The Delta Issue #49

Gov. Polis: There’s now a roadmap for states to drive student success, and there’s a role for each of us to play.

Hey everyone. Governor Jared Polis here, taking the pen to share some exciting news for all of us who are deeply invested in student success.

As Chair of the bipartisan National Governors Association , I’ve been working over the past year alongside a team of experts across education and workforce development to dive deep into a question that is top of mind for so many of us – how can we better set our students, and our economy, up for success now and into the future?

Through the Let’s Get Ready: Educating All Americans for Success initiative, we set out, with a focus on data and measurement, to look at what is working, share best practices, and drive stronger outcomes for all learners. And perhaps most importantly, to identify and change what isn’t working.

Over the course of the year, we’ve learned from experts throughout the education and workforce ecosystem, toured schools in New York, Las Vegas, and Vancouver that are leading innovative efforts to fill needed gaps for students, whether with high-quality workforce training or dual language curriculum. We’ve taken a deep dive into the data – and most noticeably – seen where we aren’t yet gathering the data we need.

And we saw time and time again that we have a “measurement mismatch” that separates the skills we measure, and for that matter the skills we invest in, from the skills that build future ready learners.

Through our many conversations with stakeholders across the country, including employers, educators, parents, researchers, and policymakers, a clear consensus emerged around the foundations of readiness that should be in our K-12 systems:

Academic foundations
Workforce preparedness
Civic engagement
Lifelong well-being

These key pillars of readiness that, while each is uniquely tailored to the specific needs and context of each state, reflect core and consistent foundations. And by shifting the focus away from the inputs – initiatives already underway – and toward measuring and scaling what works, we can best identify what it really takes to build future ready learners.

We took the lessons, best practices, and data gathered throughout this process to compile a robust, actionable roadmap ready to be tailored and applied to each state and its unique needs.

The roadmap speaks to the opportunities and action steps that Governors, as well as leaders across the education and workforce spaces, can take to set our students and our economy up for success. To align skills learned in the classroom with the skills needed to get a good job.

With five core takeaways, the roadmap lays out a clear path to connect the dots between promising practices and outcomes, including job placement and lifelong earnings.

These include:

Defining a clear vision for student readiness and assessing how your state is measuring it.
Eliminating silos across government that slow progress
Building systems and infrastructure to measure outcomes
Maintaining focus on outcomes – and driving transparency and accountability – with a public dashboard
Consider a more effective federal role in education

Each of us has a role to play to drive success for our students, our economy, and our country now and into the future.

Across the country, we are already seeing high-impact initiatives underway that are driving progress and delivering real results, and we hope to see these successes scaled and replicated across the country.

For example, in Colorado, we are investing in every step along the classroom to career pipeline. We passed free public preschool and full day kindergarten, made innovative investments in math and science to drive student achievement and support teacher training, stood up a free digital math accelerator that is already showing positive results, We made it free to get training in high-demand fields including health care and construction, and made the first two years of community college free for Coloradans from hardworking families.

And we’re just getting started. There is more to be done to streamline our workforce development initiatives across state agencies, which is why I signed an Executive Order to jump start this process.

And with the insights and action steps in this roadmap, we are better prepared than ever to best deliver real results that open the door to opportunity and prosperity.

Now, we take these tools and move from Let’s Get Ready to Let’s Get Started!

Let’s Get Muddy

📍Read the Roadmap Here