ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Monday, April 13, 2026, 2:10 pm-2:50 pm | Career-Connected Learning & Pathways
Speakers
- Brent Haken, Oklahoma DCTE
- Connor Harrington, Kuder
- Tom Cheney, Advance Vermont
- Sidney Kopsa, Nebraska Dept of Education
- Julie Kreis, BrightBound, moderator
Key Takeaways
- This panel explored the practical challenges of building statewide career navigation systems that actually reach students.
- The consistent theme across all panelists was that technology platforms alone are insufficient -- the real bottleneck is educator capacity, with counselors having only about 15 minutes per student per year and teachers often lacking knowledge of careers outside education.
- Connor Harrington of Kuder highlighted that the average school district has over 2,500 different ed-tech platforms, making adoption rates far lower than expected.
- Brent Haken from Oklahoma emphasized that deploying people on the ground to build relationships with schools has been the most impactful change in a decade, while Tom Cheney of Advance Vermont described building a comprehensive system with three pillars: technology, trained youth-serving adults, and statewide integration.
- The panel converged on a call for consistency -- stop changing platforms every few years -- and for professional development that gets educators out of schools and into businesses to understand what careers actually exist.
Notable Quotes
"How could we expect school counselors to change the lives of the students they serve in 15 minutes per student per year? It's not possible."
ā Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)
"Teachers and counselors are not always the best person to talk to students about what careers exist because they don't know themselves... educators come from a background of, I went to school, I went to more school, and I came back to school."
ā Brent Haken (Oklahoma)
"The average school district has over 2,500 different ed tech platforms... the adoption rates are not at the rate that you would anticipate because there's so much distraction."
ā Connor Harrington (Kuder)
"Kids are fascinated by what's real and what's tangible. Just give them the real stuff."
ā Brent Haken (Oklahoma)
"RFPs are doing a big disservice to what it could be for people to perform and show up. It's similar to hiring somebody just based off a resume."
ā Connor Harrington (Kuder)
Full Transcript
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining today. This is the first of, I think, ten sessions that BrightBound is leading in the next couple of days. So thank you for joining us.
I'm Julie Kreis. I'm a senior director at BrightBound working on our career navigation impact hub. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can help young people understand, navigate, and pursue high-quality education and training pathways during and immediately after high school. So I also like to think a lot about what this looks like from many different angles.
And so when we say statewide career navigation, we don't just mean a platform. We also mean a full student-facing experience, the tools, the data, the adult support around it, and so that a young person can explore the options and make confident decisions on their next steps. So across the country, many states have ambitious goals, building stronger career pathways, expanding more work-based learning opportunities, improving alignment across education and workforce systems, and retaining talent within the state. But we also know that translating those goals into a coherent experience for every student is really hard, especially when agencies, the data systems, the funding streams weren't originally designed to all work together.
So in many ways, passing the policy, and many of you in the room may have experience with getting that policy passed and over that first hump. The harder work begins after that, building useful systems that function across agencies that can also survive leadership transitions and procurement cycles. So today, we're going to have an honest conversation around what's working, maybe what's getting in the way, and what's most needed to scale these efforts without creating more fragmentation within states. So today, I'm really grateful to be joined with leaders who've built and operated statewide approaches from different angles, including Connor Harrington, CEO of Cooter, who brings a national perspective across states, districts, and systems, Tom Taney, executive director of Advance Vermont, Brent Haken, state director of the Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education, and Sidney Kopsa, assistant state director of the Office of Career Technical and Adult Education from Nebraska Department of Education.
So thank you all. First, just a quick show of hands of who is here from either a state agency, a district, or a regional intermediary working on career navigation. Thanks. Thanks.
And who's a provider, maybe of data or a program provider, a funder, or a partner trying to support states? Cool. So we're going to try to make this a little practical for both sides. Since we only have about 35 minutes, we're going to keep this going, and we're going to just dive right in.
For everybody here, tell us about your role and how you prioritize youth in your daily work. I'll start. Hello. My name is Connor Harrington.
I'm the CEO of Cooter. We have the opportunity to support statewide career navigation systems around the country. We've been doing it for about 30 years. We've also supported some countrywide systems across the globe in Qatar, Singapore, and a few other countries that have been looking to bring career navigation at scale.
So my role is to partner with these leaders and these organizations to understand their needs and figure out how our team of technologists can support them, how our technology can help them scale, and they can be successful with youth. So as it relates to students or the youth that we're supporting, it's really focused around supporting the administration and the systems around the youth so that they can have a good experience. But we are very passionate about youth, so all of our solutions are built with them in mind with heavy levels of research and reliability when we put things in the market. Hi, everybody.
I'm Tom Cheney, and I'm the executive director of Advance Vermont, and we're a teeny, tiny nonprofit serving the state trying to build out a career navigation system. And so two main things that we focus on. One is career navigation platform called MyFutureVT.org, and this is a tool that youth, adults, and those who support them can use to find a career path, an education pathway, and ultimately get connected supports along the way. And we're working with youth and those who support them to ensure that everyone graduates high school with a plan, and we'll talk a little bit more about that after.
Awesome. Brent Haken from Oklahoma and a CT director in Oklahoma. We have our hands in a lot of different things, so everything from CTE that's on the incarcerated individual to adults that are in post-secondary CTE, and then high school students that we oversee fifth through 12th. We're an independent agency separate from the regents and separate from K-12, so a little bit unique in our state, and we also oversee Title II of WIOA and the Perkins grant for all different divisions.
So we work with everyone from fifth grade all the way till they're ready to not work anymore, and we make sure that they have an opportunity to get into a job, and our whole focus is getting people to work and making sure that they have the skills they need to get there. Sydney Kobza. I serve as the assistant administrator for the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education at the Nebraska Department of Education, and I support the systems that are in place to ensure that districts have what they need to support high-quality career and technical education programs within their school districts. And so everything from career exploration, career awareness, to implementing standards in our CTE programs, to ensuring that those post-secondary pathways all lead to careers that can help support Nebraskans for learning, earning, and living.
Great. Thanks. I'm going to start with Sydney this time. Can you name the biggest challenge you're facing or concern that you have related to career navigation in your state system?
So thinking about career navigation within our state system, we are, we have a career development model that focuses on K-12 and then supporting that into post-secondary. And right now, those early access for those early grades is a little bit of a pain point. And so wanting to ensure that students have the opportunities to explore and be aware of the career opportunities and be exposed to that early on so that we're not missing that opportunity as they navigate through their career journey. And with that in mind, thinking about educator capacity to support those needs, thinking about professional development so that those adults are informed in what systems are out there, what resources are out there, so that students have informed decisions that help support them along the way so that they're aware of all of the opportunities that they have when they get to those secondary and post-secondary grades.
Awesome. So Sidney answered that really, really well, and I would say similar. In Oklahoma, what we're seeing, the problem is not a platform or a system. Connor's team's built us some really good tools to make sure that we can get to students.
The problem is the educators and the counselors don't have time or the resources to get to that skill level. And so what we see commonly in education, you guys have probably seen this before as well, teachers and counselors are not always the best person to talk to students about what careers exist because they don't know themselves. And so many times, educators come from a background of, I went to school, I went to more school, and I came back to school. Okay?
I don't know what careers exist. And so that's the biggest challenge that we see facing. Counselors have too much work on their plate, and then teachers and the other people in the schools, they don't know what exists in their own communities unless their spouse does it or their family does it. So we've got to get more exposure from the business side into the classroom, and like she mentioned, professional development is probably the key, biggest thing that we could probably do to change the space is to give some time in the school year for teachers to go out and visit business and be a part of business and know what goes on in their community.
That would probably be the key for us. So these two states are starting to figure it out. In Vermont, we haven't. We don't have a concrete career navigation system in our state.
Our system is designed, and I think this is probably true in quite a few other states as well, for, I don't know, 60, 70 years ago, built around one role, the school counselor, who are wonderful. But how could we expect school counselors to change the lives of the students they serve in 15 minutes per student per year? It's not possible. So we have to think about a systems-level approach that utilizes, to Brett's point, everyone within that ecosystem, from the parents to the teachers to the coaches and everybody in between.
But it requires rethinking the system in a meaningful way. If we have a math department in schools, why don't we have a career development department? We ought to be thinking about how to build our systems in a better way. So that's really what we're focused on, so that every student in every corner of the state of Vermont has equal access to quality career development and career navigation.
One of the challenges that we have the opportunity to see across almost all states is that there's an extreme passion for figuring it out. One stat that I saw not too long ago was that the average school district has over 2,500 different ed tech platforms that they're involved in. So the idea of getting educators, to Brent's point and Sydney's point, to be able to stick with the platform, get the scale.
that we're looking for in the buy-in, that's kind of the best kept secret in our space is that the adoption rates are not at the rate that you would anticipate because there's so much distraction. You combine that with great state leaders saying, I want to be the one to run this platform, I should take it into our department, we should look at it through our agency's eyes without talking to the agency maybe next door.
So it's very common for us to walk into a room where we see, oh, this agency has not talked to this agency, yet they're both trying to do the same thing. And so our goal is always great, it's always well-intentioned, but how do we connect these stats together and show that we need to reinvest into these platforms that exist or the tools that already exist rather than find the next shiny thing? So there's a lot around that, and we're going to get into that, I think, with some of the other questions and back and forths here. That's so great.
Thank you. So just a check in the room, are you hearing challenges that you also experience? That's a head nods, yeah. It's a lot.
Wow. I want to go deeper into each one of those. Tom, I'm going to start with you, because you mentioned your systems-level approach in Vermont, and you and I, we've had some good conversations about some of the things you're building that are outside of a platform, can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely.
So there's, I think, kind of three essential ingredients, at least the way we see it to building a crew navigation system in a state. So first is, you do have to have technology. You do have to have a platform for current education exploration, where you can harness the data and make it useful for those that you're serving. The second is, you do have to have, to Brett's point, well-trained, youth-serving adults who are not just the folks you typically expect, who have these types of conversations with youth every day in different ways.
So let's make sure that the high school soccer coach knows how to approach a conversation about what's next with their youth, and then a sense of what some of those resources are to point them in the right direction. And then you need integration. You need integration within the system, both at the district level, the school level, and at the statewide level, so that we're aligning our systems, making sure the Department of Labor and the Agency of Education know what's going on, and that they're communicating that down to schools as well. So that's kind of what we're working on, and the work that we're focused on is that platform that we created, so folks in Vermont do have a resource, a go-to resource for career and education exploration, and we're providing trainings to all of these youth-serving adults in ways that fit their needs.
So we're going to teen centers, we're going to employers, we're going to faculty meetings and making sure that those youth-serving adults have a sense of their role, have a sense of the ecosystem, and then some tools for how to incorporate it into their day. And then finally, we have to make sure that we are incorporating this into a framework, a statewide framework of competencies from sixth grade up, so that there's some standards, some learning standards, and then that we're giving these institutions, these teachers, these principals a playbook for how to implement it in their district. And then I said finally, but there's one more finally, which is you do have to have the state-level leadership, both in your agencies and also in the legislature, to pass the policies and programs that take this great work that we're doing with individual schools and make sure that there's equal access through funding and other mechanisms so that we have a cohesive system across the state. Thank you.
I just wanted other people in the room to hear that, because I think it's so exciting what you're doing with the learning standards and with all of the training from top-down and bottom-up that you're working on. And I just say, it's not complicated. We just have to do it. And I think that's kind of the, getting off start is kind of the hardest thing.
Okay. Connor. You have a unique vantage point from where Cooter is in working with many states and building these systems. And as you look across them, what patterns are you seeing in what actually helps these statewide systems take hold?
And where do states still get stuck? Yeah, there's a range of activities that allow for a statewide system to be successful. One of the first ones is the public-private partnership. So I've seen it where states have decided that we want to build our own platform.
We want it to be custom to us because we have unique needs, which is true. Every state has specific things that they need to accomplish, but they often don't have the technology teams to be able to deploy it at scale. So there is a requirement to say, we're going to go out to the private market and say, we're going to partner with an organization to help build this technology so that it will work at scale. Where the challenge comes in is the inability to create an extension of the team.
So when there is not enough buy-in with both parties or a long-term commitment, it's unable to be able to solve these problems because these are big, long-term problems. Folks in my space on the ed tech side, we come in, we say, oh, we can do this, this, that, and the other. But if you haven't worked with government agencies before, you know that, well, there's a few more things that we have to do than we do when we're just running a development cycle on our team. So there's an important element of being able to understand where both parties are coming from but letting us in the room.
We work with Brent in Oklahoma and their team has been welcoming us, but we've been working together for 10 years. So there's a long-term commitment that's involved in making this successful. A couple of the best iterations that we have, there are boots on the ground that are combining both in-person activities, online, virtual, et cetera, but I've yet to see anybody replace labor. So folks say we can replace it with technology, we will scale it up, we'll do virtual, you need to be on the ground, you need to be involved one-on-one with district leaders.
To Sydney and Brent's point, folks have a lot on their plate and so they need someone to walk them through, okay, this is what the benefit is going to be. The other thing that I'm seeing is there's a ton of legislation going on, talk about work-based learning. There's a ton of sessions and events about work-based learning, how are we doing it, how is AI going to solve it, but the funding has not caught up for the technologies. So we've run into that with almost every one of our state partners is that there's a mandate out there that says we need to report back to the state within the next six months in order to get our funding this.
And this is complicated for administrators to get, and if you think about a state like Oklahoma, what do you guys have, like over 400 school districts, almost 500? Over 500. Over 500 school districts. The average size there is less than 1,000, is that right, Brent?
And so you think about the resources at these districts, do they have the resources to sit down, pull a report, get that back to the state to get their funding? So it's, you're setting them up for failure right off the get-go. So it's very important for state leaders to recognize, hey, we're asking for this to happen, we need to quickly move to get to the bare necessities so that folks can get their funding. I have lots of follow-up questions with that, but I think I'm, we're going to come back to that at the end, because I think funding and how the interoperable part of that, and then how it affects the different agencies, is probably a whole other session and conversation.
But moving on to Sidney and Brent, many people in this room are trying to support states as partners. I think that was apparent when some people raised their hands. From your perspective, what does a high-quality public-private partnership look like in practice, and then what's a red flag to you as you both have to evaluate those partners and selections? So I would say a high-quality partnership has to have the understanding of the context of the state and the alignment and understanding what the priorities are of the state and wanting to ensure that they're meeting that.
It can't be absence of having a product to solve a solution. It's that ongoing collaboration, that back-and-forth. Tom, I love what you said about the bottom-up, top-down, and really having those supports in place to understand as needs evolve, as different initiatives evolve, as different legislature comes through, making sure that those needs are met and it can constantly evolve. So having those conversations often and throughout is just crucial in a good relationship.
A red flag would be making those decisions without seeing those needs and also thinking through the capacity of what are needed to implement the product as well. And so I talked a little bit about understanding a state system and understanding the different adults that have to be a part of making sure that something is sustainable within the districts. Having those systems, or not systems, having those products without those pieces in mind and not being able to work through those things. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
You know, it's an interesting time right now, probably more than I've seen any time in my career with all the fast pace of technology change. There's new vendors, there's old vendors, there's vendors everywhere, there's vendors I've never even heard of, they're all coming at us. And so it's every day overwhelming, like, hey, we have this solution, we have this solution. And rarely do they come to us and say, hey, what do you need?
What is the problems that you're facing? Usually it's they already have the solution built. And what helps me, Sidney said it perfectly, but it's just about building trust and having honest communication and understanding that that goes two ways. From our perspective, we try to be really honest with our vendors in different platforms of what's working and what's not, and we need vendors to be very honest also.
So the red flag is really when people sell you a bill of goods and then it doesn't work or they're not honest on that, and then I'm done working with that person.
probably for life so we need to make sure that we're just having really good honest feedback because it's all for helping students navigate their life and so as long as we can keep that in front and center then I usually can work with just about anyone so it's really key that we understand that what everyone does yes it's our jobs but it's thousands of kids future jobs that we're really trying to impact and if we can level there first and understand what are the needs that we need then we can probably work together and I wouldn't have any red flags with that company but just coming at me with with email after email about a sales pitch doesn't work for me but maybe I'm maybe I'm unique I had a little bit more to that too please and just thinking about what other states are doing and having that information is it's great to see Oklahoma and Nebraska have a lot of similarities we both have a panhandle but our our needs are very different the districts and how our systems are implemented how they're supported how our top-down system looks it's it just varies so much from state to state and so understanding a state's context is crucial to that high quality partnership absolutely all right so given that we have 20 minutes left we actually have more time than I think we anticipated so that's great I think I might just popcorn out a couple of questions more because I'm concerned a little bit about what you raised about reporting and how that impacts the work that you're able to do in also expanding the work that you're doing to reach all students so let's spend a little bit more time because I know Tom described something that is is comprehensive and pervasive it's not yet in place yet but you're working on it but in conversation with Brent and Sidney we've spoken about things that sometimes it gets siloed Brent you have mentioned and talked about the uniqueness of your role which is why don't you describe that so yeah so Oklahoma is one of the few states that has an independent agency for CTE so there's only four of us and we're the only one of those that oversees a network of schools that are non degree that are real popular now we're talking about all these non degree programs well we've been overseeing that since 1968 and so it's it's unique in our situation because I'm integrating to k12 but I'm also sending those students on through post-secondary that's non degreed and trying to articulate that into degreed systems so me and the Chancellor and the superintendent of k12 we're kind of this three-legged stool of what education is in our state and it's just different than everybody else and to Sidney's point that's why it's important for everyone that comes to us wanting to have a product used to know what our ecosystem looks like and you just add politics to it and it makes everything harder because surprised everybody usually the politicians don't know what they're doing and so they hand down legislation to us and we've got to figure that out and so just knowing your state's important I think it is very important to what you're talking about there Julie that we make sure that we're all working together on the same page to help a student that's the goal and we're all talking about this right now with we owe a funding we're talking about that with Perkins moving to DOL all these different things that we're trying to channel the goal is always the same as how do we make people work better together and so I think systems actually can make that happen because we're talking about reporting and what so if we use the same platform across all systems it makes us coordinate together and so that's one benefit that I see of technology moving forward is it is helping us to navigate and bridge working across agencies anybody want to add the guy comments there's a lot of platforms out there that power the data that folks are looking for you know you're working with a workforce agency we want to look at what the supply looks like we want to look at the labor market data we want to look at that all together I think it's important for vendors showing up in a state to be able to say we are gonna put our ego to the side and we're gonna say we're gonna make it your data it's not our data it's your data if we're gonna be working in the state and so we need to partner with you on how do we get this into a for lack of a better term a data warehouse that can be used across agencies so in every state that we work in we're coming to them saying we have incredible amounts of data it's not our data we're not selling it we want to have you use it better so let's figure out what other platforms so we are happy to work with our competitors to say hey let's bring this data together but the key factor there is that there's not always the technology folks the data folks within the state agencies to be able to connect these dots in a positive way so there's a huge gap right now I see in the market to be able to connect all of these dots and from the vendor side I could say that the mainly the main thing I see getting in the way is the ego of well this is my data not your data but whereas I think this is the students data this is the state's data and if we can reposition it that way we will be more successful in accelerating the timeline to get access to this good data I would say from a Brightbaum perspective we've had a lot of conversations this past year about data and all kinds of data and there's holes in the data so even though it's so massive and there's so much of it every time we look at program data or the non-degree credential data or pathway there's just more it's like an onion we just find more you know well there was a data that you can pull from a list but then it didn't have some other private programs on it or other other programs that aren't in a federal system so it it is humbling I would say the work to just keep pulling on those threads and making sure that if there's another pocket of data we'll gladly pull it in do you want to add in I'm just gonna say all of this makes me feel like if I'm a high school principal holy cow like they're doing all this data they're doing with all these contracts they're forcing it down us to use it with our students it's really about building that buy-in I think at the district level is another piece that we didn't really talk about as much to make sure that so we do get this the statewide system how do we ensure it's being used so an example we passed a bill in 2013 called the Flexible Pathways Act and it did some great things dual enrollment early college lots of neat stuff and personalized learning plans to call different things different places I'll tell you if you were to ask that the principals in our schools across the state if they do personalized learning plans which are mandated by state law and the Agency of Education likes to remind them of that you wouldn't see a hand in the audience up that they're doing it in a meaningful way we really have to make sure that we're building that buy-in for all of these different solutions and policies otherwise it's going to be that much more difficult so I might add to that the best thing that we have done we've actually done recently because we were checking the box also hey yeah we're walking those kids through those plans that's great yeah we check the box as a school so deploying a team from my agency that now they have a region of the state they're responsible for and they they visit every school in person and make sure they talk with the counselors and they know what they're they're supposed to be doing and help them through that platform has been the biggest change that we've seen probably in the last decade or longer is that we're putting people back to work but we went through I think Connor mentioned it earlier we went through a long time where we were told technology will take care of that for you technology will do nothing without the people that are building trust and building the understanding of how to use it the technology could be the best thing in the world and it's worthless if we don't have schools bought in we don't have the parents bought in the students bought in so getting those people at the ground level to to have that relationship and built and we tried that from outside in but the only time it really works is when they have somebody that they already trust and they can really rely on to have their cell phone number and call them and and cry over the phone when they can't figure it out and those things you have to build that kind of relationship or it will not work partnership not compliance right and that's from the adult perspective really so also like so Tom maybe talk about how the how does this trickle down to the student experience how is the student getting all of this information and what more do we need to do to make this actionable for a student all right I mean it's a good point we haven't really spoken about students yet in this conversation and they're the end you know recipient of this so we have to listen to them and we have to make sure that we are engaging them as we're developing these systems in a really meaningful way and so in Vermont there's a foundation that does some great work in this space and they've made a practice of going around the state speaking was with students and in these focus group situations and saying what do you need like what is meaningful to you how should an adult approach a conversation with you about your future and we're learning great things about what that what they want but they certainly don't want to be talked to they do want to hear our stories and they want to feel empowered to take that next step and acknowledgment that everyone does do it a little bit differently and so yeah we have to keep them at the center in this conversation and sometimes we are thinking about the tools and the systems and and ultimately we have to make sure we're going back and checking what they're what they're doing thank you so so far we've talked about systems data policy partnerships but ultimately as you said this is about young people and whether they have the support that they need to make informed decisions about their futures so we're gonna start towards closing that you guys have a little bit more time to answer your your big magic wand question that I love to ask but if you could change one thing to improve statewide crew navigation for young people or the systems that you're working in what would it be
Who has written an RFP in here? Nice. Okay, I've got to be careful now. Who's responded to an RFP in here?
Ooh, okay. Is it a beautiful process? Everybody loves it? Yeah.
I don't know how many times we will get an RFP where we say, this looks like a pretty good fit for us. We'll reach out. We'll say, hey, this part's kind of confusing. I'm not totally understanding what you meant by this, if we're even allowed to have a conversation.
And at that point, they say, oh, we pulled like six different RFPs together. We threw it into a dock and we hit send. Oh, okay. So now you want 300 companies to respond to that and then we're all going to guess what you're looking for because we're not allowed to chat with you.
And so RFPs are an important part of the process. We definitely want to be respectful of all of these publicly funded tools. I think it's an incredible responsibility to be the provider for these opportunities. But I've seen RFPs get out of hand over the last couple of years to the point that it's become more of a CYA for everyone rather than an actual, let me do my due diligence.
And so I think that we should be putting more faith into our elected leaders to be able to make decisions on behalf of folks. I definitely think we should still have a process to evaluate companies like Cooter before they come in. We want to make sure that we're able to build trust and have a conversation. But the best projects that we work on are where we are able to communicate with the people we are working with and get to know them well so that we can show up well.
RFPs do not allow us to do that. It's similar to hiring somebody just based off a resume. I'm going to read your resume, I'm going to stack it up, but I'm not going to interview you. Yeah, I'll do some type of formal presentation, we'll call it that.
But really, we've got to figure out a better way for the public private partnerships to work. And I think RFPs are doing a big disservice to what it could be for people to perform and show up. Rain. Yeah.
So I agree with that, by the way, as someone who's applied for an RFP before. And probably will do more, but it is a little bit of PTSD. So for me, we would align our systems in the state of Vermont so that with a whip of a magic wand, we would ensure that every youth-serving adult had a sense of how to approach a conversation about next steps with the youth that they serve. We would have a education system that embeds career navigation and career development from pre-K all the way up to 12 in a way that's consistent across the state.
And ultimately, what we'd be seeing is our high school continuation rates on the college or some other pathway significantly higher. We would be seeing employers really fighting over candidates for jobs as opposed to just scraping to get by. And ultimately, we would see a much more thriving economy in our teeny tiny little state. Tom, you were pretty thorough there on everything that needs to happen.
I don't know that I need to answer. I mean, it's a magic wand, right? Yeah. I like the magic wand.
I was trying to think of one thing, and then Tom just goes through the whole system. So you're spot on. And I think in Oklahoma, I don't want to speak about anyone else because I don't know what everyone else does. But streamlining what we do so that the things that are winning get selected and keep being used, that we don't change a platform or a system or a policy every year or every two years so that everyone can get on the same page and we can work.
There is no perfect button or we talk about a career navigation tool right here. So that's what I'm really referring to. Every time we turn around, we're trying to have a new agency come to be or a new legislator that wants this or a new elected state superintendent that wants something. Just get with something and stick with it.
And then let's get all of our schools to have the resources behind that. We talked about earlier the professional development for educators, those that are supporting parents being engaged. That happens when educators know how to engage them and know what their role needs to be. So that professional development probably is the biggest key that we can do, but we cannot keep changing the game for these schools on what they're supposed to use every few years.
And that's one thing that I have seen across many different states is we've got to get on whatever the platform is, whatever we use. Let's stay consistent with something and let's let it evolve as it needs to evolve. But let's all as state leaders, and I'm talking about commerce and SDE and regents and Workforce Commission and everybody, let's all be on the same page that let's pick something and then let's stick with it. I think that would be the biggest thing that we can do, but it has to be supported with professional development for the educators and the schools, or nothing's going to really result.
It's going to be a checkbox system, and I don't need more compliance. I need more partnerships where how we can work with people. So that's the magic wand, I guess. Those things will end up with the results, the outcomes that Tom's talking about.
We want people to have good jobs where they can stay in our state, and those companies are thriving. And I think if we're going to make a difference in education, that's how we do it. Yeah, I'm going to jump in on Tom's magic, too. And so really making sure that the learners have, I'm going to use the word again, career-connected learning.
And so through their whole academic journey, they're seeing what they want to do in every aspect of school, in every aspect of academics. And so they're seeing it show up in their English classes. They're seeing it show up in their math classes, not just in isolation in CTE. They're seeing it through their work-based learning experiences.
And so making sure that happens so that they can make informed decisions, not in absence of a system. They understand what they want to do in their futures, and they have the next steps to a meaningful career. Thank you. So I hope you all find that useful.
And we heard no RFPs, so yeah. We're still going to respond to them, so. Professional learning, professional training, training the advisors, embedded career development, and the career-connected learning part of that for access for all students, not just students who choose a CTE path, but all of the options available to them throughout high school and beyond. And then the continuity and the consistency, just to give it time to take form and to have momentum without changing all the time.
So I think with all of that, and that's a great magic wand, you know, that is such a hopeful place to be. And I think it's possible. I just think we need to stay strong in those beliefs and make sure that those policies happen and that we stay true to it. So, you know, ultimately it does come down to investing in people, building shared understanding, and making sure every student has access to real opportunities and the support from very early on, even before middle school.
But Brightbaum focuses on middle school and high school, but Tom, I think your work is gonna open our eyes to even younger ages and where we can really start this work and this effort. So I'm really grateful to each of you for joining me up here today. We have two minutes. I don't know what that means.
If we say thank you or if there are any last words. You look like you're ready, Brent. Yeah, so I just wanted to say, sorry. I can't ever shut up.
I've been really trying to stay quiet this whole time. One thing that I wanted to mention that I haven't so far, Julie just said it, we're not that far off from where we need to be for students. We just have some fine tuning. We don't need to make big adjustments.
The biggest thing that I see right now is we are trying to appeal to everybody at every time. And instead of that, we just need to give people good information and move forward and not make, and I'm talking about even the student side right now. I feel like everybody is trying to make a new game of what it is to be career connected or this new flashy thing. Man, just show them what's available.
Kids are fascinated by what's real and what's tangible. Just give them the real stuff. That's why micro stuff works so well, this dirty job stuff that came back, because people want to know what's real and what's out there. And so if we can just be real with people, we're not far off.
We can make fine adjustments and we will get people where they need to be. Thank you. That's a great place to end. Thanks everyone.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.