In Philadelphia, a young person leaving Launchpad Philly’s post-high school graduate training track is on pace to earn nearly $30,000 within nine months and $50,000 within one year. That far outpaces the roughly $12,500 a young Philadelphian with only a high school diploma typically earns.
That’s not a best-case anecdote. It’s a design choice. And it’s one of six such designs documented in our new report, A Practical Guide to Work-Based Learning, which also examines a network of career and technical charter schools in South Bend, Indiana; an industry-themed school network in San Antonio; a rural coordination model spanning a thinly populated Indiana county; a Purdue-affiliated early college network; and a multi-district rural collaborative in Colorado.
Each program provides, by any fair measure, excellent preparation for college and career. And each one raises the same uncomfortable predicament. Education has no shortage of good ideas. What it lacks is a strategy for making them commonplace.
States should stop treating work-based learning primarily as something individual schools or districts choose to pursue and start treating it as something the state itself is responsible for enabling at scale. Based on what separated our six success stories from the much larger number of well-intentioned efforts that stall out, here are four actions state policymakers can pursue.
1. Develop a statewide work-based learning framework that incorporates work-based learning in graduation requirements and accountability systems so that schools do not feel that the time and effort spent developing high-quality programs will go unrecognized. CANOPS, Purdue Polytechnic High Schools, and RAZ-32 in Indiana, for example, greatly benefit from Indiana’s diploma-seal system, which made work-based learning part of earning a diploma rather than an add-on.
2. Fund intermediary and coordination capacity directly, as well as the other true costs of earn-and-learn programs like student wages and transportation, rather than expecting schools or employers to absorb those costs informally.
To ensure enough funding for their program, schools took advantage of all the high school and workforce development funding streams they could access. In Colorado, the Fremont Multidistrict Initiative (FMI) certified its high schools as Colorado P-TECH schools, which unlocked up to two additional years of per-pupil funding after graduation, layered on top of a statewide Opportunity Now workforce grant. These extra dollars help FMI fund its work as the intermediary that recruits students and coordinates work experiences with partnering employers. They also cover other costs like classroom-based supplies and materials, and instructional staff.
Transportation remains an ongoing challenge for many programs. CAST Schools Network in San Antonio uses school district buses to help students get from their high school to their work site across the city, but students in many of our profiled programs still have to find their own transportation.
3. Create licensure flexibility for industry experts, following Indiana’s “workplace specialist” certification and similar adjunct-teaching pathways that let qualified professionals teach or supervise career-related coursework without a traditional teaching credential.
Teacher licensure rules presented a barrier for most schools in our sample. Launchpad Philly sidestepped this issue by offering programming in out-of-school time during the summer, after school, and in the year following high school graduation. FMI shares courses across campuses so that they can reduce the number of specialized staff they need to hire. It also pioneered a separate pay scale for teachers in hard-to-staff career and technical education (CTE) positions to offer industry-competitive wages. But FMI lamented that if they were not a collaboration of traditional public schools and instead were a charter network in Colorado and could take advantage of those flexibilities, the licensure issues would not pose such a challenge. (Ironically, the charters in our sample, which were from Indiana, explained that state law there doesn’t grant as much useful licensure flexibility as in other places, making the “workplace specialist” certification critical.)
4. Make regional collaboration easier by establishing legal and funding structures for intermediaries, especially for small or rural schools, that can build partnerships with local industries. Several schools formed intermediaries to manage the important and time-intensive work of creating and maintaining employer partnerships. State policy in Indiana, Colorado, and Texas made it possible for these collaborations to both form and share resources across traditional district schools. However, these intermediaries must often raise philanthropic dollars because government funding doesn’t stretch far enough to cover these additional costs.
We detail these and other recommendations in our report, which shows that the challenges faced by each of these programs require the support of multiple stakeholders, including state policymakers, school leaders, industry, and even philanthropy. That is exactly why “good programs” are the wrong unit of analysis for policymakers. A good program is a story about a school. A good system is a story about a state policy environment that makes these types of schools possible.
None of this is a call for a single national model. The six programs in our report reflect the differences in the communities they serve, and that variation is a strength. What they share is not a template, but a set of conditions that state policy can either enable or obstruct.
The question for state leaders is not whether they can point to a program within their own borders like the ones we have profiled. Plenty of states can already point to at least one strong example. The real test is whether they have built the policy infrastructure that would let a strong example become the norm rather than the exception. Six excellent programs prove the model works. What remains is a policy choice.
