State Strategies for Sustaining and Scaling Grades 9-14 Career Pathways: Toward a Policy Set for Pathways to Prosperity

This brief begins with a discussion of the composition of state leadership teams and organizing structures for supporting a Pathways to Prosperity Network initiative, and then describes effective strategies currently at play in the network states for jumpstarting work in the regions. It goes on to review state policies that support 9-14 collaborations, including dual enrollment, career and technical education policy, and funding. The 9-14 career pathways policy lever is well developed as a result of extensive work by several organizations, including Jobs for the Future (JFF), which has a decade of experience in high school-to-post-secondary transitions that incorporate dual enrollment. JFF has also developed a specific 9-14 policy set to support Early College Designs. The organization has led the Early College High School Initiative nationally since 2002. The paper then becomes more speculative. In the sections on career advising, employer engagement, and intermediaries, the paper lists and briefly describes policies that could be deployed in the service of 9-14 career pathways development, but are not currently widespread or designed specifically to support 9-14 career pathways. These sections are shorter, and while they do include some examples, they also point in new directions that might be explored and raise questions about where state-level policies are needed and where regional and local decision making are more effective. [This paper was produced with the Pathways to Prosperity Network, a collaboration of states, Jobs for the Future, and the Pathways to Prosperity Project at Harvard Graduate School of Education.]