUNCH states through a self-assessment, a student outcomes analysis, and a data capacity review. These analyses gave us important details: what information did the state collect about their students’ progress, what of that data was shared (between K12, postsecondary, and workforce agencies, for example), and what data was disaggregated and connected? What stories could we discover about their system and how students moved through it? What blind spots did each state have? 

As each state outlined the decisions they wanted to be able to make for their students (which programs to incentivize and reward, which schools needed more help, which pathways produced higher wages), they also detailed the information they would need to make them – uncovering if they collected the right facts, if they shared them across different agencies, divisions, and teams, and if the correct decision makers even had access in a timely way. The states also looked at their results and, with local education leaders at the table, identified barriers blocking their students from postsecondary and career success. I’m excited to preview that the LAUNCH partners will be releasing more information we uncovered during these data capacity analysis later this fall, so look forward to learning more about what your state can do to improve your systems toward student success. 

Two states—Colorado and Tennessee—uncovered that they had work to do to collect the right information. For Colorado, a journey toward a more robust, statewide longitudinal data system began. Future technical assistance through LAUNCH will support baseline data collection of important student indicators, such as postsecondary credit attainment, work-based learning participation, and industry credential awards. Tennessee realized they couldn’t answer questions about quality when it came to their work-based learning efforts and are now endeavoring to answer that question with increased collaboration with employers, a revised work-based learning framework, and pilot programs to learn more about what characteristics lead to better student outcomes. While states in LAUNCH approach collaboration and strategy differently, the focus remains on building the infrastructure necessary for all students to succeed.

These states have been on this journey for more than a decade—whether starting in a conference room in a new automobile manufacturing facility or a mile-high meeting room overlooking the mountains—but they admit that while their progress has been great, they have big goals for where they want to be and are encouraging other states to come along with them. 

These two states are living examples of ESG’s recent recommendations for the next decade of pathways work. They are recalibrating the role of employers, they are collecting data to redesign their state measures of high school success, they are interrogating their state policies to enable students to carry forward credit and credentials across systems. Most importantly, they are being honest with themselves about if their efforts are supporting ALL students in their state, rather than a select group. 

I am excited to continue the work of the LAUNCH community for another two years and am so fortunate this initiative is providing me the opportunity to return to Tennessee and continue the conversations we started with employers over a decade ago. The progress has been great, but the students of Tennessee—and Colorado and the rest of the country—have an ever changing future ahead of them and deserve to be prepared to LAUNCH into it.