NCAN to Support States & Advance Their CCR Policies Through Member Partners

By: Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives

Reading Time: 4 min.

NCAN will work with 15 state-level member organizations to inform and advance state-level college and career readiness policies and practices through a new grant. The effort will also find NCAN developing, refining, and advancing a student-centered support model and identifying and promoting high-leverage activities states can take on if they want to improve their students’ educational attainment levels.

The three-year grant is being funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Through this effort, the “Postsecondary Pathways Project” for short, NCAN will engage in the following activities while working alongside NCAN members conducting their own efforts statewide and influencing state-level practices:

1. Identifying and documenting state-level progress in advancing effective college and career readiness practices, with an emphasis on data sharing and usage
2. Curating, producing, and promoting new and existing K-12 resources and channeling them to states, districts, community-based organizations, and partnerships that deliver supports to students
3. Developing a student support model around what all students should experience, see, and feel through the postsecondary advising process and connect those elements to their postsecondary outcomes

The 15 states and partner organizations, each of which is a subgrantee, include:

• Alabama: Alabama Possible
• Arizona: Education Forward Arizona
  
• Florida: Florida College Access Network
• Idaho: Idaho State Board of Education
• Illinois: Illinois Student Assistance Commission
• Kentucky: Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority
• Michigan: Michigan College Access Network
• Mississippi: Woodward Hines Education Foundation
• Missouri: Missouri College and Career Attainment Network
• Montana: Montana College Attainment Network
• New Mexico: New Mexico Educational Assistance Foundation
• Oregon: Oregon Office of Student Access and Completion
• Rhode Island: Onward We Learn
• Texas: TxCAN
• Washington: Washington Student Achievement Council

Alongside these partners, NCAN will deliver training and professional development opportunities to K-12 and nonprofit college and career readiness practitioners.

Overall, these efforts will coordinate to identify high-leverage policies and practices, create partnerships with the organizations that can promote and implement them, and increase the number of schools providing, and students accessing, effective, affordable advising solutions. By the end of the grant in February 2025, NCAN, our members and partners operating and advocating at the state level, as well as state education agencies across the country, will be collaborating to promote and deliver information, tools, and training, and identifying and proposing policy changes, that help states and school districts improve, postsecondary outcomes, especially for students of color and students experiencing poverty.

Key activities related to this investment include:

• Developing and publishing a landscape analysis of high-leverage state-level policies and practices and documenting states’ current status with regard to them
• Recruiting a cohort of College and Career Readiness Fellows from among the 15 partner states to gather feedback from practitioners and continue to grow the number of college and career readiness-focused K-12 personnel across the country
• Designing and delivering additional college and career readiness resources and training opportunities to supplement NCAN’s existing options (e.g., eLearning, K-12 College and Career Readiness Calendar, Summer Melt and Fit and Match Toolkits)
• Strengthening state partners’ communication efforts and infrastructure with practitioner audiences
• Development and release of a student-centered support model that influences how all students engage with college and career readiness supports
  

This last activity is particularly interesting. NCAN members’ experiences are that many of the high schools they serve, especially those serving significant populations of students from low-income backgrounds and students of color, are insufficiently resourced to best support these students. Meanwhile, in better-resourced schools and communities, students receive more intensive college and career readiness advising experiences and supports that contribute (along with higher levels of social capital) to these students’ positive postsecondary outcomes.

What NCAN proposes is to create and collate a student-centric model of postsecondary advising focused on what students see, feel, and experience in terms of support rather than focusing exclusively on the available inputs (e.g., staffing) that would deliver those supports or outcome measures. The student support model we envision will describe the student’s experience in being advised, measure students’ outcomes, and then draw a correlative or causal association between the two.

The materials included in this model might include, for example, a survey instrument or instruments that examine students’ experiences, sentiments, and feelings related to postsecondary advising; curricula for shifting said experiences; and case studies about districts and schools that have connected students’ experiences and outcomes. This model could be an aspirational “north star” for states, districts, schools, and community-based organizations and help to reshape the delivery of postsecondary advising.

NCAN is grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the opportunity to continue to advance this important line of work, which is closely aligned with NCAN’s strategic plan. For additional information or inquiries please contact Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives, at debaunb@ncan.org.