In Philadelphia, a young person leaving Launchpad Philly’s post-high school graduate training track is on pace to earn nearly $30,000 within nine months and $50,000 within one year. That far outpaces the roughly $12,500 a young Philadelphian with only a high school diploma typically earns.
That’s not a best-case anecdote. It’s a design choice. And it’s one of six such designs documented in our new report, A Practical Guide to Work-Based Learning, which also examines a network of career and technical charter schools in South Bend, Indiana; an industry-themed school network in San Antonio; a rural coordination model spanning a thinly populated Indiana county; a Purdue-affiliated early college network; and a multi-district rural collaborative in Colorado.
Each program provides, by any fair measure, excellent preparation for college and career. And each one raises the same uncomfortable predicament. Education has no shortage of good ideas. What it lacks is a strategy for making them commonplace.
States should stop treating work-based learning primarily as something individual schools or districts choose to pursue and start treating it as something the state itself is responsible for enabling at scale. Based on what separated our six success stories from the much larger number of well-intentioned efforts that stall out, here are four actions state policymakers can pursue.
