Posts Tagged ‘Workforce Data Quality Campaign’

Research Roundup: Strategies for Fostering Effective Partnerships for Equitable CTE Research

Monday, June 26th, 2023

Advance CTE’s “Research Round-Up” blog series features summaries of relevant research reports and studies to elevate evidence-backed Career Technical Educational (CTE) policies and practices and topics related to college and career readiness. This month’s blog highlights strategies that support the connection between researchers and local CTE practitioners to generate evidence-based research to inform program improvement. These findings align with Advance CTE’s vision for the future of CTE where each learner engages in a responsive career preparation ecosystem.

State CTE leaders are eager to learn about the newest innovations or best practices to improve CTE learner outcomes. Researchers play an important role in translating the outcomes of different interventions and distilling their findings into recommendations that help to shape the direction of CTE programs. The K-12 education research landscape is rapidly shifting, and to effectively recruit districts and schools, researchers need to have strategies for building strong partnerships. A recent blog from the Career & Technical Education Research Network suggests that understanding these changes and their implications for evaluations is crucial for funders, researchers, and policymakers because of limited information on evidence-based CTE strategies and relatively few causal studies of CTE.

During the pandemic, it became clear that districts and schools are already facing many challenges regarding the availability of resources and their capacity to participate in research evaluations. Additional barriers include challenges with identifying clear counterfactuals, or programs to serve as reasonable comparisons, navigating district approval processes, and the willingness of schools to participate in district research.

States can support researchers to mitigate these challenges and foster mutually beneficial research partnerships with local practitioners that will contribute to the development of an effective data strategy. 

Strategies 

The CTE Research Network suggests the following strategies: 

Application for State CTE Leaders 

Strategic partnerships provide CTE leadership with relevant, evidence-based recommendations for implementing high-quality CTE programs for every learner. These partnerships expand the scope and quality of data available to state leaders by working directly with districts to capture the most timely information available to improve the alignment and quality of CTE programs.

There are several examples of established partnerships between state-level agencies and researchers. The Data Quality Campaign produced a Roadmap for Effective Data Use and Research Partnerships that breaks down the steps for integrating research into school improvement policies. 

The American Youth Policy Forum and Results for America also offer resources targeted to support state leaders in pushing beyond simply disseminating data to leverage research evidence to drive policy decisions.

Additional resources on data-informed program improvement can be found in Advance CTE’s Learning that Works Resource Center. The Advancing Postsecondary CTE Data Quality Initiative blog series represent lessons learned and successful strategies employed across the five states to move their data systems and structures forward.

Amy Hodge, Policy Associate 

By Layla Alagic in Research
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Measuring Career Readiness in State Accountability Systems: Where to Start

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) affords states the chance to strengthen their accountability systems by adopting multiple measures of school success rather than relying on an antiquated test-based system. Buoyed by this flexibility, state agencies across the country are exploring strategies to integrate career readiness indicators into their accountability systems. While some states have made considerable progress in this arena, others are left wondering where do we start?

To help states navigate this new territory, Education Strategy Group and the Council of Chief State School Officers convened a workgroup of accountability experts and tasked them with identifying and recommending robust metrics to measure career readiness. Their recommendations, released earlier this month in a brief titled Destination Known: Valuing College AND Career Readiness in State Accountability Systems, detail four possible measures of student career readiness:

The brief further outlines strategies for measuring and valuing each of these measures, demonstrating how states can implement and gradually increase the sophistication of their measurement indicators. Lessons are also drawn from states such as Ohio, Kentucky and California that have made headway toward adopting and implementing career-focused accountability indicators in recent years.

Moving forward, JPMorgan Chase & Co. aims to support state efforts to adopt these recommendations and enhance their career-focused accountability through New Skills for Youth, a cross-state initiative to dramatically increase the number of students who graduate from high school prepared for careers.

Expanding Access to Postsecondary Learning

Separately, students who earned dual credit in Oregon schools were more likely than their peers to graduate from high school, enroll in college and persist through their first year. That’s according to new research from the Research Education Lab at Education Northwest examining dual credit participation between 2005 and 2013. While the study reveals a correlation between dual credit attainment and positive outcomes, the authors note equity gaps in participation across student subgroups. Dual credit earners in the study were more often white, female and not on the federal free and reduced lunch program.

Equitable access to higher education is not a new issue, but it can often be exacerbated by performance-based funding formulas. Without careful design, such formulas can encourage two-year and four-year colleges to be more selective with who they admit into their programs. According to the Center for Legal and Social Policy (CLASP), states should adjust their postsecondary formula weights to counteract selectivity and encourage more open access to postsecondary education.

Odds and Ends

Austin Estes, Policy Associate

By admin in Research, Resources
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CTE Research Review: The Value of Rigorous High School Programs

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016

New Research Highlights the Value of “And” in College And Career

Path Least TakenCollege is often considered a safe bet, but new research from the Center for Public Education (CPE) finds that comparable opportunity can be found in rigorous high school programs that result in a professional certification. In the third installment of its “Path Least Taken” series, CPE compares social and economic outcomes between students with a four-year college degree and “high-credentialed” students with no degree (the paper defines “high-credentialed” students as those who demonstrated success in high school academic and technical courses and obtained a professional certification).

The study finds that “high-credentialed” students with no degree were just as likely to be employed full-time, be satisfied with their jobs and to vote in a recent election by age 26 as students with four-year degrees. The study also finds that, among students who pursued but did not complete a postsecondary degree, those who graduated from a rigorous high school program had more positive social and economic outcomes overall. This demonstrates that rigorous college and career preparation in high school can serve as a powerful economic safety net along the path to a higher degree.

Evaluation Finds Opportunity in Accelerating Opportunity Program

In other news, Urban Institute and the Aspen Institute released an evaluation of Accelerating Opportunity (AO), a program designed to help adults with low basic skills earn occupational credentials and obtain well-paying jobs. One innovation that AO uses is to change the delivery of adult education by pairing basic skill instruction and technical education so that students can earn Career Technical Education (CTE) credits and a high school credential concurrently, placing adults without a high school degree on a path towards a high-wage, high-skill job.

The evaluation finds interesting outcomes from the first three years of the program. Of the more than 8 thousand students enrolled in evaluated states (Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana), one-third engaged in work-based learning and 30 percent found a job related to the occupational area of their pathway within the first three years. The report highlights further opportunities for states to align adult education and CTE in community colleges.

Diving Into Postsecondary Data Systems

Without labor market outcomes and participation data for students in CTE programs, it is difficult for policymakers to identify challenges or scale successes. That’s why a strong state-level data system is core to an effective CTE strategy. At the postsecondary level, linked data systems (also known as postsecondary student unit record systems or PSURSs) can improve program efficiency, advance student success and provide useful information to policymakers.

A new report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) examines national trends across state data collection agencies. The report draws on survey data to illustrate the scope of state-level PSURSs and the strategies states are using to link their data systems with others in the education and workforce continuum. The report finds that 26 states currently enable the linking of postsecondary, workforce and K-12 data in a P20W data warehouse — up from eight in 2010. While these trends are promising, the report issues four concluding recommendations for policymakers to improve and further expand state-level PSURSs:

WDQC InfographicThe report precedes an infographic released last week from the Workforce Data Quality Campaign, the Postsecondary Data Collaborative and SHEEO. The sleek infographic maps postsecondary and workforce data systems and illuminates the most common gaps in state longitudinal data systems (SLDS). Filling these gaps is important not only to provide data to policymakers and researchers but also to increase transparency for college-going students and their parents.  

Odds and Ends

Austin Estes, Policy Associate

By admin in Research
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