Advancing Economic Mobility Through Postsecondary and Workforce Strategies
Danny Torres in Conversation With Kathy Booth and Randy Tillery
Randy Tillery:
I think it’s important to note what’s happening around the country in terms of labor markets and job growth. We have tens of thousands of new jobs being created in advanced manufacturing and technology industries, and no amount of college graduates are going to fill all those jobs. This is a moment where we need to really reach into the wellspring of human potential, into adult learners, into populations that don’t fit the normal kind of educational paradigm, and figure out how we help those individuals really help fill the gaps in our economy, and therefore, really provide for their families.
Danny Torres:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s leading voices, shaping innovations and applying rigorous research, in ways that help reduce opportunity gaps and build communities where all can thrive. I’m Danny Torres, I’ll be your host.
Education is the engine of economic mobility. It moves communities and individuals forward. But, that engine can stall when students and communities are constrained by structural barriers or disconnected systems. So what can we do to remove these barriers and create greater opportunities for everyone?
The Center for Economic Mobility at WestEd brings together employers, educational institutions, and workforce systems to co-design solutions that meet the needs of both learners and employers. By strengthening linkages between systems, the Center aims to foster greater access to education, job training, and credentials that lead to careers with income stability and opportunities for growth.
Today, we’re here with two leading experts in the field, Kathy Booth and Randy Tillery. As director of WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility, Kathy supports state and national efforts to improve students’ economic outcomes. Kathy’s research focuses on a range of topics, including economic outcomes for community college students. She designs state and longitudinal data systems, and delivers technical assistance on using labor market data to develop stronger pathways to living wages.
Randy Tillery is the director of Economic Mobility and Postsecondary and Workforce Systems at WestEd. He’s also co-director of WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility. He brings more than 25 years of experience building and implementing education, workforce, and community development strategies. His work is grounded in a commitment to building systems that expand economic opportunity for communities and individuals.
Kathy and Randy, it’s great to have you both on the program.
Kathy Booth:
Great to be here.
Randy Tillery:
Thank you.
Danny Torres:
All right. So, what does the labor market look like these days? And from what you’ve both learned through research and work with partners in the field, what are the major barriers to economic mobility for individuals and communities across the country?
Kathy Booth:
Well, I think one of the biggest challenges we have right now is that there’s a narrative about opportunity that doesn’t actually align with the evidence. So, it’s pretty common that I hear people talking about the possibility of engaging in very short-term training, say, take very short-term certificate program or a boot camp, and that this will lead to a job that pays really great wages.
But unfortunately, when we look at the data, that’s not what we see. For example, I’ve been working with another researcher named Peter Riley Bahr, formerly from the University of Michigan, now at Strada, and what he’s been focusing on with me is this question of, when people go to community college and take one or two classes, what happens to them afterwards?
And what we find is that there’s definitely an increase in earnings, way more than you would think for just taking one or two classes. But in truth, most people are only making about $5,000 more per year, so we almost never see that people move from being at a place where they are living in poverty to getting to a living wage, based on that short-term course taking.
And there’s other research. So just today, Burning Glass Institute released something called the Credential Value Index, where they looked at non-degree credentials, so that’s basically anything that you can earn that’s less than a bachelor’s degree, and figuring out who benefits and how much they benefit economically from that short-term training. And what they found is that, you almost never see big earnings gains. Their findings are directly similar to what Peter Bahr and I have found, and that, in fact, the people that tend to benefit from short-term training programs are people that already have academic credentials, which is also consistent with what Peter and I found.
What I am concerned about is that there’s going to be a lot of people who maybe are in high school and about to head out into their adult lives, or people that maybe had a little bit of college and didn’t finish, and they’re going to be told that it’s fine to go into short-term training, but we’re not seeing evidence that that will be sufficient.
That said, it’s also difficult to put a value on some of these short-term training programs when you’re looking at someone in the totality of their life experience. You may have somebody who is in a very unstable job, say, in the retail sector, where they can’t get consistent hours and they don’t have access to benefits. And some of these programs might actually get them into more stable work, which would be an important way forward. So I think that one of our challenges is that we need to figure out ways to help people understand the role that short-term training plays in economic mobility, which may not be what we hear in the media.
Randy Tillery:
One of the challenges is that we have educational systems that run counter to the complexity of people’s actual lives. So there’s this prevailing paradigm of education that presumes an orderly progression from high school and the post-secondary education or college, and then into workforce, and just the more of that college you get, the better off you are. And so, we have a system that’s really designed to best engage someone who was within four years of high school graduation. And what we know is that people’s lives, once you get out of high school and you start to begin to work or other things begin to happen in your lives, they become more and more complex, and that educational systems aren’t really tools up to deal with that complexity for folks who want to go back to education, who really want to realize wage gains later in life, and who may have started out really in a low wage occupation.
And the other piece of this is that it glosses over a number of problems, this sort of idea of this kind of straight linear progression. It discounts the social capital that someone brings with them when they start education based on their family background. It presumes equal value for college attainment, so college becomes the good thing regardless of what you take. It’s got this steady progression model that really only serves a particular customer or client. And it really lacks an understanding of the complexity of people’s actual lives.
So oftentimes, I could be working as a CNA for a number of years trying to raise a family, and I could have a number of barriers that I face in terms of being able to go back to education to engage with it. So there could be the fact that I’m working full-time. I have family obligations. I may have barriers related to literacy, my math skills, English language proficiency. I may have been justice involved, I may have done a little time, and I’m trying to get re-engaged and sort of actually better my life to re-engage with my family and my community. I may not have completed high school. And I may have prior negative experiences in education. And so, with the model that presumes kind of a common customer within, let’s say, 18 to 22 years of age, for people to come back and engage with education again is often extraordinarily difficult. And there’s a lot of disconnected systems they have to engage to be able to do that.
Kathy and I had the fortune to be able to lead this process with the California Governor’s Office around the career education master plan, and we led regional engagement sessions all over the state. And one of the most poignant things someone said is they stood up and they said, well, the challenge for adult learners is, in order for them to actually benefit from what we have to offer them, they have to be an expert in how to navigate all of these different systems that aren’t connected together. So you have this issue with folks having a variety of barriers or things that they need to overcome to get there, and systems that really aren’t aligned to their needs or that actually don’t understand how to serve them once they try to connect.
Danny Torres:
Right. So, given that reality, can you offer some examples of how the Center for Economic Mobility at WestEd works with partners to make change?
Kathy Booth:
So at the ground level, I think we’re trying to help people understand what’s really happening with labor markets and the capacity of people to navigate systems as they’ve been designed. A good example is that when we normally look at decisions about what is a good program or maybe a program that’d be riskier to engage in, we’re looking at this two-dimensional supply and demand model.
So literally, the way that is established is we look at a code that’s associated with your field of study that you got your credential in, and then there’s a different code that’s supposed to be what your job is. And so sometimes that works really well when the name of your major is the same as the name of your job. So nursing, welding, things like that go just fine. But when you start to look at other disciplines that are pretty common, like psychology majors or even business majors, you realize that people could end up in a variety of different occupations. And so, what ends up happening is we think of the choice of major as being all or nothing.
And so sometimes it is. So if you want to be a nurse, so the earlier example that Randy gave with a certified nursing assistant, a CNA, you really have to train in the medical field to be able to become a nurse. You can’t just sort of waltz into that occupation because it’s highly licensed. But if you want to be a manager, there’s a lot of routes that you could get to build those skills, and being a psychology major might be a great way to prepare. In fact, we have evidence by looking at large surveys that are done by the census that a lot of people that are psychology majors end up becoming managers, which makes sense because you learn what motivates people and you learn a lot of things that are valuable in the act of being a manager.
But, if we want to be able to look at labor market supply and demand in a more three-dimensional way, we really have to interject skills into that equation. So for example being able to say to somebody being a psychology major is a good choice if you want to be a manager because you will learn about things like motivation, that’s a very different conversation than if you say, oh, if you’re going to be a psychology major, then you can go be a counselor or a psychiatrist, which loses out a lot of the opportunity that’s there.
So, to some degree, what we’re doing is we are really going in, in a variety of different specific programs, to help people understand what it means to take a three three-dimensional approach. So for example, we’re working with a National Association of Systems heads. So basically, educational institutions are grouped within states. So you might have somebody that’s in charge of, say, all of your four-year institutions, and that’s a system.
So, we are working with systems in a number of states to sit down with them and take a look at the labor market data, and help them make sense of how you would talk to a student about the choice of major that they would choose, how to better engage employers, to be able to design programs that are really related to work, and to work with the workforce system, because one of the things that we know, especially if we want to reengage the adult learners that Randy was describing, is we’re probably going to have to get to the supplemental supports that the workforce system can generate, or the fact that a workforce system could let somebody who is in their fifties who has been laid off figure out where to find training.
So really, part of our three-dimensional model is not only looking at deepening supply and demand analysis, but to think about the partnerships that have to be built, between education, workforce, and employers, to be able to help people navigate from where they are where they have skills to the jobs with the skills that they would like to have, and how do they bridge those gaps.
Randy Tillery:
So as Kathy was pointing out, the labor market data, demographic data, educational data are directional and can take you a long ways, but they’re not sufficient in and of themselves to really, for educators, to kind of transform their practice.
One of the challenges that educators face, particularly in higher education, is they often lack a nuanced understanding of what is going on around them in the communities and with their local employers, that they aren’t actually engaging with the lived experiences of learners in their communities and with employers as they’re trying to grow their workforce and kind of expand their businesses.
So one of the things we do in terms of local practice is we’re trying to de-center the educator, to get them to listen much more closely to the needs and barriers faced by learners who are trying to actually advance their careers and wages and to employers who are really trying to grow their workforce. And so there’s two ways that we kind of do this, one of which is that we’re supporting some really amazing work that’s operating at scale in California right now. So Chancellor Sonia Christian and the California Community College Chancellor’s Office has this vision that the community colleges should be serving adult learners at scale. There should be a line of business for the system really equal to the mission of the colleges in serving learners coming out of high school and helping them transfer to college.
Part of the thesis that she’s really focused on is that if you build these partnerships with these other large-scale organizations who serve adult learners, that that is one way to better understand the needs of learners. So, the two of the partnerships that they created are with the United Domestic Workers and the SEIU United Healthcare Workers Education Fund, which is a Taft-Hartley trust fund.
Danny Torres:
So for listeners who may not know, the SEIU UHW is the Service Employees International Union, United Healthcare Workers West.
Randy Tillery:
So on the one hand the colleges, if they’re grappling with the needs of learners in their communities, they need to be engaging in partnership with organizations that really do understand these communities that are already serving them to build educational models that are better suited to meet the needs of learners. And on the other side, it’s not enough just to understand what’s happening in your local labor market, you actually have to talk to employers. And you have to not just talk to employers or engage them, we talk about employer engagement, but oftentimes educators enter that space not really listening. They’re like, I have a need for X. I need more work-based learning. I need you to validate my curriculum. I need you to hire the people I’m training, rather than helping employers be at the center of the conversation. So what we’re trying to do is center the needs of learners and employers, and have the educators off to the edge working in partnership or in tandem with really their core customers to be able to advance what they’re doing in the educational space.
So, the partnerships that we’re building right now, the United Domestic Workers, is with a consortium of 20 colleges in California. And what we’ve done is, we’re trying to help the college district on how to engage the 171,000 UDW members, who are generally individuals over age 35, many in their fifties, in in-home supportive services or early care occupations, and to engage with employers in their communities to really triangulate the jobs, the people, and the program to be able to build more effective pathways, and that means, oftentimes, redesigning everything, about matriculation, around enrollment, about how you engage learners, and about how you actually listen to learners as they’re coming into education to be able to build more effective pathways for them.
And then the other project that we’re leading on behalf of the Chancellor’s office right now with the Education Fund is really focused on building effective pathways for entry-level healthcare workers to really advance to, from a medical assistant to a licensed vocational nurse, or into Allied Health. And so we’ve been actually organizing listening sessions to put the employers at the center of the room, and have the educators just observing, and then flipping that so then the educators are in the center of the room, the employers are just listening, so that what you have is a moment where educators and employers and labor organizations are working really as co-equal partners in the construction of these pathways, the goal being to kind of create a regional academy system that’s really accessible to all of these entry-level healthcare workers to help them advance their careers rather than having to go figure out what they want to do all on their own.
Kathy Booth:
And what this is really speaking to is the shift in the way education functions in our society. So if you look back at the 20th century, we sort of had a schooled society. And what that means is that the federal government and state governments made enormous investments in institutions that were available to people for free, to do training, largely in the first quarter of their lives. So, that meant creating universal K-12, for example, and then through big investments like, first, the GI Bill, and later, federal financial aid, making it possible to unlock going to college for all sorts of people.
And then what happens as we moved into the 21st century is the needs for training changed. So it used to be that people would prepare for an occupation, and they would probably stay in that same job or a similar job type for a large portion of their career. Well, now we know that people have to move around a lot more over time. They might shift careers because of the job they were doing goes away, or a new opportunity develops that they want to be engaged in. And, we also know that because people are living and working longer, that they are going to have to retrain, because maybe the thing that you’re going to be really great at didn’t even exist when you were 22 years old.
But the problem we have is that we had sort of a tacit agreement that we had state support to pay for this training over time. And we have changed that agreement. So we’re seeing a reduction in funding in K-12. We’re seeing a reduction in funding for higher education. That’s been going on for quite some time with states stepping back from paying for a public four-year and two-year institutions.
And now you have a situation in which the cost of training is largely falling on the learner. And that is very difficult if you happen to be someone that doesn’t have a lot of assets. And so what this does when we’re talking about barriers to economic mobility is, let’s say, that you did get that psychology degree and you didn’t have social capital like Randy was describing. You didn’t know how to explain the value of what you learned. You realized that you didn’t want to go become a psychiatrist and you end up in more of a retail position. You’re now in this place of incredible chaos because most folks in retail don’t know their schedule two weeks in advance, can’t get full-time work, might be on call, and then trying to figure out how to re-engage in an education system that’s still designed for an eighteen-year-old whose primary job is to go to school does not work.
And so, what we need to do is move to a learning society, where we’re understanding that we have to have partnerships. We have to figure out how to spread out the risk. Because right now, we’re just expecting people to stand up and pay for it, and you do see great innovations. You see creative ways that post-secondary institutions are making it possible for people to pay to be able to be in school. You see employers coming up with really innovative training programs. But these are all one-offs. So we’re no longer, as a society, thinking about how do we create the right ecosystem that allows people to be able to learn what they need to so they can make transitions, so that we can fill the skills gaps that we keep hearing from employers are making it difficult to grow prosperity.
Randy Tillery:
I think this deeper engagement of educators with the actual needs of their communities, getting them in the room with learners, getting them in the room with employers, allows educators to center what they do differently. So what we’re seeing right now with the United Domestic Workers Project is a rapid acceleration from just like a few dozen learners to now more and more learners. So we hope to have over a thousand union members in the pipeline by the end of this year, and that could triple next year.
But to do that, the educational institutions have to build that muscle. And so what they need is to be in the room. And what the center does is we are sort of passengers in that room with them. We could go in there and tell them, we think you should build it this way and you should do this, and it’s all going to be fabulous. But really, what, the way it works is if we’re facilitating the conversation. If we’re helping the employer, if we’re asking the employers questions and the educators are listening, and then we’re having them speak to each other to clarify their expectations and needs and really getting the educators to understand that, for this to work, it has to be industry-led. It has to be industry-centered and has to be focused on the deep needs of learners, because they’ve met those learners, and they know who they are, and they’re building long-term enduring partnerships.
I think because education has this sort of self-sufficiency mindset about itself, even where I’ve built really highly effective partnerships like before when I was an independent consultant before I came to Wested, those go on for a while and everyone says there’s a nice program, and then the colleges wander away. They go back to their central job, which is just serving thousands and thousands of students, and they forget the value of the partnerships. What we’re trying to do is transform the thinking of the institutions in ways that allow them to understand that the partnership is not a short-term game, it is the game. That colleges can’t do this by themselves. Educators cannot do this by themselves. They need these other passengers, and it has to be a collective solution.
One of the things I think that we are really, really good at is helping build that collective dialogue. We do it as well. I mean, we know how to be in the room with educators and employers and learners and to build that collective dialogue that actually begins to change practice for educational institutions so they just don’t revert to the mean.
Kathy Booth:
Another example of a project that we’re just about to kick off is that, there’s places where, in almost every labor market, you have a large number of people in a low wage occupation where there’s a related better paid occupation, but there is no educational pathway to get there.
So I’ll give you an example out of education, which is that early childhood education is an area where you have community colleges training thousands of people every single year. And that is a critical job, to be able to allow people to work, to make sure that young people get off on a good start. But there’s also opportunities where people who might start out in early care, maybe when their kids are little and that is a way for them to both take care of their own children and work, who might then want to be moving on to working in an elementary school where they might have more opportunities. That’s a union-protected environment. You’re going to be paid a lot more money if you get your way up to be an elementary education specialist of some sort or a teacher.
And so, the problem is that there’s no pathway to get there, because you have to have a bachelor’s degree plus a credential to be able to teach in an elementary school, and to be an early childhood educator, that can be like just six or seven classes. And so, what we actually are going to be doing is building the pathways that get you from early childhood, that recognize all of the skills that early childhood workers have related to human development, related to really raising children that will thrive, and then making sure that they have educational opportunities that wouldn’t normally be available to them to get to that next place.
Another pathway that we want to build is that, I mentioned earlier that the retail sector is one that has a lot of insecurity, but if you can get to first-line supervisor, you get to a job that has a lot more stability. And so, we’re going to be looking at a number of different occupations where people might be on the floor, in essence, like doing the baseline work, and then figuring out ways to make sure that they can get to that supervisor role.
Part of this though is to recognize, as Randy said, and really underscore it, educators can’t just teach their way out of this problem. We have to be engaging employers. And that also means that we have to help employers understand different ways to hire than they have in the past.
So there’s this big idea out there right now called skills first or skills-based hiring, which is the idea that employers will move away from academic credentials, especially bachelor’s degrees, and look instead at the capabilities of a candidate, to make sure that they’re hiring based on where those skills actually lie.
So the challenge is that, a lot of employers don’t actually know how to engage in skills first hiring. So somebody sends you a resume, how do you know what skills they actually have? So one of the things that we’ve been doing in Nevada is actually working to develop a way to support employers to change the way they hire. So for example, we help them figure out how to write a job description that is based on the skills that you need to do the job, and then how to go through the interview and vetting process to be able to bring people on board based on skills and not just degrees.
Danny Torres:
From what you and Randy have discussed so far, it sounds like our systems are in need of some changes to better reflect the fact that people are living and working longer. So, how can our education systems adapt to this reality, so our systems better serve communities?
Randy Tillery:
So, one of the things we have to get much better at is helping people access education for what they need when they need it, not presuming they’re going to enter education at some point, and they’re going to go along until they’re done, and then maybe come back again later on to get a little bit more. That people are going to have different needs, so this speaks to this idea of becoming a learning society, that we have to have educational systems that are flexible enough to engage with someone whatever phase of life they’re in, to help them get to that next step in their educational journey, to get to either that next credential or that next job.
One thing we know is that people vote with their feet, and that the pathways that we create that are so nice and orderly or things that we created that are very logical for us, but actually don’t reflect the lived experience of people’s needs as they evolve over their lifetime.
So once again, I mean going back to the person with the CNA, they should just go be able to get that credential. The system should be aligned. So whether they go to the job center, whether they go to the adult school, whether they go to the community college, that these things are connected in ways that allow them to understand the next piece of education they can get that’s going to advance their wages and advance their career. It might not take them straight to that great paying job, but it might take them to a better paying job, because people’s wages and their lives and their careers evolve over their lifetime.
The challenge is that the systems we have that are most flexible, like adult education, like the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act-funded training programs, like even community college CTE programs, are the most marginalized systems in education. So they sort of occupy this corner space for adults, basically in the shadow of these vast educational systems serving primary, secondary and post-secondary education students at scale, so the systems that really should be serving them don’t really understand how to get them what they need, and they don’t know how to engage them when they come back.
One of the biggest challenges we have found in the United Demonstration Workers Training Project is that colleges just don’t know how to assess people for what they need. That if it doesn’t fit into what they already have or what they already offer…so colleges will be like, oh, I have a program for you, like they’re just going to go do this program, but they don’t know how to assess them for if they need childcare, if they need transportation, if there’s other kind of supports they need, about how they fold in supports provided by the union, and how they get them into a program that might need to be somehow customized so they can get there quickly.
The one thing about adult learners is they can’t afford to do extended educational sequences. If you tell someone it’s going to take you a year and a half to become a medical assistant going full time, it’s just too long. They don’t have that much time to spend out of their day, unless it’s in a shorter sequence. So we need to figure out how we build pathways in ways that really accelerate learners to that next step, which also builds the value proposition for them for what education can deliver. Because if I’m a medical assistant or if I’m a CNA and you tell me, hey, you just need to go back to college, that’s just not a value proposition by itself. The value proposition is in the next job I’m going to get that’s going to help me make an extra $10 an hour, which is going to be the difference between food insecurity and food security in my household.
Danny Torres:
So with all this talk about the nonlinear pathways people take, what did each of you major in and how does that relate to your work?
Randy Tillery:
We both majored in workforce and economic development and higher education pathways.
Kathy Booth:
Well, I can start. So, I was a women’s studies major and a theater minor. And I can recall that when I was in college, somebody asked me what I was going to do. And I said, why, I’m going to subvert the dominant paradigm, of course. And someone who was standing next to me was like, she’s going to be a teacher, because how else could you explain what I was going to do with that degree?
But what’s really funny to me is, so one of the things that I do is I build data systems. And I was talking to a bunch of other people that have done fairly unusual things with data that made it more available to educators in particular for decision-making. And we discovered that the group of us had three women’s studies majors. And my thought was, maybe part of this is because sharing data is really a language issue. And what you study when you’re in women’s studies is how is it that we talk about the things that are important to us and how do things get encoded in different ways so that some people know what’s going on and other people might use a different way to explain the same concept. So, I don’t know, I think that my non-traditional major was one that caused me to look at these issues differently. And when I first encountered educators feeling uncomfortable with labor market information and not understanding what was expected of their students, it resonated because I didn’t follow a path that was linear.
Randy Tillery:
Well, I like to describe myself as being of the “raised by wolves” school of college and career readiness. I’m first generation college in my family. My parents were like first generation high school out of the California Central Valley in Modesto, California, and my parents just didn’t know what to do with me. I was a smart kid, but it was the 70s so I was also kind of bumping around and doing those kinds of devotees kinds of things. And I really literally went to seven different colleges over time before I actually went to graduate school and got a graduate degree.
But the other sort of really throughput of my life was that I grew up two blocks from a YMCA. And so I was bumping around in the streets of Modesto, I decided I wanted to go to summer camp when I was eight, and I went to summer camp and stayed there for 22 years. And so, I really became just obsessed with this idea of this, because I worked at summer camp, saw many people show up and they create a culture and they create an environment and people learn from participation in that. So of course, I became an anthropologist, because I was really concerned about systems and culture and people, and I really feel like that, although I had no idea I was going to work in education or educational consulting, I thought I was going to go be a professor like so many other people in graduate school do.
Really, Kathy would tell you, I’m obsessed with culture and systems and how systems come together and how they transform. So it had, in some ways, very little to do with what I ended up doing professionally, but in other ways, it really had everything to do with it.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you for sharing your stories. Those are really great examples of nonlinear pathways. Do you have any last thoughts for our listeners?
Randy Tillery:
I think it’s important to note what’s happening around the country in terms of labor markets and job growth, that we have tens of thousands of new jobs being created in advanced manufacturing and technology industries, and no amount of college graduates are going to fill all those jobs. That this is a moment where we need to really reach into the wellspring of human potential, into adult learners, into populations that don’t fit the normal kind of educational paradigm, and figure out how we help those individuals really help fill the gaps in our economy, and therefore, really provide for their families. There’s so many things that we know about the value of adult learners. We know that childhood educational outcomes are so dependent upon the family’s income and the mother’s highest level of education. We should be doubling down on adult learners as an opportunity for not only helping really deal with the economic needs we face, but also with really better supporting children’s and families in ways that we wouldn’t normally think of.
Kathy Booth:
I think that really fits into our 3D model for labor market information, because we really want everyone to start by thinking about, who are the people in our communities, and what are their skills? We’re so used to talking about the skills gap as if there’s nobody out there that knows how to do the things that employers need. And I think, in fact, the issue is more that we haven’t figured out a good way to translate between what it is that people know how to do and what would really make it easier for employers to deliver what they are hoping to do in their communities.
And that if we focus more on just where the gaps are between what people already know how to do and what might be needed for a job, especially as jobs are changing with AI, with shifts and where we’re going to be focusing resources in this country. And so, I think that taking that asset approach might make this feel really exciting and think about the opportunity that everybody, not just educators, but also employers and community-based organizations and parents can play in helping see the value of the people that are right here ready to do good work.
Danny Torres:
And how can our listeners find you online?
Kathy Booth:
So we have a website that is part of the WestEd family of websites, and so that URL is economic-mobility.wested.org. And if you go here, you’ll find a whole slew of examples of very tangible ways that we’ve been able to partner with different types of institutions to help create those stronger pathways and those robust partnerships, that make it possible to make that connection between people and jobs.
Oh, and I would also highly recommend, I’ve got one blog post on there that’s called The Seven Deadly Sins of Educational Reform, that sort of lays out some of those ideas of things that we do by accident in education that we could probably do a little differently.
Danny Torres:
Great. We’ll drop links to the Center for Economic Mobility website and to your blog post in our show notes. Thank you, Kathy and Randy, for being on the program, and thank you to all our listeners for joining us today. You can find this and past episodes of the Leading Voices podcast online at wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast, or on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, iHeart, and Spotify.
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