Career-technical education (CTE) has become a significant priority for Ohio leaders and lawmakers over the last several years. For those who aren’t familiar with CTE, or who may have outdated views about what it offers students, this increasing emphasis may be surprising.
Career-technical education (CTE) has become a significant priority for Ohio leaders and lawmakers over the last several years. For those who aren’t familiar with CTE, or who may have outdated views about what it offers students, this increasing emphasis may be surprising. To fully grasp why leaders and lawmakers are right to invest so much time and effort, Ohioans need to understand the bigger picture. Specifically, they need to understand career pathways.
A detailed definition of career pathways can be found in the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), a federal law that requires states to “strategically align their core workforce development programs” to increase opportunities and improve outcomes. This law, which was passed in 2014 with significant bipartisan support, defines a career pathway as a combination of rigorous and high-quality education, training, and other services. It also includes some more specific characteristics, such as alignment to workforce needs and work-based learning.
Aside from being instructive about what career pathways are, the WIOA definition offers a solid jumping off point to examine some of what Ohio has accomplished in the career pathways space over the last few years. Let’s take a closer look at Ohio’s progress in a few key areas.
Career pathways enable students to attain a secondary school diploma and at least one recognized post-secondary credential.
In 2019, Ohio lawmakers passed a revised set of graduation requirements that made room for career pathways. Under these standards, students must not only complete course requirements to earn a diploma, but also demonstrate both competency and readiness. For the competency portion, they are permitted to meet standards based on career experience and technical skill. For the readiness portion, they must earn at least two diploma seals. Of the twelve seals available, two incorporate components of career pathways—the OhioMeansJobs-Readiness Seal and the Industry-Recognized Credential Seal.
Speaking of industry-recognized credentials, Ohio has developed a comprehensive infrastructure that assigns each credential a point value between one and twelve. Values are determined by employer demand and/or state regulations; the more points a credential is worth, the more value it has in a career field. The number of students earning credentials has dramatically increased over the last few years, with over 10 percent of the Class of 2022 earning one. This increase is due in part to state-funded initiatives like the Innovative Workforce Incentive Program, which was designed to increase the number of students who earn qualifying credentials in “priority” industry sectors.
Career pathways align with industry skill needs in state and regional economies.
Alignment between career pathways and workforce needs ensures that students are effectively prepared to work in fields with plenty of opportunities and well-paying jobs. Here again, Ohio’s efforts with industry-recognized credentials come into play. To be included on the state’s approved list, a credential must be recognized by multiple Ohio employers within an industry sector, and must also be connected to a job on Ohio's Top Jobs List. But that’s not all. The Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation has established a development and alignment strategy for Ohio’s broadband and 5G workforce, as well as the auto and advanced mobility workforce, as these areas are expected to create thousands of jobs over the next decade. The state also oversees the Industry Sector Partnership Grant, which aims to drive collaboration between local businesses, education and training providers, and community stakeholders. To date, thirty-seven partnerships from around the state have been awarded funds.
Career pathways offer work-based learning.
WIOA asserts that a career pathway should offer education “concurrently with and in the same context as workforce preparation activities and training for a specific occupation.” One example of such training is work-based learning. To this end, Ohio has established guidelines for work-based learning opportunities and offers a tax credit certificate program for employers that offer experiences to students. The High School Tech internship program provides high school students with work experience in technology-related roles, and placed over 500 students in internships during 2023. Students also have access to pre-apprenticeships; there are currently 152 pre-apprenticeship programs that work with Ohio high schools and career centers.
Career pathways include counseling to support students in achieving their education and career goals.
Beginning with the 2015–16 school year, every district in Ohio has been required to adopt a policy on career advising. These policies must specify how districts will provide career advising to all students in grades 6–12, train staff to advise students on career pathways, and identify and publicize courses that award students CTE credit. The Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) has provided a career-advising toolkit to help accomplish these goals. More recently, DEW launched a communications campaign aimed at students and families. The Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation also offers resources designed to inform students of their options. And the most recent state budget allocated dollars for every public school—$7.50 per student for the 2023–24 school year and $10 for the 2024–25 school year—to fund career awareness and exploration.
***
Clearly, Ohio has taken seriously its charge to implement career pathways. But although the programs and initiatives mentioned above are positive steps forward, it’s important to recognize that Ohio hasn’t yet crossed the finish line.
Each of the aforementioned areas has weaknesses that must be addressed. For example, it’s important for the state to ensure that every credential an Ohio student can earn is meaningful and fully aligned with workforce needs. Otherwise, students could end up struggling to find employment or being stuck in a job that pays too little. In the realm of graduation requirements, it’s crucial to ensure that schools aren’t gaming the system for their own benefit by encouraging students to earn meaningless credentials just so they can graduate. Work-based learning opportunities aren’t nearly as widespread or as easily accessible as they should be. And although Ohio has a decent foundation regarding career counseling, there are still far too many students and families who are unaware of their options.
Over the next decade, Ohio leaders and lawmakers will need to work on addressing these issues. The good news is that they’re clearly taking that duty seriously, as evidenced by just how much work has been done over the last few years. Here’s hoping that the next few continue this positive trend.
NOTE: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.
In a new analysis released today, ExcelinEd examined the combined impact of Ohio’s various policies to support charter school facilities and compared it to what the schools are currently spending for those facilities. The analysis looked just at the basic buildings that most charter schools occupy—not the vastly more expensive facilities in the state’s traditional school districts.
When ExcelinEd first conducted this analysis in 2021, we found that Ohio was meeting only 18 percent of the facility needs of its charter school students. This meant that a significant portion of each charter school’s resources were being used for facilities rather than classroom needs.
Thanks to recent increases in state per-pupil facility aid for charter schools, Ohio has made progress. However, the state still has significant room to improve.
Using ExcelinEd’s Charter School Facility Index methodology to measure the actual impact of state policies, the updated study found that Ohio is currently meeting 52 percent of the facility needs of its brick-and-mortar charter schools. The analysis also determined that if policymakers don’t make any changes, that number will drop to 42 percent in five years.
This large facility gap means charter schools must still dip into operational revenues to pay the remaining cost of their facilities (48 percent), which equals $971 per student. Again, this means less money in the classroom.
With those dollars, an average-sized charter school could, for example, pay for an additional five teachers or give its current classroom teachers a 25 percent salary increase.
Over the next five years—if policy improvements aren’t made—those lost opportunities will grow to seven teachers per school or a 38 percent raise for every teacher.
The facility gap also means charter schools will have difficulty expanding to provide educational opportunity to more Ohio students.
State policymakers have several options to close the facility funding gap for charter schools
State policymakers have a variety of options to better meet the facility needs of Ohio charter schools. As discussed in our report, these options include additional direct aid for facilities, strategies to provide easier access to unused district school buildings and policies that reduce the costs of financing capital projects.
Through the report’s companion, ExcelinEd’s Charter School Facility Index Tool, Ohio policymakers can evaluate these options and determine the likely impacts of potential changes in state policies.
Just to maintain current level of support, the state can regularly review its direct funding for charter school facilities to ensure that it is keeping pace with enrollment increases and facility-cost inflation.
To reduce the facility gap, the state can let charter schools share in the $300 million in state facilities grants each year, proportional to their public school enrollment.
Ohio can also follow the lead of states like Colorado that are requiring districts to share local funds raised for facilities.
Access to existing school buildings can make a difference, too. There are significant numbers of under-utilized district buildings in Ohio. The state can provide access to these buildings at no or low cost and strengthen the requirement that districts list surplus buildings.
Lastly, it is difficult for charter schools in Ohio to secure affordable financing to purchase or build facilities. Credit enhancement improves charter schools’ ability to secure financing to acquire, construct or renovate buildings through guarantees or other forms of financial support. This improves the schools’ credit ratings, which can help them secure loans and bonds at lower interest rates.
Ohio also can provide low-interest loans to charter schools through a Revolving Loan Fund, like Idaho recently did. This would be a particular help for new schools that may need extra dollars to cover startup costs or an existing school that’s facing a facilities-related expense, such as replacing a roof or boiler.
Bridging the facility funding gap for Ohio’s charter schools will lead to a stronger, more robust education landscape
Fully meeting charter schools’ facility needs is critical to the success of students and the long-term growth and sustainability of these schools. Achieving this goal will allow charters to use more funds in the classroom, including paying teachers more competitive wages. It will also ensure that charters have the physical space and amenities to continue to meet the growing demand from Ohio’s families for quality school options.
In recent years, Ohio has made commendable progress on charter facilities—but it’s only halfway there. If state policymakers can fill the other half of the facility-funding bucket, more Ohio students will have opportunities to attend excellent public charter schools.
Matthew Joseph is Senior Policy Advisor for ExcelinEd.
In a recent Columbus Dispatch op-ed, Democrat state senator Bill DeMora slammed his GOP colleagues for supporting school choice, accused Ohio of having a “chronically underfunded” education system, and even suggested that Buckeye schools have markedly declined in national rankings over the past decade.
To its credit, the Dispatch quickly ran strong responses from Republican state senator Andrew Brenner and the Buckeye Institute’s Greg Lawson. They refute the “underfunding” exaggeration by noting a decade-worth of spending increases for K–12 education, including the hefty billion dollar hike passed in the most recent state budget bill. Senator Brenner also mentions the huge funding advantage enjoyed by traditional public schools—which spent on average $15,427 per pupil last year—when compared to private-school scholarship amounts, which generally range from $6,100 to $8,500.
These rejoinders cover the most egregious misstatements in the original column. But there is one more tall tale worth dispelling: that Ohio’s national ranking has fallen dramatically over the past decade and has slumped to the bottom half of states. As Senator DeMora declared in his piece, “Ohio used to be 5th in the nation when it comes to education. Since Republicans have taken over, we’ve fallen to 29th.”
This partisan talking point has circulated for years, and my former Fordham colleague Jamie Davies O’Leary has previously explained why it’s so misleading. In essence, back in 2010, the national publication Education Week awarded a 5th-place ranking to Ohio in its review of state education systems. That ranking quickly fell, but not because Ohio students were learning less or schools were becoming worse. Rather, it reflected an overhaul of the publication’s evaluation metrics. Starting in 2015, Ohio no longer received credit for its strong standards and accountability system, as EdWeek dropped measures that examined whether states had certain policies on the books.
Beyond this methodological change, EdWeek’s current rating system includes some dubious measures. They award credit to states based on the education levels, employment rates, and annual incomes of adult (!) populations. It also favors states that spend extraordinary sums on education, without consideration of whether dollars are well-spent. (Other analysts have also noted these flaws, too.) Overall, it’s little surprise that the top five states in its 2021 analysis were New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, and New York—all extremely high-spending East Coast states with more affluent adult populations (Ohio clocked in at 21st).
If not EdWeek, how should we gauge Ohio’s national standing? Actual student achievement seems like the place to go. On this count, the most respected yardstick is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the “Nation’s Report Card.” This biennial math and reading assessment is given to a representative sample of fourth and eighth students across the U.S. Unlike state exams, which differ across states, NAEP allows for state-to-state comparisons and national rankings.
Table 1 shows Ohio’s rank on this assessment from 2003 to 2022. The first thing to note is that Ohio has never during this period scored among the nation’s top five states, so its 5th-place finish on EdWeek’s 2010 analysis was something of a mirage. The other thing to notice is the remarkable consistency in Ohio’s rankings during this period. In general, Ohio has placed between 10th and 20th in the nation, depending on the grade, subject, and year—not too shabby and hardly the freefall that some like to portray. When comparing 2009 to 2022 rankings, Ohio has ticked up (albeit very slightly) in three of the four assessments, and the state’s average ranking across the four exams is unchanged at 16th place.
Table 1: Ohio’s ranking on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
Table 1 presents raw achievement rankings, which reflect, to a certain extent, the student demographics of each state. To gauge Ohio’s national standing after accounting for demographics, we take a look at the Urban Institute’s adjusted rankings based on NAEP results. On this measure, Ohio’s rankings tend to tick down slightly, but the overall picture is largely the same—the state usually lands somewhere between 15th and 20th in the nation, with an average ranking of 16th across the four assessments in 2019, the most recent from the Urban Institute.
Table 2: Ohio’s demographically-adjusted ranking on NAEP
Some may still wonder where Ohio ranks on “input”-type measures, such as school spending or teacher salary. Is Ohio falling behind on these metrics? As Table 3 indicates, the answer is no. Ohio’s rank on spending per pupil has held steady over the past decade, right around 20th in the nation. As for average teacher salary, Ohio has ranked from 15th to 21st in the nation. And that’s without considering Ohio’s relatively low cost of living, meaning that dollars for schools and teachers go further than they do on the coasts.
Table 3: Ohio’s national rank in spending per pupil and teacher salary, 2009 to 2022 (selected years)
In sum, one can say with confidence that Ohio ranks in the top half of states in K–12 education. The state isn’t in the bottom half nationally, as Senator DeMora implied, and it hasn’t been that low at any point within the past decade.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Ohio should stop striving to do better by its students. There’s no reason why the state couldn’t regularly crack the top ten nationally on NAEP, or even rise to the top spot. Achievement gaps remain unacceptably wide, and much work remains to narrow them. Ohio lawmakers are right to look for ways to continue to improve education in Ohio. But they should do so based on the facts, not outdated rhetoric.
Students experienced significant learning loss during the pandemic, accelerating pre-existing trends and widening achievement gaps. The World Bank estimates that seven in ten students in low- and middle-income countries are living in “learning poverty” today, unable to read a simple sentence by the time they finish elementary school. Furthermore, if existing trends continue, it will take until 2040 just to get back to where we were in 2019 in terms of global student learning outcomes and more than 725 million children worldwide would still be in “learning poverty” status by 2050. Looking for some signs of hope, analysts from McKinsey and Company’s Global Education Practice scoured the globe for education systems bucking the trends. Their new report suggests that there is a roadmap available to speed up improvement for those willing to follow it.
The enormous research effort was multi-faceted and involved data from hundreds of educational systems—national, regional, state/province, and even city-level systems—across the world. It included a literature review of over 400 publications covering twenty years, encompassing a broad range of international testing data (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, and more); over 10,000 education policy changes in 190 countries via Stanford University’s World Education Reform Database; and conversations with more than 200 system leaders, experts, donors, philanthropists, and researchers. The final step was a global education survey conducted between September and December of 2023, gathering 422 responses from twenty-seven countries across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Survey respondents included senior leaders (from national education ministers to school superintendents) and senior members of executive teams (like chief academic officers and chief operating officers of education systems). Analysts then built detailed case studies of fourteen systems that had made and sustained educational improvements over the course of a decade or more prior to the pandemic, documenting their reform efforts in an effort to find replicable commonalities.
The topline finding is that, based on student performance on those various international tests, many systems were “beating the odds” and showing strong improvement between 2005 and 2019. The biggest improvers ran the gamut of national and subnational (state/province/local) structures and experienced both high- and low-poverty. Interestingly, educational spending was only impactful up to a point—somewhere around $6,000 to $8,000 U.S. dollars per student—above which additional spending was not clearly correlated with continued academic improvement.
Looking to see what worked in various contexts (size, structure, socioeconomic status, education spending), analysts dug deeply into those systems chosen for case studies. Nationally, they are Kenya, Poland, Singapore, Morocco, Norway, South Africa, Peru, Estonia, and Malawi. The regions of Ceará in Brazil and Punjab in India were also studied. So was the state of Mississippi, which has been lauded elsewhere for its success in scaling reforms statewide. London, England, and Washington, D.C., represented city-wide efforts. The latter was specifically cited for coalition-building across various levels of stakeholders under Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson. The report covers all of the particulars, but the bottom line is that if—starting today—all education systems could improve at the same rate these exemplars exhibited in 2019, anticipated global pandemic recovery time would be drastically shortened and improvement would restart at such a pace that an additional 350 million children could be lifted from learning poverty by 2050.
That’s great news, but is it realistic to expect improvement on that kind of scale? The answer to that question takes up the majority of the report, and is perhaps even more relevant to the authors than documenting the existence of improvement.
On the upside, it seems that the high level “to do” list is fairly short. Successful school systems, analysts say, emphasize changes in the classroom, focusing first and foremost on teachers and the content they deliver. These systems choose evidence-backed strategies relevant to their starting place, require a solid baseline of data, acknowledge that student outcomes can only improve incrementally (from poor to fair to good to great), prioritize outcomes at the instructional core, and use available technology as a tool to enhance learning. Timelines for improvement must be realistic and include short-, medium-, and long-term benchmarks. Measuring student outcomes—and making those data transparent to all stakeholders—is key to knowing when to stay the course and when to make changes. There is a wealth of detail from exemplar systems about lower-level “to dos” that could help kickstart this kind of success in other locales.
If this sounds like an all-hands-on-deck approach to you, then you’re reading it right. Everyone from government oversight agencies and school bureaucracies to teachers and families must be brought on board for meaningful change to occur and, most importantly, sustain. The exemplar systems examined in this report accomplished this by setting fewer priorities so they could reach higher goals, cultivating multiple likeminded leaders at each stakeholder level, and engaging educators and families “authentically,” with transparent two-way communication.
The McKinsey authors are not Pollyanna-ish. To wit: “One should never underestimate stakeholders’ perception that a reform is a threat to them and their values, even if all they want is to retain what is familiar, stable, and predictable in their work and life.” The status quo, they add, “has many protectors.” But their conclusion—in response to all of the data, good and bad—is two-fold. First, a number of education systems of various sizes and resource levels have clearly shown that reform and improvement are possible, scalable, and sustainable. Second, their successes occurred in spite of the many “protectors” that were surely present at the start of their journeys. The distillation of these systems’ success into basic guidelines for other leaders to replicate—including how to address inevitable opposition—is meant to spark the belief that if another system can do it, so can we.
SOURCE: McKinsey and Company, “Spark & Sustain: How all of the world’s school systems can improve learning at scale” (February 2024).
Most young people who enroll in college after high school graduation do so in the hope that it will help them secure a good job. Similarly, many employers look to colleges as sources of high-quality candidates to fill job openings. But a new report calls the economic opportunity promise of higher education into question.
Burning Glass Institute teamed up with Strada Education Foundation to examine the employment histories of college graduates. The data come primarily from Lightcast’s Career Histories Database, which includes information on the educational attainment, employment, and career trajectories of more than 60 million workers, along with hundreds of millions of online job postings. Analysts combined these with information from multiple federal education and labor resources to capture extensive information about college-educated workers’ alma maters, degree fields, earnings, and geographic locations. The resulting dataset included about 18.6 million unique degree-earners, 10.8 million of whom earned a “terminal” bachelor’s degree—meaning those who didn’t go on to earn a higher degree, such as a master’s degree or doctorate. (The report does have additional findings related to higher degrees, but those will not be discussed here.)
The aim of the study was to observe and describe the career trajectories of individuals in the years following college degree attainment. To do so, the researchers examined profiles with graduation dates between 2012 and 2021, determined who was employed in 2022, and worked backward to construct their employment histories between graduation and 2022.
The big news: Overall, 52 percent of college graduates were underemployed one year after degree completion. That is, they were working in jobs that don’t typically require a bachelor’s degree to obtain. For those initially-underemployed workers with ten years of data, 45 percent of them were still underemployed after a decade, even given the post-pandemic labor market conditions that favored workers.
However, of the 48 percent of graduates who were working at a college-level job (one that typically requires a bachelor’s degree to obtain) within a year after degree completion, 79 percent remained in a college-level occupation five years after graduation. And the vast majority (86 percent) of these graduates with 10 years of employment data were still in a college-level job a decade out.
Unsurprisingly, these outcomes vary by field of study. The best degrees for attaining college-level employment upon graduation are those involving substantial quantitative reasoning (computer science, engineering, mathematics, etc.), or math-intensive business fields, like finance and accounting. Not all STEM fields are alike, however, as graduates in the life sciences do not fare as well as their engineering and math-focused peers. Also good: education and health-related degrees such as nursing. On the other hand, nearly 60 percent of graduates with degrees in public safety and security, recreation and wellness studies, or general business fields like marketing are likely to end up underemployed.
The analysts found a strong connection between internships and college-level employment after graduation. Controlling for factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, and institutional characteristics, the odds of underemployment for graduates who had at least one internship are 48.5 percent lower than for their peers who had no internships, and the benefits associated with completing an internship are relatively strong across degree fields. Graduates of more selective institutions are less likely to experience underemployment than those who attended more inclusive institutions. Black and Hispanic students are substantially more likely than students of other races and ethnicities to wind up underemployed. And men are more likely to be underemployed than women. None of which is too surprising.
But underemployment also varies by state, with Hawaii and its tourism-driven economy faring worst (57 percent of college graduates were underemployed five years after completing) and D.C.-adjacent Maryland faring best (“only” 40 percent underemployment after five years).
While the college wage premium is real—the Burning Glass report found that recent graduates employed in a college-level job typically earned about 88 percent more than a high school diploma holder—the path to that premium is not as clear cut as high school students and their families might think. Certain additional data not analyzed or discussed here—such as the specific skills listed in job postings—might help clarify those pathway mismatches a little, but the sheer amount of job listings and career trajectories that are included seem pretty clear cut: Underemployment for college grads is pervasive, persistent, and pernicious, as an underemployed college graduate typically earns only about 25 percent more than a high school graduate, and for most young people, everything starts from that very first post-college job.
Recommendations from the report are aimed at policymakers and higher education officials and include eliminating low-return major offerings, providing clearer and more realistic information about the job market for graduates, offering more internships, and establishing stronger coordination between employers and colleges about what skills—and credentials—are truly needed for high-paying jobs.
But the message for families considering postsecondary options should probably be simpler: caveat emptor.
SOURCE: “Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward,” The Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation (February 2024).
Today, ExcelinEd, a leading national education organization, released an analysis that finds continuing shortfalls in meeting the facility needs of Ohio charter schools. According to their analysis, Ohio currently meets just 52 percent of charter school facility needs. Charters must cover the other half of those expenses—for example, paying for rent, maintenance, and utilities—by dipping into operational funds that are meant for classroom instruction.
“Securing adequate facilities remains one of the biggest challenges facing Ohio charter schools,” said Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Unlike traditional districts, public charter schools have never had access to the state’s generous school construction grant program, and they receive no local tax support for capital improvements. The lack of sufficient facility resources disadvantages charters seeking to expand their capacity and create exceptional learning environments.”
Matthew Joseph, ExcelinEd’s senior policy advisor for education funding, said, “Our Ohio analysis reflects what we find in many states across the country: Public charter schools are forced to use instructional funding to pay for basic facilities, unlike their traditional counterparts. This creates an un-level playing field for students, teachers, and families. We are proud to partner with state-based advocates like Fordham to shine the light on these continued disparities and push for fair funding for all students.”
In 2021, an ExcelinEd analysis found that Ohio met only 18 percent of charters’ facility needs at that time. To their credit, Ohio lawmakers have since increased the per-pupil facility allowance for charter schools, helping to explain the improvement in the latest study. To make further progress, the paper offers several policy recommendations for Ohio lawmakers, including:
“Ohio has cut the charter facilities gap thanks to the increased per-pupil facilities aid passed in last year’s state budget,” Aldis added. “But more work is still needed to ensure that charter schools receive support sufficient to cover the costs of purchasing and operating a suitable facility. With additional policy measures, charters will be able to better serve students, while also meeting the growing demand for quality school options.”
The full report, Building for Success in Ohio 2024: Measuring How Well Ohio is Meeting Charter School Facility Needs, is available here.
