NOTE: Today, the Ohio Senate Education Committee heard testimony on Senate Bill 328. It would, among other things, improve on the state’s workforce readiness and career-connected learning initiatives for K-12 students. Fordham’s Vice President for Ohio Policy provided the following proponent testimony.
Ohio has made real progress over the past several years in expanding career-connected learning. Students have more opportunities today than they did a decade ago. But despite that progress, too many students still move through school without a clear sense of what comes next or how their education connects to their future.
Senate Bill 328 takes an important step toward fixing that. This testimony will focus on three parts of the bill that will likely have the greatest impact: the middle school career exploration requirement, the new approach to academic and career planning, and the return on investment initiative.
Let’s start with middle school.
One of the most valuable aspects of this bill is that it doesn’t wait until high school to begin career-related conversations. It requires schools to provide students in grades 6 through 8 with meaningful exposure to careers, including hands-on experiences, financial literacy, and at least one structured career coaching session.
That matters more than it might seem at first glance.
Right now, we typically expect students to make important decisions early in high school—what courses to take, whether to pursue career-technical education, how to think about college or training programs—without ever having explored their interests in a serious way. For many students, those decisions are made with very little context.
This bill helps change that by making sure students have time before high school to explore options, reflect on their strengths, and think about what they might want to pursue. Research and experience both tell us that those early exposure opportunities—job shadowing, career speakers, and even simple interest inventories—can make a real difference in how students engage with school and the choices they later make.
It’s much easier to build a coherent pathway when students have had a chance to see what’s out there.
That leads directly to the second piece: academic and career planning.
Senate Bill 328 asks students, beginning in eighth grade, to create a plan that goes beyond just earning a diploma. Instead of focusing narrowly on graduation requirements, students will be asked to think about their interests, their goals, and the steps needed to get where they want to go.
That shift is significant.
Too often, planning in high school is treated as a compliance exercise—something to check off rather than something that meaningfully guides decisions. The approach in this bill is different. Plans must be updated each year, they must reflect real experiences like career exploration and work-based learning, and families are expected to be part of the process.
That combination—starting earlier, revisiting plans regularly, and involving families—makes it much more likely that these plans will actually matter.
And frankly, they need to. As we’ve seen, many students graduate without a clear sense of direction, which makes the already difficult transition to college or the workforce even harder. Helping students connect their coursework to real goals is one of the most practical ways to address that problem.
Finally, I want to touch on the return on investment initiative.
Ohio has invested a great deal in education and workforce programs. But it’s often hard for students, families, and policymakers to see which pathways are leading to strong outcomes. This initiative is designed to change that by connecting data across agencies and making it more useful and accessible.
That includes information on things like employment outcomes, wages, and how well different programs are preparing students for what comes next.
That kind of transparency is long overdue.
Students and families should be able to see, in clear terms, what different pathways lead to. Educators should have better feedback on what’s working. And policymakers should be able to make decisions based on evidence, not guesswork.
Taken together, these three components—early career exploration, meaningful planning, and better data—fit together in a way that strengthens the overall system.
Students explore options earlier. They build and refine a plan over time. And the state provides clearer information about which pathways deliver results.
That’s a coherent approach, and it builds directly on the work that Ohio has already done.
Senate Bill 328 doesn’t try to reinvent everything. Instead, it fills in some important gaps and makes existing efforts more connected and more effective. It’s a good bill, and I would urge you to pass it without too many changes. Some of the amendments that have been discussed, especially around the middle school career exploration requirement, pose a significant risk of watering down the requirement to the point of making it almost irrelevant. I urge you to resist those efforts.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify.
