A Social-Capital Approach to Education Reform
From 1910 to 1940, a grassroots effort created an astonishing transformation in the American education system. Commonly referred to as the "high-school movement," this ambitious endeavor emerged as a response to the transformation of American society around the turn of the 20th century. Due to rapid urbanization and advanced industrialization, America's by-then outdated education system was failing to prepare American children for the unique challenges of the day. As America's schools fell further and further behind the times, a significant "skills gap" emerged, in which an expanding economy created more and more jobs for which Americans were simply unprepared.
The solution, as proposed by the high-school movement, was as simple as it was bold: the unprecedented expansion of publicly funded and universally accessible secondary schools across the country. Once realized, this vision for American education became a foundational component of both American life and American prosperity for the better part of a century.
Today, America once again finds itself in a period of rapid economic, social, and cultural change. Information-age technology — including computers, cell phones, and the internet — has wholly transformed the way Americans build and maintain relationships, families, and communities. A new skills gap has emerged, driven by demand for workers who possess particular kinds of knowledge and training more appropriate to the needs of America's information-age economy. Yet despite all these dramatic changes, the country's education system has yet to significantly respond or adapt.
This is not to say that the need for institutional reform has gone unnoticed. On the contrary, upon observing our continued commitment to outmoded education models, small groups of committed educators around the country have begun experimenting with changes in school curricula and structure in an effort to better prepare their students for success. By examining the most promising of these experiments, we can identify the types of reform that are most likely to succeed in equipping America's students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive in the modern age. At the same time, by revisiting the example of the 20th century's high-school movement, we can gain a better understanding of how to effect the large-scale reforms that 21st-century American education so desperately needs.
THE NEW SKILLS GAP?
Many analysts have taken stock of an emerging skills gap in which American workers are increasingly ill-prepared and underqualified for the jobs generated by the nation's economic activity. Ryan Craig, co-founder and managing director of University Ventures, describes two reasons for this gap: First, too few candidates have the hard skills required for work in technology- and software-heavy fields; second, candidates increasingly lack the soft skills — responsibility, ambition, communication skills, the ability to work with a team, etc. — that modern employers most desire in their employees.
Compounding this problem, according to Craig, is the substantial worsening of two related problems: education friction and hiring friction. Education friction is a supply-side phenomenon that occurs when individuals purposefully choose not to acquire new skills because a substantial investment of time and money is no assurance of finding a well-paying job. Hiring friction, on the other hand, is a demand-side phenomenon in which employers are reluctant to hire unproven candidates due to the significant costs associated with employee turnover.
There is, of course, no shortage of critics of the skills-gap hypothesis. Paul Osterman and Andrew Weaver of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School conducted a nationally representative survey of manufacturing employers, concluding that "[a] strong majority of manufacturers are able to obtain the workforce they need." The New York Times editorial board decries the skills gap as "a corporate fiction...based in part on self-interest and a misreading of government data." Economist Paul Krugman calls it a "zombie idea."
Yet the survey data collected in recent years from those most familiar with the education system suggest that significant gaps do exist between students' skills and knowledge and the expectations and demands they encounter after high school. Echelon Insights, a survey research firm, has extensively studied Millennials — roughly the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, now numbering over 75 million individuals — and their experience with the American school system. Reflecting on their high-school education, only 39% of Millennial college attendees believe "they were prepared to succeed in college or post-secondary coursework." Of those not attending college, only 21% believed they would have been prepared had they decided to attend, 22% believed they left high school ready to succeed in the workforce, and 20% believed they were prepared to navigate life and real-world challenges.
One of the obstacles to understanding the skills-gap theory is an overly narrow focus on the most easily quantifiable and hence measurable hard skills like math, science, and writing. Though America's students and recent graduates give us real reasons to worry about our young people's hard skills, our focus on those competencies causes us to lose sight of an emerging soft-skills gap. These are skills that have less to do with the technical abilities that will one day be required of students in the workplace and more to do with the personal characteristics and life skills that may be less tangible but are no less critical for success in adult life. After all, if our children leave school wholly disengaged and uninspired, then their mastery of academic skills like algebra or chemistry will matter very little.
Unfortunately, this is increasingly the condition of America's students once they've graduated from high school. Since 2009, the Gallup Student Poll has surveyed U.S. students in grades five through 12 in three attitudinal domains: engagement — school involvement and enthusiasm; hope — ideas and energy for the future; and entrepreneurial aspiration — talent and energy necessary to build businesses. The main finding is that, as students go through school, they become less engaged, experiencing a "school engagement cliff." At grade five, 26% of students are actively disengaged or not engaged, a percentage that rises to 66% in grade 12. As students near high-school graduation, they also feel less enthusiastic about their education.
Engagement and hope are also linked to student plans after high school. Engaged students are over four times more likely to be hopeful about the future than their peers. Conversely, actively disengaged students are over seven times more likely to feel discouraged about the future. These sentiments affect entrepreneurial aspiration, which also wanes as students attend high school.
One need not accept the skills-gap theory in its entirety to acknowledge that American students increasingly feel ill-equipped to succeed after graduation. And one need not fully embrace the theory to be alarmed that this rising trend is accompanied by a spike in feelings of disengagement and hopelessness. Regardless of whether one accepts the language or solutions of the new-skills-gap advocates, however, it should be clear that more could — and should — be done to ensure young Americans leave high school better prepared for and more hopeful about adult life.
A SOCIAL-CAPITAL FRAMEWORK
Research has shown that sources of social capital — characterized by affiliation with community networks, organizations, and activities — can create within individuals positive feelings of engagement and self-agency. Such connections create new opportunities for people, contributing to their upward mobility and a greater sense of equality. They also tend to produce life satisfaction and community stability. A social-capital approach to education reform, therefore, has the potential to make a significant contribution to overcoming the disconnection young people experience while keeping them engaged during their time in school. By helping ensure students are more fully engaged in class, a social-capital framework may even improve learning outcomes and shrink both the soft- and hard-skills gaps.
A social-capital framework that aims to remedy the disconnection and hopelessness associated with young people's schooling experiences must be shaped by three considerations. The first is a network perspective grounded in the distinction between bonding social capital and bridging (or leveraged) social capital. Bonding social capital satisfies the need to be with others like ourselves, providing emotional support, companionship, and validation. Bridging social capital, on the other hand, satisfies the need to connect with individuals who differ from ourselves, which expands our knowledge and resources across features like race, class, and religion. It leverages across groups new networks and relationships, including power relationships — e.g., those between a community organization and a government agency or funder. These two forms of social capital are complimentary; as Xavier de Souza Briggs says, bonding social capital is for "getting by," while bridging social capital is for "getting ahead."
The second consideration involved in shaping a social-capital framework is what Julia Freeland Fisher of the Clayton Christensen Institute calls an "opportunity equation," which includes not only cultivating what students know but also who they know. The "who" side of the equation can be cultivated by school structures and supports that help students develop social capital in the form of new personal and professional relationships. Schools can develop this factor by deepening and diversifying students' opportunity networks through structured peer interactions, mentorships, visits to service and professional organizations, and the cultivation of other formal and informal relationships with adults. They also can develop students' career-linked relationships with industry experts and advisors through work-based learning. Each of these efforts can facilitate students' creation of new personal and professional networks, thereby developing young people's bonding and bridging social capital and increasing their opportunities to succeed.
A final consideration for incorporating a social-capital framework is found in what Gallup analyst Shane Lopez identifies as three distinct kinds of thinking: goals thinking — defining and setting achievable future outcomes; pathways thinking — creating a specific route to those outcomes; and agency thinking — the mental energy and self-reliance needed to pursue one's goals along defined pathways. Pathways and agency thinking work together to foster the pursuit of goals.
When combined, these three elements create a robust social-capital framework that educational and other institutions can use to foster young people's engagement in school and other non-school organizations and enterprises, thereby expanding their social circles and the resources available to them. The structures and networks formed give students a chance to test-drive their future by placing them in situations where they can identify, assess, and develop their strengths and career interests. Meanwhile, the relationships and networks students build can provide them with resources that can lead to the development and accumulation of human capital and opportunity networks.
A SUCCESSFUL PATHWAYS PROGRAM
A new high-school movement is currently building on the social-capital framework to create innovative career pathways within schools. These pathways programs leverage partnerships between schools and the surrounding communities to develop young people's social capital, placing them on a trajectory to economic and social well-being and informed citizenship.
The Pathways to Prosperity Network, an alliance of over 60 pathways programs in regions nationwide, has identified four noteworthy aspects of successful pathways programs. First, most successful programs are structured and credentialed. They therefore have a sequenced academic curriculum, requirements aligned with genuine labor-market needs, and a general timeline guiding young people through the program. As a result of this structure, young people leave the program not only with real vocational training, but with a meaningful career credential.
Second, these programs have written agreements between the parties involved that delineate roles and responsibilities, as well as a designated budget for program support. The program partners — schools, other educational and community institutions, government agencies, etc. — have a management structure that includes a governing authority with the prestige to access policymakers and other influential individuals whose support is needed for effective program design and implementation.
Third, these programs introduce young people to work and careers early — often as early as middle school. At the middle-school level, exposure includes activities like guest speakers and field trips that provide students with awareness and information about potential career paths. In high school, career exposure involves placement in work settings in the form of mentorships, internships, and actual work within an occupation. This work-based learning — which is integrated with classroom instruction — is a motivational strategy that challenges young people with real-world tasks so that they learn and understand labor-market demands, including both the academic and technical knowledge as well as the soft skills that are needed for a career. Developmental psychologist Robert Halpern describes this as the development of a young person's vocational self.
Finally, for a pathways program to succeed, employers, industry associations, and other mediating institutions must play a role in successful program design and management. In particular, employers and their affiliated associations should assist in setting program standards and defining the skills and competencies young people need to obtain a certificate and, in turn, employment. They also provide the internships and paid apprenticeships that offer work experience for young people and assist in assessing a young person's readiness for the workforce. Other community groups or intermediaries may help with convening, organizing, and planning functions, in addition to providing program and work-placement navigation and social-support services for the young people involved in the program and their families. Examples of these intermediaries include community foundations, community colleges, chambers of commerce, private-industry councils, the Salvation Army, and United Way.
THE SUPPLY SIDE: EDUCATION INITIATIVES
Building on a social-capital framework and the successful pathways-program model, some highly innovative K-12 educators, community organizations, and other enterprises are creating new pathways programs for young people that engage them in novel ways and prepare them for in-demand 21st-century careers. Some of these enterprises offer students career and technical education; others offer students a chance to participate in career academies or "boot camps" that help them acquire discrete knowledge or skills. Many offer students apprenticeships and internships as well as staffing and placement services for those looking for on-the-job experience. There are schools that allow students to enroll in both high school and post-secondary institutions. Schools that offer income-share agreements enable students to repay tuition after they acquire a well-paying job.
Da Vinci Schools, a Los Angeles-area charter school created in 2009 by the Wiseburn School District, offers one example of these initiatives in practice. Da Vinci operates as a partnership between the district and the charter school. Today, it serves 2,500 students in grades K-16 and comprises five high schools, a K-8 home-school hybrid model, and a post-secondary college and career program. An amazing 98% of its students graduate from high school meeting the admission requirements for the University of California system.
In terms of incorporating career pathways into its education model, Da Vinci works with more than 100 business and non-profit partners to offer students internships, mentorships, workshops, boot camps, project consultancies, and other student-engagement programs. Students, in turn, learn to provide Da Vinci partners with website and social-media design services, graphic-design services, and youth-marketing focus groups. Meanwhile, the Da Vinci Extension program integrates high-school and college education with career opportunities and student services like tutoring and counseling.
Da Vinci students — some of whom already work — have two pathways for furthering their education beyond K-12. One pathway is through the University of California, Los Angeles Extension and El Camino College, which they can pursue at no additional cost. The other pathway is through College for America (CFA), which is affiliated with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Families can use Pell Grants and local funding to help pay for CFA tuition. In both programs, students access tutoring, advising, and teacher support through Da Vinci.
Another example of a pathways program based on the social-capital framework is Match Education in Boston. Match Education comprises several education initiatives, including Match Schools and the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education. Until 2018, it also included a program called Match Beyond. Match Public Charter School was founded in 1999 and enrolls 1,250 students in grades pre-K-12 across three campuses. The Sposato School awards a master's in effective teaching degree for those learning the teaching methods used in Match Schools. Match Beyond, launched in 2014 as an outgrowth of Match Charter High School, initially focused on helping high-school graduates with career placement and college completion. Like Da Vinci, Match partnered with CFA to provide instructional services for Match Beyond participants. It also offered student coaching and other support programs, including job counseling.
In 2018, Match Beyond was renamed Duet and became an independent non-profit. Duet, which continues to maintain a close relationship with Match Education, offers associate's and bachelor's degrees to participants through SNHU. The program offers participants comprehensive career services for up to two years after graduation, including resume development, interview preparation, job-search assistance, and support for navigating the hiring process. SNHU associate's and bachelor's degrees powered by Duet have been awarded to 147 young people.
Beyond the public and non-profit space, several parochial schools have quite successfully pursued pathways reforms that incorporate the social-capital framework. Among them, one of the most impressive is the national Catholic-school network Cristo Rey. Founded in 1996, Cristo Rey comprises 37 Catholic schools with more than 18,000 graduates, enrolling more than 13,000 students in 24 states. Forty percent of these students are not Catholic, and 98% are minority students. The program integrates four years of academics with work experience through its Corporate Work Study Program, a separate non-profit that places high-school students in an entry-level professional job for several days a month. Students earn 60% of their tuition through employment, with 30% coming from fundraising and 10% from family contributions. Families can also access state school-voucher and tax-credit programs where available to help pay for the program.
More recently, reformers have launched public-private ventures in pursuit of similar education initiatives. In Georgia, Fulton County Schools, Junior Achievement, and the Atlanta business community launched one such public-private partnership to create a new school-curriculum model within a traditional district high school. The program, dubbed 3DE, "re-engineers high school education to be more relevant, experiential, and...connected to the...real world in order to more fully prepare today's students for the demands of tomorrow's economy." Since 2015, 3DE has expanded to six schools in four public-school districts.
3DE's project-based learning design includes a six-week case study beginning in 11th grade, through which students take part in off-campus experiences within industries and professions. Examples of the workforce pathways offered include business and technology, entrepreneurship, marketing and management, and financial services. Not only do 3DE students excel academically, they feel prepared for what lies ahead: According to 3DE's 2018-2019 impact report, "[ninety-eight percent] of 3DE students feel excited about their futures."
Building on the momentum of these ventures, some locales have begun implementing similar reforms at the citywide level. In New Orleans, the education, business, and civic partnership YouthForce NOLA has been preparing students for high-wage and high-demand career pathways since 2015. YF NOLA works with open-enrollment charter high schools, offering career exposure, work experiences, soft-skills training, coaching, and internships. The internships consist of 60 hours of paid training followed by 90 hours of work in a career pathway where subjects include biology and health sciences, digital media and information technology, and skilled crafts.
YF NOLA also offers other programs, including an annual career expo for freshmen; a teacher fellowship where teachers learn about and develop soft skills; and a family engagement toolkit that educates parents about the career-pathways program. The 12 organizations comprising YF NOLA's steering committee — including the New Orleans school district, workforce- and economic-development organizations, community advisory groups, and philanthropic partners — help ensure that the city prioritizes its students.
In addition to all these reform efforts — and as testament to their tremendous success — several private enterprises have begun launching for-profit education programs grounded in a similar pedagogical approach. In Indianapolis, Kenzie Academy began in 2017 as a two-year venture-funded training and apprenticeship program focused on helping students develop software-engineering skills. In year two of the program, students apprentice in Kenzie Studio, the company's consulting arm. The program serves students from varying backgrounds, including 19-year-old high-school graduates, formerly incarcerated individuals, and working adults seeking new occupational opportunities. Kenzie also has a partnership with Butler University that allows students to receive a joint certificate from both organizations. To make the $24,000-a-year program accessible to more people, students partake in an income-share agreement that can delay payments until they complete the program and obtain a job paying at least $40,000 annually.
Another example of a successful for-profit pathways enterprise is General Assembly, a training boot camp founded in 2011 that offers short and long, in-person and online courses in computer programming, data science, and product management. General Assembly has 30 campuses around the world and works with more than 19,000 hiring partners. Through its Catalyst program, enrollees can take part in an income-share agreement similar to the one offered by Kenzie.
Reforms and initiatives like those described above provide young people with new options for gaining the knowledge and skills that will lead to success in the workforce and a lifetime of opportunity. Just as important, their focus on linking academic education with practical experience, community engagement, and network building allows students — with the assistance of classroom educators and workforce mentors — to make a connection between school and work, education and career. This prepares them to make better-informed decisions about their next steps beyond high school, whether that includes some form of post-secondary education or a foray into the workforce.
THE DEMAND SIDE: GOOD JOBS
A college degree may have become a de facto proxy for employability, but finding a well-paying job doesn't require one. Unfortunately, the inflated value attached to that degree leads individuals to think that nothing less can yield as positive an outcome.
Despite this common perception, there are opportunity-rich employment options for those without a four-year degree that can lift them into the middle class. To determine how many of these jobs exist, analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, along with their colleagues in Atlanta and Philadelphia, examined labor-market differences for those with and without bachelor's degrees in 121 metro areas where 103.5 million workers were employed. Almost 22% of the jobs held were "opportunity" jobs, defined as positions filled by people without degrees who were paid at least the national annual median wage of nearly $38,000 (adjusted for regional differences).
Meanwhile, analysts at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce have analyzed the education pathways to the nearly 65 million existing "good jobs" — defined as those paying at least $35,000 annually for those aged 25 through 44 and at least $45,000 for those aged 45 through 64. (This was in 2016, when Americans' median earnings were $56,000 for workers without a college degree and $65,000 for those with at least a college degree.) Researchers found three pathways to these jobs, two of which do not require a four-year degree.
The first non-four-year pathway is the high-school pathway, which includes those with a high-school diploma or less and led to 20% of good jobs, as defined above, in 2016. Workers who follow this path often advance to roles as managers and supervisors in fields like construction, manufacturing, food services, and office support.
The second non-four-year pathway — the middle-skills pathway — encompasses those with more than a high-school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree. Most people who follow this pathway hold associate's degrees or employee certificates. These "certified value" individuals held 24% of 2016's good jobs, which include skilled-services positions as well as a host of blue-collar fields, including health-care technicians, records clerks, firefighters, and law-enforcement officers.
The bachelor's-degree pathway, meanwhile, assumes at least a four-year degree. This pathway was the one taken by 56% of those who held good jobs in 2016. Careers in this category include various professional and technical jobs.
The researchers also found that it was not until 2008 that bachelor's-degree-pathway workers held more good jobs than those without a degree, thereby initiating the ascent of the "college economy." From 1991 to 2016, bachelor's-degree-pathway jobs doubled, from 18 million to 36 million. Middle-skills-pathway jobs grew by 3.5 million during the same period. While high-school-pathway jobs decreased by nearly 2 million, employment opportunities for those following the high-school pathway remained stable, as the number of high-school-pathway workers moving to other pathways was greater than the number of jobs lost in the high-school pathway.
To understand the level of education that employers seek when filling open positions, Reserve Bank analysts acquired data from Burning Glass Technologies, which tracks labor-market data and talent. They found that among the 25 largest careers, at least nine — led by several occupations in health care and the skilled trades — are fully accessible to those without a four-year degree. For the other 16 occupations, there was no employer consensus regarding the education credentials needed.
The Reserve Bank's analysts suspect that this lack of consensus is due largely to labor-market challenges rather than the work's true educational requirements. An employer's requirement of a college degree may itself be a form of credential inflation — "an unnecessary barrier for [certain] workers in some places relative to others." A more skills-based, or supply-side, approach to hiring would make far more sense, although it's understood that some employers treat education credentials as signals of character traits that they value (e.g., persistence) even if there's no direct relationship between what's actually learned and what the job actually demands.
The Fed's analysts say that a key challenge for both employers (the demand side) and job seekers (the supply side) is pairing individuals without bachelor's degrees to good jobs. One solution comes from "last-mile training" programs. In A New U: Faster and Cheaper Alternatives to College, Ryan Craig points to the emergence of these new intermediaries, which assist with matching supply and demand by training individuals and then helping them find jobs. They can take many forms, including apprenticeships, boot camps, income-share programs, and staffing and placement models. "Placement colleges," as Craig calls them, thus function like staffing companies and service providers to help young people navigate their way through these programs and into a job.
A deeper, more permanent solution to the challenge of matching training to employment requires schools, colleges, and placement organizations to build strong employer relationships so that potential workers are educated for and can find the right first job. The Delaware Pathways to Prosperity program, launched in 2014 by then-governor Jack Markell, is a statewide initiative that provides college and career preparation for Delaware youth in grades seven through 14. Middle-school students in the program learn about career options, and then as high-school sophomores or juniors, they take courses related to those careers. During their senior year, students participate in a 240-hour paid internship that lasts through the following school year. The program creates pathways from school to careers aligned with state and regional economies, with a special focus on middle-skills jobs. In Delaware, these jobs offer an average salary of nearly $45,000 a year, while low-skills jobs in the state offer around $26,000 annually.
Pathways to Prosperity offers 20 pathways in fields like manufacturing, engineering, finance, teaching, law enforcement, and health care. Over 12,000 students are enrolled, which is around a quarter of all high-school students in the state. In some pathways, students take career-related courses at institutions of higher education and earn college credit, which can be applied to certificates or associate's degrees. In others, students take career-related courses at their high school. The teachers for these courses often have extended industry experience.
The program involves a diverse partnership of K-12 educators, businesses, post-secondary education institutions, philanthropists, and community agencies and organizations. Delaware Technical Community College arranges work-based experiences, while United Way coordinates support services for low-income students. The initiative is governed by a 14-member steering committee composed of representatives from the public, private, and non-profit sectors, with financial support coming from public and private dollars, including philanthropy.
A NEW HIGH-SCHOOL MOVEMENT
In their 2008 book, The Race between Education and Technology, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz document the spectacular educational transformation effected by America's high-school movement in the early part of the 20th century. It began in America's heartland — the "education belt" — and focused its efforts on creating universally accessible and publicly funded secondary schools for all Americans.
From 1910 to 1940, high-school expansion was rapid though uneven, primarily due to regional economies with different occupational demands. In addition, at that point in American history, schooling was highly decentralized, so communities had to be persuaded individually to build new schools and levy the local property taxes necessary to support them. But reformers pushed forward with their largely uncoordinated, grassroots approach to high-school expansion that ultimately propelled the United States to its status as a global leader in educational attainment.
During that 30-year period, youth enrollment in high school increased from 18% to 71%, with graduation rates rising from 9% to more than 50%. The number of public high schools ballooned from 10,213 to around 25,000, with graduates per 100 17-year-olds jumping from 8.8 to 50.8. A comparison between the United States and a dozen European countries shows that in 1940, the formal full-time schooling enrollment rates for youth ages 15 through 19 was just over 70% for the United States, compared to a 25% average across those European nations. Even when including European youth enrolled in full-time technical programs, the latter rate did not exceed 40%.
The story of the high-school movement, as presented by Goldin and Katz, forces us to consider the relationship between the achievements of the high-school movement and the achievements of the American people in the following decades. Is it any wonder, for instance, that the very "nation that invested the most in education, and did much of that investment during the century in which education would critically matter, was the nation that had the highest level of per capita income" by the end of the century? Indeed, America's early investments in education reform played a major role in shaping the nation's pre-eminence and prosperity in what came to be known as "the American Century."
Today, America is encountering challenges and opportunities not at all dissimilar to those it encountered roughly a century ago. Today, as in the early 20th century, there is growing demand for a new sort of worker, one who possesses new and different skills from those that were most essential just a generation ago. Today, as then, rapid social, economic, and technological changes are transforming the way personal and professional relationships are made and maintained. And today, as before, savvy educators and activists are learning to adapt school structures and curricula to better prepare their students to work and live in modern society.
A small number of programs in recent years have demonstrated what real progress in these areas can look like. Our education system, however, is in need of reform far more substantial in scope than anything these programs have achieved. Building on the achievements accomplished on the margins, advocates and policymakers must seek to replicate those successes on a larger scale by applying the lessons learned to public, charter, and private schools around the country as well as to the private sector.
This is the task of a new education-reform movement. As was the case a century ago with the high-school movement, the success of this generation of reformers in modernizing American education may prove critical to securing American prosperity and well-being in the decades to come.
