Reframing Work-Based Learning for Relevancy
BY KIMBERLY REEVES/School Administrator, January 2022

Mike Stacy, superintendent of Kentucky’s Beechwood schools, in the IDEA lab with students and the projects they created with 3D printers. PHOTO COURTESY OF BEECHWOOD INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS

Superintendent Ann Levett has a line she uses when she talks about Savannah-Chatham County Schools’ work-based learning opportunities: “Why should we be offering a class in dragon catching if we all know we no longer have any dragons to catch?”

That’s Levett’s way of saying that every class must earn its place on Savannah-Chatham campuses based on its relevance, especially those that deal with career and college readiness.

Her strategy mirrors some of the best new practices in career and technical education, which tend to focus on relevance to today’s students and their personal learning needs. Do the district’s work-based course options reflect local job openings? Does the program include a paid apprenticeship component, one supervised by a highly skilled mentor? Will the process result in a useful credential, plus academic credit toward a degree at one of the colleges in the region?

“We need to make sure that we are in touch with what the industry standards and needs are,” Levett says. “It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have. In the end, you still need to be able to work either for yourself or for someone else.”

Logistical Strategy

That’s why Ron Aikens, the school district’s work-based learning coordinator, ended up on the Georgia Tech campus two years ago, learning about area workforce trends. Much of the talk was focused on the future of the Port of Savannah, one of the busiest freight ports in the country.

That industry insight — shared with Aikens by business leaders — reframed a strand of the workforce training in Savannah-Chatham schools: freight logistics. Today, the district puts a special focus on the emerging cold storage market in the region.

“So now we’re ahead of the curve,” Aikens says. “They were talking about the strategic planning for cold storage in the region. So, for the last three or four years, we’ve known how much the district would need to focus on cold storage. It’s now one of our lead logistics areas.”

Ready for Hire

Many families are unfamiliar with what is known as mid-skills jobs: decent-paying positions that require more training than a high school diploma but less than a four-year degree. In certain cases, those jobs can pay as well as a four-year degree, especially for in-demand jobs.

“We need to make sure we get past the understanding of the old dinosaur method of vocational-technical education and move on to career and college readiness,” says Aikens, adding that it’s a process of changing current perceptions. “The new approach is through pathways, through work-based learning placements.”

The focus is making students ready for hire, with a year-long apprenticeship as the capstone for the school district’s work-based learning options. Half-day or full-day, the work must be highly structured and supervised by a mentor, with a written training plan that matches the student’s career pathway, Aikens says. In high demand areas, such as logistics or avionics, students often are hired by the sponsoring company at the end of their senior year.

Upending Tradition

Federal statistics show structured youth apprenticeships have grown by 70 percent since 2011, despite a dip during the pandemic. In the last five years alone, more than 13,500 new apprenticeship programs have begun. This shift in instructional ideology — with terms such as “workforce pathways” and “work-based learning” — has been strongly influenced in the last decade by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. 

Labor economist Anthony Carnevale, who leads the center, says he recognized the tide of available jobs shifting away from those holding only a high school diploma.

Carnevale came to his current post in 2007 after serving almost a decade as the vice president for public leadership at the Education Testing Service. In that role, Carnevale often found himself as the keynote speaker at sundry education conferences, where he rang the bell, time and again, on the changing picture of the workforce. It eventually led to the creation of the Center on Education and the Workforce.

“I would be the one who got up and gave that talk about education and the economy, and then they would go off and talk about education,” Carnevale told the audience at a Lumina Foundation event in 2019 about formation of the center. “That was the initial impetus for all this. In some ways, my career made me perfect for that.”

Many of the Center on Education and the Workforce’s study findings upend the customary thinking of educators, which tends to swing from “every child needs to get a four-year degree” to “college isn’t necessary for everyone.” The data indicate the truth lies somewhere in the middle, with a wide swath of jobs requiring less than a four-year college degree paying a solid living wage.

Michelle Klein (third from left), business/university liaison in Kentucky’s Beechwood Independent Schools, and internship coordinator Janelle Hawkes (right) with students participating in internships through the district’s EDGE program. PHOTO COURTESY OF BEECHWOOD INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS

The latest workforce data suggest current students, upon graduation, will hold multiple jobs with varying skills sets in the future. The ability to be nimble — to add competencies and credentials across a full career — will be the most necessary worker attribute for a changing economy.

That’s one reason the 1,500-student Beechwood Independent School District in Northern Kentucky has placed an emphasis on the soft skills starting in early grades. A seminar class in 5th grade focuses on solving an actual business problem with genuine company feedback. A year-long course in 8th grade gives students four weeks to solve challenges in eight different career areas. In high school, electives have been replaced to give students the option of a high school “minor” that mirrors their interests and frequently includes interactions with local business leaders.

Michelle Klein, Beachwood’s business and university liaison, says the interactions, especially in the early grades, focus heavily on helping businesses solve challenges.

“For example, we had Amazon come in. They were building a new distribution center, and they needed to figure out how they were going to handle the traffic situation on a particular corner,” Klein says. “So they wanted our kids to come look at the traffic patterns and come up with a solution. That’s the kind of challenges we want to have for students.”

Fearless Learning

Some might look at the Beechwood Independent School District and see little to fix. The district’s high school has been ranked one of the best in the nation by U.S. News and World Report for seven years straight. Students’ ACT scores are the highest in the state. Better than 95 percent of the school district’s seniors each year are college bound.

“Either you’re evolving or you’re in the process of going backwards. So how do you take a top-performing system and evolve it?” says Mike Stacy, who was hired as Beechwood’s superintendent in 2015. “I didn’t really have to worry about test scores. That gave me and my administrators the opportunity to be able to look at more creative design.”

Stacy knew he wanted to get his students, even those heading to top colleges, out of their seats and working with their peers. He wanted students exposed enough to careers to make informed decisions on potential majors or professional certificates. He wanted Beechwood graduates to avoid the mistake he made in college by switching between majors and adding to the cost of his education.

The goal, Stacy explains, is to create resilient and inquisitive learners with keen interests in their intended career fields. They shouldn’t graduate from college with a degree in mechanical engineering and then suddenly realize they didn’t want to spend their life in an office cubicle.

“We don’t want to train a kid who doesn’t know how to do anything other than get an A and be compliant,” the superintendent says. “That’s not what most of our industry partners want. They want a kid who is fearless, who is willing to take a risk.”

Stacy also wants Beechwood graduates who get into college with a clear understanding of the jobs they might get with their chosen major. Stacy says as a collegian he switched majors and minors and, after his basketball scholarship days were over, he switched colleges. Eventually, he would switch careers, too. That’s no longer affordable for many families, even at a state university.

Locally Tailored

Not every regional push for work-based learning and youth apprenticeships starts at the school district. Ann Flynt is the director of the public-private Eastern Triad Workforce Initiative in Greensboro, N.C., overseeing apprenticeships in the four-county Piedmont region of the Tar Heel State.

The initiative is a collaborative that shares workforce development grants to develop infrastructure that can serve school districts, community colleges and chambers of commerce.

Flynt considers the program strongly employer driven. Workforce training and apprenticeship opportunities are tailored to local community needs.

“We work together to try to increase the pipeline of workers in our area,” Flynt says. “The youth apprenticeship program in our area is very strong because we can leverage these funds.”

Youth apprenticeships are strictly regulated by contract with the state Department of Labor. High school juniors and seniors can take one of two paths: as a jumpstart to a career or as initial work toward a four-year degree program.

The Piedmont region is one that has seen a tremendous upheaval in its economy. The major industries that once supported the area, notably furniture, tobacco and textiles, are all gone. It’s forced both industry and educational leaders to rethink pathways for students.

Superintendent Mike Stacy visits a school facility under construction in the Beechwood Independent Schools in Mitchell, Ky., that will host lab spaces for an academic program on workplace readiness developed in partnership with regional industry and higher education. PHOTO COURTESY OF BEECHWOOD INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS

Eboni Chillis, the interim chief innovation officer for Guilford County Schools in Greensboro, N.C., came into her district with a commitment to using data to minimize tracking her black and brown students into easy, or expected, career pathways. She urges students to look broader.

“Some kids are going to do exactly what their parents did, but it doesn’t mean you have to go into that profession at the low end of that job,” Chillis says. “You can visualize yourself being the entrepreneur, owning the company, creating the new service, process or tool. Maybe you’re doing construction, but you want to be the foreman or the superintendent.”

Career Readiness

Back in Savannah, some of Aiken’s students who have completed a paid apprenticeship will go directly into the workforce upon high school graduation. Others will take the college credit earned through the workforce training program and enroll in one of the state’s major universities as a transfer student.

The Savannah-Chatham district has an entire team that focuses on work-based experiences, which are monitored by the Georgia Department of Education. Three years ago, Georgia added career-ready seals for high school diplomas in three areas: employability/soft skills, career pathways and one focused on leadership of career-oriented groups and local competitions.

Students enrolled in work-based learning have better attendance and higher graduation rates, says Angie Lewis, who heads the school district’s office of college and career readiness. The district used to look at technical skills attainment. Today, the focus is credential value.

“Our graduation rate is 89.7 percent. But our graduation rate for our career tech students was 96.7 percent,” Lewis says. “We also know from the data we get from the state that 99.6 percent of our career tech students are employed or go on to postsecondary education.”

KIMBERLY REEVES is a policy and education writer in Austin, Texas.