Earlier this month, NCAN released “Moving the College Access Needle for the New Majority: Lessons from Leading Communities,” a
new report that examines the principles and practices that have led four districts around the U.S. to transform their approach
to postsecondary advising.
NCAN hosted a webinar on this new report on Feb. 25 that explored the paper’s findings.
Rudy Ruiz, a partner at FourPoint Education Partners, authored the report. Support from the Carnegie Corporation of
New York made its publication possible, for which NCAN is grateful.
The profiles of the four districts, the School District of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Miami-Dade County Public Schools (Florida), the School District of Lancaster (Pennsylvania), and Brownsville Independent School District (Texas) are loaded with practical,
replicable, actionable approaches to transforming postsecondary advising in K-12 systems.
That, as they say, is not all.
The report also zooms out to identify key takeaways gleaned from across the districts, organized by different K-12 stakeholders. These are sampled below, but check out the report for the complete list.
School-Based Practitioners
As you begin to plan for the upcoming school year, take stock of your current college and career readiness partners, programs, and practices.
Ask for National Student Clearinghouse data if they are not currently available to you.
Bring your staff (school counselors, college and career advisers, career and technical education (CTE) teachers, and teacher leaders involved with advisory period programming) and partners (colleges/universities and college access organizations) together
to get clear on roles, responsibilities, and ways to monitor progress.
District Practitioners
Establish a cross-departmental college and career readiness team that can help design, maintain, promote, and train on understanding a postsecondary success dashboard with key metrics that include available postsecondary data by school. Help schools
use backward mapping to understand whether students are on track to succeed after high school.
Help current and prospective partners understand the district’s college and career readiness strategy and key metrics, and how these partners can best connect to support that vision.
Signal to schools and school leaders that this is a district priority (through accountability, key performance indicators (KPIs), etc.).
Community Partners
Take time to understand the priority areas in your school district’s strategic plan, so you can better convey the alignment of your work.
Ask the district to obtain and analyze National Student Clearinghouse data if they are not currently, and offer support to do so.
Learn what steps your organization can take – such as keeping copies of parent release forms for students’ academic data and a roster of the students you serve, with their school ID numbers – to make it easier to discuss possibilities for streamlining
data collection, reporting, and sharing for your organization’s work.
State Policymakers
Consider opportunities to:
Leverage policy to increase college access through setting the expectation that all high school seniors complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in order to graduate.
Provide completion data to schools and community-based organizations that can support families who need assistance.
Smooth the road to postsecondary success by establishing expectations and providing support for earlier and more equitable access to college and career credentials, including dual enrollment and early college opportunities, as well as funding support
for credentialing exams.
Additionally, the report identifies a few key conditions for success that appeared across the districts. These include:
A clear, shared vision of college, career, and life readiness.
Having a college and career readiness office at the district level.
Promoting data literacy, systems, structures, and practices, especially around the National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker for High Schools Platform.
Focusing on building college and career readiness capacities in school counselors.
Starting or scaling early college high school or dual enrollment programs.
Investigating and securing effective partnerships with local colleges, universities, college access providers, and community-based organizations.
This report is an important new addition to NCAN’s work focused on how K-12 districts and schools can transform students’ postsecondary trajectories. Although the majority of NCAN members are (and historically have been) community-based organizations,
the size of the need for college access services nationally is so great that meaningfully engaging districts and schools in delivering those services is critical, especially for students from low-income backgrounds, students of color, and first-generation
students.
Interested in more success stories from districts and schools? Check out 2020’s “The Data That Matter and the Plans That Work,” which focuses
on five districts NCAN worked with during the To & Through Advising Challenge. NCAN maintains a set of resources that can assist districts and schools with changing their approach to postsecondary
advising, no matter the current state of their practice.
Stay tuned for more releases related to transforming postsecondary transitions in districts and schools. Have questions about the paper? Reach out to Bill DeBaun, director of data and evaluation, at debaunb@ncan.org.
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