How Digital Curriculum Can Scale Career-Connected Learning in K12

Amanda Kocon, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Edmentum, joined me and Danny to explore how digital curriculum can help scale career-connected learning for all students. Amanda discussed the driving forces behind the shift toward career readiness in K–12 education and emphasized the need to close exposure gaps and lower switching costs for students exploring different career paths. She detailed Edmentum’s recent acquisition of MajorClarity and their partnership with Interplay, which is enabling districts to integrate CTE courses, simulation-based trades training, and comprehensive college and career planning tools. I was excited to dig into how exactly we can scale opportunities for all students to have broad, student-driven career explorations in every district to ensure every student graduates with valuable skills and real career options.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And to help us illuminate that today, I’m thrilled that my co-conspirator Danny Curtis is here because we’ve got a very good conversation teed up today. Danny, good to see you.

Danny Curtis

It’s great to be here, Michael. Always nice to chat with you and especially today because we get to talk about one of our favorite topics.

Michael Horn

Exactly. And you and I wrote this piece, I don’t know, about a year and a half ago at this point, I think, for Education Next, where we said, look, career-connected learning really should not be a “for some,” it’s really a “for all,” increasingly. And I think we’ve also though, been puzzling how do we help schools actually execute on that vision? And we’ve found someone that I think can start to shed some light on that. So I’m excited about this conversation, Danny.

Danny Curtis

Yeah, me, too. We wanted to bring on a guest today that is going to help us think through one approach to scaling up more career connected learning and helping districts overcome some of those challenges that they encounter when they do make the decision to move towards career connected learning. And so we are really delighted to have Amanda Kocon, the chief strategy and operations officer at Edmentum, a K12 online learning provider, join us here today. Amanda, welcome.

Amanda Kocon

Thank you. It is tremendous to be with you, Danny and Michael.

Elevating CTE for Workforce Readiness

Danny Curtis

Amanda, as we mentioned up-front, we along with many others nationwide have been pushing for more career-connected learning in K–12. And as we’ll discuss you all at Edmentum, have a big announcement and have been doing a lot of work there. But before we dive into the work you’ve been doing, I want to start with the big picture “why.” In your view, what is driving this shift towards career readiness in K–12?

Amanda Kocon

It’s the question right now. Right. So if we think back to when Edmentum started this journey of really leaning into career connected learning for all, which is an important part of the story, we started paying attention to what was being provided to kids. So we are at our core a digital first curriculum company. We are a 60 year old plus ed tech company. We’re one of the oldest. We actually started our journey in workforce redevelopment and then focused many years later on the K12 space. But it’s always been sort of part of our DNA.

We have always provided CTE courses and curriculum as part of our sort of comprehensive catalogs of offerings. And one of the things about almost four years ago now that we started talking about was what’s the sort of quality of offering that we have and how do we make sure that the same level of intention and rigor and learning design that is going into our core courses, so think your core four, your electives even, is also going into CTE. And so we started this build out in part to say what kids that are thinking about a path direct to direct to the workforce, whether they stop at college or not. Very few people exit high school and retire. It really is career for all. And so how do we get kids better ready with better materials, if you will? And so that’s where we started the journey. I think a huge part of the why for us was paying attention to the nearly 50% plus of that, like really won’t go to college and how do we make sure that they exit high school with something of value? So that’s when we started really building out our own CTE course catalog that we’ve built out over the last three years. And a huge part of that for us was then beginning to realize that as you think about what’s available, how do we combat, two things in particular, so we had started with like, what’s the curriculum that we need to deploy? And then we said, there’s two issues.

One is a massive exposure gap. Kids actually don’t have a sense of what’s possible. The second thing we really focused in on is what’s the switching cost? So if we move kids, any kid, through a program of study, if you will, where they don’t learn academic, technical, durable skills and they don’t have a sense of what’s possible post secondary, we probably are going to continue to fail these kids. We will exit them from high school, but they won’t actually be future ready or job ready.

Danny Curtis

Yeah, you lay out a really compelling rationale for this movement towards career and connected learning. And now I want to really zoom in on the offerings that Edmentum is providing in this area. You all just made a big acquisition, the MajorClarity College and Career Readiness platform. And there’s a lot to unpack here. But I want to start with the vision behind the acquisition and the opportunity that it represents. Wondering what challenges have you seen districts face as they implement and scale these programs? And what is the role that digital tools and curriculum play in helping them to address those challenges?

Scaling Work-Based Learning Solutions

Amanda Kocon

So I think one of the big challenges you laid out, actually, in the intro, which is how do you at scale, bring sort of the level of awareness, exploration, planfulness, curricular apps and programmatic options and then begin to manage what is the holy grail, which is work based learning for kids, in the middle school and high school arena. We, as I said before, started with what is true to us, which is we could become really good high quality digital curriculum providers. So we’ve built up as a starting place over the last three years, well over 200 semesters of CTE courses that is inclusive of 57 pathways and building. And that was an important starting place for us. But we also knew that in order to land a solution that allowed teachers, educators, counselors, superintendents to think about the programs that they offer and how to do that, not just in one building, but across all of their buildings. And we can get into a little bit why that matters in a second. We needed to actually bring the tooling and the solutioning that surrounds our curriculum that sort of integrates better with what is available in a brick and mortar, plus what we can bring that can be digitally or virtually available. And so for me, the whole vision has been let’s bring these two things together.

How do we bring the workflow, the tooling, the planning, the career exploration starting in middle school and integrate that with the curricular options that are additive, not reductive in a place so that you have truly an interconnected solution of content, curriculum and tooling. And so the putting these two things together, it has been the vision. And so we’re very excited about the acquisition of MajorClarity and putting these two companies together.

Michael Horn

So I want to make sure I’m understanding the different pieces, right? Because 57 pathways, 200 semesters of content is already a lot.

And so that’s like, I think if I’m hearing you right, that’s like the additive we can’t give exposure to learn about X. Here’s a way to do it. And so then now you have the MajorClarity piece of it that it sounds like makes this more integrated. But I want to make sure you’re putting a pin in it, like, how does this actually work for schools? And sort of what differentiates the Edmentum approach from, you know, because this is a hot space, as you know, a lot of folks are doing different stabs on what college and career readiness mean to them. What differentiates this approach with this integration?

Amanda Kocon

It’s a great question. So for us, our ability to use MajorClarity really as the entry point. So I’m going to just take you through the student’s journey. So starting in, starting in middle school. And that is where we have decided to start for now. It doesn’t mean we won’t move down into elementary, but you all know that in middle school is really the first opportunity the kids have to change classes. There is actually truly time for things like college and career exploration. And career exploration in particular, whether that’s advisory or in electives.

We have interesting inventories that allow students to really think about what they are interested in that generates over time, both in that moment and later, sort of a fit score. Here are some things that you might want to investigate. Edmentum has built out elective courses which help students. Actually we’ve done these with America Succeeds. So they embed durable skills. We’re the first ones to bring it down to middle school. We think middle school is particularly important for students as they start to understand what are those work based skills, terms, terminology. How do you think about and understand what it means to develop communication skills and collaborative skills and even metacognition? How do you understand how you learn starting in middle school? As you start to think about what you might be interested in.

When I talked about switching costs, this is a particularly important moment. And the reason it’s particularly a moment for students is the sky’s the limit. We still have plenty of time. If you have a student who’s behind in reading or who needs some help in math, now’s the time we can begin to do some interventions so that they can have the job they really want versus the job later. In high school they are left with right because they only have one or two options at that point. And so we started in middle school with assessment beginning early exploration. As you move through, you begin to think about how you’re planning your programs of study, your academic study, whether you’re interested in pursuing a particular pathway. We have the digital courses to both allow you to do that online.

That includes one of the biggest pressure points we hear from schools is I don’t have consistent CTE curriculum and or I can’t get a CTE teacher. So Edmentum as also the operator of two fully virtual schools can work with districts to ensure that we have a CTE teacher who is available to do virtual instruction, if you don’t have somebody in person. As you move through that, you start to do things like test drive activities so you can get a sense of the day in the life sort of rich video, rich understanding we’re going to continue to build that out. We’re very excited to do more than just here’s a doctor, here’s a lawyer, here’s a veterinarian. But here, when you think about what you’re interested in, what your particular assets and leanings are, are other ways you can think about curating both a program of study and a job. As we move through. All of this is localized to the local labor data and so you’re starting to see what’s available locally. That’s not to say that kids in the future won’t also have virtual work experiences, because they will. But we want to localize it as much as possible as well.

As you move through from a learning perspective, that’s where I’ve talked about sort of the rich catalog. It reminds me, and you guys will appreciate this, of the early days of blended learning where you have to sort of talk to people about, yes, you are curating some experiences which are taught very explicitly by a CTE teacher. You are going to do welding in person. Some of the things that are part of that journey, however, in the early pathways are things that you actually can do in more of a flipped classroom model that you can actually do digitally that kids can do asynchronously. This is one of the places where we have partnered with Interplay, which is one of the key providers. We met with them. They are somebody who really focuses on helping skilled trades employers get employees ready to be job site ready. We brought that down in high school.

Career and College Readiness Pathways

Amanda Kocon

Those have rich simulations so you can get a pathway around plumbing and electric mechanical, early on and get exposure so that you’re actually job site ready. So think about academic CTE programming, which we’ve talked about, as well as the skilled trades, and begin to get some exposure around those things. As you move through that, you then have all the tooling that you would expect out of a college and career readiness. So we’re not asking kids to pick one path or another. We’re actually saying when you’re doing your programming and you’re thinking about your academic planning, we will lead you into a set of tools and capabilities that allows you to plan your college. So which colleges of our interest, which community colleges might be of interest? How do you think about scholarships, fit, application? We integrate with a common app and that sort of set of tooling. And on the career side, you’re able to do technical school exploration, you’re able to focus on work based learning. And ultimately all of this is building a portfolio over time.

So that kids have something of value and that something of value is everything from micro credentials, sort of mini courses that they can take, I think like four to six hours of mini courses that can drop into a resume builder. So they’re beginning to build a resume which I will tell you is as important if you are going to college as it is if you are going directly into the workforce.

Michael Horn

So Amanda, a lot of what you just described, right, is like a broadening of horizons followed by a series of student driven exploration to make choices. Let’s start at the beginning of the funnel because you mentioned the durable skill piece of that and I’m super curious just to have you question quickly drilled into like what do you mean by durable skills? Because it’s a bit of a catch all term and people mean lots of different things and I, I’ll just give my bias up front so maybe you can answer the question, respond to it a little bit is. Some of the durable skills, it seems to me, are more vocation specific than we might admit. Right. And some are pretty generalizable. And so I’m sort of curious how you think about what do you mean about it and which ones transfer and which ones are actually like this is what this means in this context. This is what it means in this other one.

Amanda Kocon

Yeah, we’ve tried to focus, I mean it’s an interesting question both for durable skills and where we’ve tried to focus, even the curricular decisions we’ve made. So we’ve tried to focus, not to double use the word, on those things that are actually durable. And so how do you think about building again it’s like communication. How do you understand what it is to have good collaboration skills, good problem solving skills, good those things that actually are transferable, across not just a job, but across industry. And so we focus there in part because we wanted to make sure we’re anchoring kids on really that understanding of what are the skills beyond the academic skills or the technical skills.

Michael Horn

So it’s more about helping them even recognize what it looks like when you do this. Even if how you do it might change.

Amanda Kocon

How you do might change, how you demonstrate it might change. But to be able to think about how do I understand, let’s say like a communication skill, what good communication skills look like? How do I demonstrate that in my work and how do I begin to build just the recognition of those things so I can build towards that. Similarly, on the curricular side, we’ve actually really tried to focus in on what are durable higher paying jobs. That is where we have focused our energy in terms of there’s lots of providers that can provide other things. But we’ve tried to focus on just from a pure mission and landing what is going to be kind of evergreen in a rapidly changing work environment. How do we think about those things?

Michael Horn

Gotcha. And you mentioned before that you had an eye toward the 50 plus percent who are not going to go to a traditional college. But are you targeting all schools or is it like segmented? How do you think about that?

Serving All Students Equitably

Amanda Kocon

We are targeting all schools. And again, the reason I raise that is because we want to serve all kids. Edmentum has always, as a company that really is about learning acceleration, who does a lot of work in intervention. In particular from elementary school to high school, we’ve often served kids who have been under-resourced from the quality of the resources they get. And so when we focused in on where can we be uniquely positioned, what’s sort of at the core of what we do well? It really is, those are our kids, the kids that need something different. The kids who may or may not go to a four year college, they may go directly in the workforce. They may enlist, they may have other paths. What I would say is, and I know I’m speaking to the converted on this, that is increasingly more and more kids.

Right. Like, and so I think that moment is one we’re working hard to meet. We really do think though that, like informed decisions as early as possible is super important. So with the help of our partners in the school district, not only are we able to say this kid is interested in this and wants to pursue this, and we can sort of tap into that intrinsic, not just extrinsic, motivation. And we use that then to help kids actually catch up. Right. And get ahead and chart that path that we think is possible for all kids.

Danny Curtis

Amanda, you talked earlier about the possibility that opens up when you get students started down these paths at an earlier age. And I agree that you’re getting students to test drive and to be thinking about these potential paths at an earlier age in middle school, there’s a lot of benefit to that. And I think there’s probably a balance to be struck because, you know, career planning is not linear for a few different reasons. One, job markets are dynamic careers. Jobs are always changing. And so developing a static job and career identity in a dynamic job market can pose some problems. And then also students are young and still developing and so their minds are likely to change. And so I’d be curious to hear how you think about building these services and structuring these services when these plans are so subject to change.

Amanda Kocon

We want as much as possible, everything we are doing and how we are partnering with educatives to be expansive and not reductive. And so we’re very focused on, it’s not this career path or nothing, that the job market we are moving kids into is going to continue to evolve and has been. I would say that the pace of the change is actually probably faster than ever. And what I would say, Danny, is that’s important truly for all kids. I mean, to the extent that you can get. That’s what I was talking about a little bit, those two things. So one of them was, you know, what is the exposure gap? Early on you have kids, particularly kids from less resourced environments, not actually even having a sense of what’s possible from a jobs perspective.

You know, I sort of have a running saying, if you go into an elementary school classroom, you will usually hear kids want to be, you know, a doctor or veterinarian or a teacher. And it’s because it’s what they have most exposure to. Right. And as they develop a sense of possibility. I will also say, though, that it is our, I think it’s our duty increasingly in the high school arena to make sure that all kids come out with something of value and they are able to demonstrate why, I think that the soft skills, the durable of the professional skills, which reduces that switching costs. I am, let me just say this. I can do math.

I can do math. I am literate when I talk about academic skills, those help kids learn and relearn. You want these learners to relearn and relearn throughout their life. I’ve got some soft skills, some professional skills. I can talk about those and know what they are, and I can show up with them on a resume in an interview. And I’ve got some technical skills. I actually have a sense and have learned how to acquire and develop those. If we do that, I think we’re doing better when we think about what secondary education in particular needs to look like.

Danny Curtis

Yeah, the breadth of exposure is so important. And I’m also really excited to learn more about how you are deepening experience with this partnership with Interplay you mentioned earlier. You all are partnering with Interplay to create simulation based coursework aligned to a number of professions, specifically in the trades. And so I’m wondering, could you talk us through what the trade prep program is and how it figures into your larger suite of offerings and would love to hear about how it’s scaling access to these professions it’s aligned to.

Skilled Trades Education Initiative

Amanda Kocon

Yeah, this one is in its early days. I would, we like to call this year the day, the year of working really, really closely with school districts on how do we bring these, how do we bring these to life. So there are very few school districts that can set up true programs around the skilled trades for a bunch of reasons including age, right. What age kids can actually get hands-on experience in some of these industries. What’s really exciting is we are bringing down into our sort of pathway the ability to use interplay courses and curriculum both directly with a student, but also to be mixed in with a CTE director on the ground. That allows kids to get exposure both in terms of taking just an overview course of what are the different kinds of skill trades, how do I think about those? What might be of interest? Then being able to go through some of that coursework with the simulations. The simulations are pretty slick.

It was the first company that I saw that I thought really landed it without the hardware. A lot of the companies you need to have very specialized hardware. This you do not. You just need to have a regular laptop. And that was pretty cool. It is also one of the few that is being used as much as it is by employers. Now with MajorClarity, what I’m able to do is connect that workspace learning opportunities. So employers in a place in the skilled trades, you all know that it’s very hard right now to get an electrician or a plumber.

Interplay is coming at that by helping those employers build a pipeline. We’re trying to connect then that pipeline in K12. I was out in a district just a few weeks ago and I asked the question, you know, I spent a lot of years as the head of strategy for an organization called TNTP. We did a lot of teacher work and teacher recruiting work. So one of my favorite questions to ask a superintendent or a head of HR is what’s the hardest thing to recruit for right now? What I did not expect was that the answer was boiler operators. And I said, well, I’d like to hear some more about that because that’s not typically, I hear, you know, special ed.

Michael Horn

Yeah, I was gonna say special ed, Math elementary.

Amanda Kocon

Yeah, exactly. And that was the first thing out of this head of HR’s mouth. And I said, well, tell me more. And he said, they’re all retiring. All of the folks who maintain our facilities are retiring. And I said, well, what about a grow your own program? What if we could bring Interplay into your CTE programming where you could get kids job ready, field ready and we could partner them with some of these folks who are retiring as their work based learning in your school district. And you only have to keep them for a couple years post graduation and then they are amazing. If we partnered this was particularly, you know, we partner with some of the union and the employers in this particular place.

We would be amazing, you would be an amazing path. Not just you know, for, for these employers if you will and for these kids but frankly a path into the middle class because these are very high paying jobs. The other thing to really focus on is these are not, these are not low paying jobs. These are very high, family sustaining jobs. And so you could see their eyes light up like wait a second, I could, I could do something right by kids and get them literally a pretty incredible local job, help fix the pipeline problem that these employers and that the union themselves have come and said like is an issue for these skilled trades. And in the meantime I could have some assistance maintaining my buildings.

Michael Horn

Love it. All right, last question as we wrap up here. I’m curious. You’ve been dancing around in a variety of ways but like how schools should or do integrate these offerings and you’ve talked about the room for electives and things of that nature. But just like maybe impose your own view of what a good integration looks like and what’s like sort of a bad integration right where it’s not maybe a strategic or giving these kids a true view of what college and career readiness that on ramp looks like for students.

Thoughtful, Planful Programming Matters

Amanda Kocon

Listen, I would say a good integration is where we see really thoughtful, it doesn’t need to take a long time, but thoughtful top down programming. You’re really thinking about what’s the connective tissue in terms of the tooling, the insights, the data, the reporting that allows me to understand what kids are interested in, how I get them in the courses and the programs that are of most interest and then how do I get them some work based learning experience. And I mean that for all kids. And that thoughtful programming I think is our best implementations, I would say our poorest are where you’re transactionally trying to solve for a particular program you don’t have in sort of a half hearted way or serving up CTE as just a way to get to graduation. And so it’s a last minute effort versus a planful program. And so I would say, you know, increasingly we’re seeing folks really want to do more planful programming. I do think like anything, implementation and planful programming are often hard to pull off. And so we are working really hard to make sure we’re getting, whether it’s us or somebody else that’s coming in and helping to advise on how we stand these up.

We are working really hard to do that. And if we’re going to really bring the promise of career, connected learning and opportunities for all, it has to be about really rethinking what the sort of job of a high school is at the end of the day and how do we think about landing that in the day to day. It’s not sexy, but it is the day to day planfulness, programming, scheduling that happens with kids.

Michael Horn

Yeah, it seems like it is the question to be asking right now because we see the disengagement and so forth. This seems like a way at that. It seems like a way at the pathways. Like it just seems like a big answer to a lot of problems right now that high schools are facing. So Amanda, huge thanks for coming on and talking about these efforts and we’ll keep a close eye as it continues to develop and you continue to move forward in these different directions giving this comprehensive suite of offerings. So thank you and for all of you tuning in. We’ll be back. Next time on the Future of Education.

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