Credit: Orange County Department of Education (2018)
Credit: Orange County Department of Education (2018)The Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown had great expectations for new regional compacts and levels of cooperation five years ago when they invested an unprecedented half-billion dollars in a new program, the California Career Pathways Trust. They envisioned school districts, community colleges and businesses together creating hundreds of new programs in dozens of sectors, from health to high tech, seamlessly guiding students to work certificates, two-and four-year college degrees and jobs and careers of their choice.
Five years later, many of the career and college pathways that the money inspired continue, but the spirit of regional collaboration behind them has largely faded, a recent report concluded. Most of the consortiums that got multi-million-dollar grants failed to achieve the hoped-for regional impact and fully sustain the alliances.
“Although all consortia created important pathways during the grant period, many of them disbanded, did not sustain staffing of (career pathways trust) functions and saw members turn their attention to other matters as new grants or initiatives surfaced,” wrote researchers in the report, California Career Pathways Trust: Sustaining Regional Cross-Sector Partnerships. “By and large, organizations in the collaboratives defaulted back to business as usual after the demands of the grant requirements diminished,” they added.
The report was written by Milbrey McLaughlin, an education professor emeritus at Stanford University, Barry Groves, president of ACS Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and Valerie Lundy-Wagner, the associate director for research at JFF, a workplace development nonprofit based in Boston and Oakland that commissioned the three-part research.
Suddenly flush from a post-recession rebound and revenue from a temporary tax increase that Brown championed, the Legislature created the California Career Pathways Trust in 2013 and began funding it a year later. The $500 million program, a top priority of Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, was a huge infusion following significant cuts to career tech and vocational education programs during the recession.
The career pathways trust legislation had a big vision. Most districts have college/career programs in their high schools. The pathways trust required the next step: To receive a grant, community colleges, districts, county offices of education and universities would have to establish consortiums whose mission was to plan for future needs of a regional workforce.
The concept of regionalism made sense. Consortiums brought together teachers, college deans and administrators to share ideas and conduct trainings. They could work through challenges, like creating a common sequence of courses enabling students who completed a pathway program in any high school to take the next requirements in community college. They could make it easier to expand dual enrollment, which allows students to take courses in community college while in high school.
Consortiums are also more efficient for business partners. “You need a regional approach if you are serious about connecting with businesses. They want to work with all districts. They can provide input into courses and provide instructors and resources,” said study co-author Groves, a retired Bay Area superintendent.
The first funding round of $250 million went to 39 consortiums with grants ranging from under $1 million to $15 million (given to 10 consortiums). Those consortiums included 167 K-12 districts, 371 high schools, 13 county offices of education, 845 businesses and 20 universities.
The grantees were required to state how they would sustain funding internally or through outside funding for two years after the 3-year state funding ended. The consortiums were expected to continue the regional collaborations that they committed to.
In a rush of activity, grantees created 406 new career pathways and strengthened nearly 1,300 existing pathways, according to data supplied to the state. Most of these continued after the grant ended although the exact number is unknown because the Legislature didn’t require a final evaluation of the program. Because of limited data capacity, the state also doesn’t know how many students completed pathways after high school under the program. As a result, there was “inadequate evidence about student outcomes to make a persuasive case for pathway continuation,” the report said.
What is clear, though, based on researchers’ site visits and 100 interviews with consortium leaders, is that the goals of sustained regional collaborations proved “overly ambitious.”
As the 3-year funding ended, some consortiums cut back the number of pathways. Others laid off the staff responsible for building relationships, sometimes re-assigning the jobs to those with little interest in career pathways, the report said. Aligning pathway courses proved to be complicated and relationships between high schools and some community colleges were “rocky,” the report said. Several consortiums dropped “what they perceived to be uncooperative community colleges from the regional work.”
Success stories
Two successful consortiums cited in the report — the Orange County Regional Consortium and the two-county Tulare-Kings College and Career Collaborative — built lasting relationships and involved partners in making decisions. Both received $15 million grants.
“We did not hire a bunch of people at the regional level knowing funding would disappear,” said Jeff Hittenberger, chief academic officer for the Orange County Department of Education, which has guided the countywide effort. The consortium relied on leaders within the partnerships to do the work instead of funding new positions, he said.
The consortium worked closely with Wallace Walrod, chief economist of the Orange County Business Council, to plan pathways for the next generation of jobs in the county. Over four years, the consortium created 75 new career pathway programs in high schools and community colleges, with the biggest growth in priority areas — computer science and engineering. In response to the shortage of career tech teachers, perhaps the biggest challenge facing pathways’ stability, the consortium has created a credentialing program for career tech teachers.
Last week, the consortium celebrated the growth of career programs and partnerships at the 4th annual OC Pathways event at Edwards Lifesciences, an Irvine-based manufacturer of artificial hearts. Dozens of students told how high school and community college courses and work-based opportunities have put them on the path to becoming emergency medical technicians, machinists, engineers and nurses. Eight businesses were honored with Exemplary Partners Awards.
The Tulare-Kings consortium didn’t have Orange County’s history of district-community college collaboration; it built its new structure from scratch, said Joy Soares, director of the collaborative. “Money brought us together but trust and partnerships have sustained us,” she said.
Since the career pathways funding ended, Gov. Brown has restored $300 million in annual allocations for career technical education. This year the money is split evenly between Career Technical Education Incentive Grants administered by the California Department of Education and K-12 Strong Workforce grants administered by the community colleges. School districts and counties in both the Orange County and Tulare-Kings consortiums used the incentive grants and the money from the Local Control Funding Formula to support their ongoing efforts. Many members of other consortiums did not.
Unlike Tulare-Kings, other consortiums found that three years proved to be too little time to build sustaining relationships, Grove said. “By the time you hire people, start the work do the research, you realize the money will be gone. There was just not enough time.”
Hilary McLean, executive vice president of the Linked Learning Alliance, a coalition of organizations that promotes rigorous pathways, agreed there is value to regional coordination but the fact that the collaboration wasn’t strong in every region doesn’t mean that the career pathways trust was unsuccessful. The grants provided “the opportunity to increase pathways on a scale California had never seen,” she said.
Groves said the state should take a 10-year look at building out college/career pathways and send a consistent message. It should continue funding regional efforts and have teams of experts to help districts. And funding, he said, should be tied to accountability and metrics.
Unlike the pathways trust program, “funding should be based on outcomes,” he said.
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Cheryl Ney 4 years ago4 years ago
The Los Angeles Regional Coalition for Linked Learning (LARCLL) is another regional consortium that continues to function effectively in support of this important educational reform as the “tide of funding ebbs and flows”.
Brian Ausland 4 years ago4 years ago
Sustained funding perhaps is an answer, but it seems to be an answer too readily tendered by those that received much of the last round of funding that generated little by way of measurable outcomes. We believe more funding is critical, but how that funding is handled, who receives and manages it, and a more systemic approach to defining the deliverables need to be completely, and more coherently thought through and part of the funding … Read More
Sustained funding perhaps is an answer, but it seems to be an answer too readily tendered by those that received much of the last round of funding that generated little by way of measurable outcomes. We believe more funding is critical, but how that funding is handled, who receives and manages it, and a more systemic approach to defining the deliverables need to be completely, and more coherently thought through and part of the funding package specifications and requirements when issued.
All CCPT partners were asked to research and initiate local programs that could be self-sustaining and deemed a critical part of their local education and industry ecosystems by the end of the grant funding periods. At the end of $5.8 million in funding for our local project, we were directed to a single webpage of results that had no model outlines, programs of study, data on resulting student outcomes, or even sample projects that demonstrated how a course was refined or developed to connect with the local needs of a given industry sector partner with a school site course offering or pathway.
As we were recently engaged in designing a model for creating grade 9-14 sequences, we inquired if the state plan and approach worked to orchestrate any common deliverables across all CA projects to feed into a shared resource repository we might reference from the half billion of funding, and if those resources were deemed critical to ongoing program growth, increased student engagement, and learning gains across school districts…silence. No such parallel initiative was considered for this project. Our last stop was to ask, “Well, what then, if anything, did you learn from this unprecedented amount of funding by way of post-analysis findings that we should avoid in future iterations, large or small?”, but as your article pointed out “…the Legislature didn’t require a final evaluation of the program.”
Ann 4 years ago4 years ago
I recall commenting on this initiative with the prediction it would fail to produce much if anything. Expecting large disparate institutions to collaborate successfully, especially when one is public education, is a pipe dream. One third of California's schools (and probably more of its students) are failing. How does that system succeed in this sort of endeavor? Like most of the money spent in this state for education, it's gone down the drain or, more … Read More
I recall commenting on this initiative with the prediction it would fail to produce much if anything. Expecting large disparate institutions to collaborate successfully, especially when one is public education, is a pipe dream. One third of California’s schools (and probably more of its students) are failing. How does that system succeed in this sort of endeavor? Like most of the money spent in this state for education, it’s gone down the drain or, more accurately, into the bank accounts of people who don’t deserve it.
Replies
John Fensterwald 4 years ago4 years ago
Ann, let me clarify a couple of points in case I was not clear. I wrote this week in another story on the California School Dashboard that one in three districts will receive county or state assistance because of low-performing student groups, including, in many districts, homeless students, foster children, students with disabilities and some racial and ethnic groups. To my reading, that's shining a light on rampant inequities but not an indictment that schools' … Read More
Ann, let me clarify a couple of points in case I was not clear. I wrote this week in another story on the California School Dashboard that one in three districts will receive county or state assistance because of low-performing student groups, including, in many districts, homeless students, foster children, students with disabilities and some racial and ethnic groups. To my reading, that’s shining a light on rampant inequities but not an indictment that schools’ and districts’ are failing all or most students.
The pathways trust led to the establishment of hundreds of new career pathways programs, many of which are succeeding, an expansion of dual enrollment in community colleges, and some — but not enough — agreements to better align high school and community college courses. The JFF study revealed that regional alliances and interdistrict cooperation, which are vital to building on what the grants started, petered out in many cases. That’s a disappointment and implies a need for more accountability and consistency in funding — but not a conclusion that the pathways program was a waste of money.
ann 4 years ago4 years ago
John, I didn't see you had responded until now. I know you have a very optimistic attitude toward pretty much all initiatives and the spending that goes with them. I look more at outcome when evaluating their value. Take note of Jaeson's comment below. Can you provide evidence of the 'hundreds of new career pathways programs' and moreover how many students completed the programs and attained jobs in a chosen career? With regard to the … Read More
John, I didn’t see you had responded until now. I know you have a very optimistic attitude toward pretty much all initiatives and the spending that goes with them. I look more at outcome when evaluating their value. Take note of Jaeson’s comment below. Can you provide evidence of the ‘hundreds of new career pathways programs’ and moreover how many students completed the programs and attained jobs in a chosen career? With regard to the assistance programs; John, you and I have been in this business for enough years to know that yet another assistance program needed to address inequalities is a sign we have made little or no progress, despite pretty much all the ‘investment’ in adult’s salaries and benefits ( sarcasm intended)
Alyssa Lynch 4 years ago4 years ago
Thank you for the article John! Great to know the big picture.
Fred Jones 4 years ago4 years ago
With all of the competing priorities placed on local districts — almost of which totally ignore supporting bona fide career preparatory and training programs, sustained state investments are critical … as this story and report revealed.
jaeson 4 years ago4 years ago
I think the problem is that pumping funding is very short-sighted. I worked at a local community college where they used all the grant money for staffing. This really shouldn't happen- as a result they could only realistically run 1-2 cohorts as pilots and then hope people were willing to pay. Of course that didn't happen. Eventually our funding ran dry and a bunch of us got pink slips that were … Read More
I think the problem is that pumping funding is very short-sighted. I worked at a local community college where they used all the grant money for staffing. This really shouldn’t happen- as a result they could only realistically run 1-2 cohorts as pilots and then hope people were willing to pay. Of course that didn’t happen. Eventually our funding ran dry and a bunch of us got pink slips that were working there. I loved my job, but the college didn’t see value in funding our positions or allowing programs to expanding and realizing sometimes there are lulls!