Good morning, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share with you a Contributor Column from Pagee Cheung, the co-founder and, after 13 years, the outgoing Co-Executive Director of MESA Charter High Schools in Brooklyn, New York as she has taken her talents out west to California.
Pagee is now going on to found and serve as the Executive Director of the College Persistence Coalition. We provide a bio for Pagee below.
Pagee Cheung is the co-founder of MESA Charter High Schools, a network of standalone charter high schools in Brooklyn, NY. Since opening its doors in 2013, MESA has celebrated a 94% graduation rate and set academic standards that sent students to Ivy Leagues and other elite institutions while leading cutting edge work in career-connected learning and postsecondary pathways. MESA founded Alumni Lab in 2021, a program that now helps over 200 opportunity youth from district and charter schools across the city access career mobility by providing them with the necessary skills to successfully re-enroll back into college or enter workforce programs. Pagee is also the founder of the College Persistence Coalition, which runs Innovation Design Labs between K-12 and higher education leaders to pilot innovative solutions that increase college persistence and graduation rates. She has authored articles in the 74 Million, Chalkbeat, and Crain’s. She received her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Biotechnology through the University of Southern California and her Master of Arts in Secondary Mathematics Education through Teachers College, Columbia University.
Long time CharterFolk readers will remember Pagee from the Contributor Column she co-wrote in 2021 with Arthur Samuels, the co-founder of MESA. Great to have you back, Pagee!
The Revolutionary Next Step in Education Reform Might Just Be Too Obvious
As every organization contemplates the reverberations caused from shifts in the US Department of Education and the rapid gutting of long-standing institutional supports, the education sector stands at an inflection point. The recent bombshell NAEP report laid bare what educators have long known: the pandemic exacerbated deep systemic inequities and we have yet to regain lost ground. Across the country, we are seeing significant drops in reading and math proficiency, with lower performing students disproportionately suffering the steepest declines in decades. This means that many of our students are graduating high school unprepared for the academic rigors and socioemotional demands of college, and higher education institutions are spinning their wheels and struggling to adapt in real time.
The postsecondary landscape for young people has undergone seismic shifts in the last few years. Incredibly impactful investments have been made into workforce development with amazing results, leading many to openly question the value of a college degree for our students. However, quality middle-skill workforce programs are not infinitely scalable by nature and have become increasingly selective. Realistically, a student has a far better shot at getting into college than coveting a seat in a high-quality training program.
Moreover, in a post-AI world, entry level jobs are undergoing major market fluctuations, causing employers to be much more risk-averse to hiring nontraditional applicants than they have in prior years. At the end of the day, the leading factor for economic mobility for low-income students is still, by far, the attainment of a bachelor’s degree. This leads me to plead my case: the pendulum has swung too far. Of course, investing in equitable non-college career pathways is, without a doubt, crucial. So many groundbreaking workforce pathways have emerged in the last few years that have completely transformed my students’ lives. But by sheer volume, we are still matriculating the majority of our students into college after high school graduation, so we need to invest time, energy, and resources to rebuild a higher education system reeling from these complex changes, too.
What we need now is not an “either-or” binary that forces educators to choose between prioritizing college or workforce programs but a comprehensive postsecondary approach that adequately prepares our students to make these decisions for themselves. We need robust and diverse middle-skill non-traditional career pathways and colleges and universities that are responsive to the student experience in this current economy and job market.
Instead of conceding to the conclusion that a college degree is no longer worth it, how can we reimagine the way that K-12 and higher education systems strategically collaborate to make college pathways more meaningful and valuable for our future workforce generation? The drop in NAEP scores send us a loud and urgent warning: work together to build a cohesive 9-16-career continuum that eliminates the disjointed handoffs that simply aren’t working or prepare ourselves for a widening achievement and income gap.
The College Persistence Coalition (CPC) convenes district and charter high schools with colleges across NYC to do just that–find innovative and sustainable ways to leverage the existing infrastructures within the K-12 and higher education systems to ensure that 1) our students persist through college at a higher rate and 2) our students are leaving college with the skills necessary to gain meaningful employment.
Getting high schools and colleges to talk to one another about how to attain mutually beneficial outcomes seems blatantly obvious. But as a high school educator of nearly two decades I’ve never gotten to problem solve or share feedback with my higher education counterparts, and that is true for many of my peers. CPC aims to change that.
Lessons Learned from Alumni Lab
As Co-Executive Director of MESA Charter High School, I saw these realities first-hand. On paper, we checked all the boxes. Our top-quartile students were heading to Ivy League schools and competitive institutions with full rides, we outperformed our state and district peers on NY state Regents exams, and we consistently boasted above 93% graduation rate in the lowest performing district in NYC.
Beneath that top quartile was a different story. The postsecondary fate of the students in the “mighty middle” were less predictable and more discouraging. We saw that our students were dropping out of college at an alarming rate, and that trend was exacerbated by the pandemic. We also realized that there wasn’t anything in the educational ecosystem that served our students who were floundering in “no man’s land.” They were no longer high school students, but they also were no longer college students. There was a void in accountability for this group of out-of-school, out-of-work (or underemployed) “disconnected youth,” so my co-founding partner Arthur Samuels and I decided to create Alumni Lab, an intensive cohort program designed to help students enter a workforce program or rematriculate back into college through workshops that covered topics like career navigation, professional communication skills, and growth mindset.
We started by serving 40 MESA alumni in 2021 and now serve 200 young people from over 65 district and charter high schools across NYC. Our success rates are impressive–71% of Alumni Lab graduates persist through their first year in college or complete their workforce training program. We’ve also learned a lot from embarking on this journey with our participants in the last few years. Some of the lessons learned:
- Not all workforce programs are created equal. There are truly exceptional programs and there are poorly run programs. We found that low-skill jobs training programs which lead to minimal growth opportunities were easier for students to get into, but we needed to be discerning about employment conversion and pay rate. Middle-skill programs that yield career mobility and financial security have become more competitive. Depending on industry, some landed jobs with great pay, benefits, and a pathway to financial independence while others suffered the opportunity cost of time and income for longer intensive training programs only for employers to favor more traditional candidates with college degrees.
- High schools, colleges and workforce programs who collaborated with us had significantly better outcomes. When we shifted the paradigm to committing to shared vision and results for our collective students they thrived. We problem-solved through attendance issues, gave programmatic feedback, and adapted curriculum through the community that we’ve built.
- Colleges have been incredibly receptive to and eager for feedback. When a student drops out of college, information on how the college could have done better leaves with them. Colleges are keenly aware that enrollment is steadily dropping and the key to retaining students is adapting to K-12 schools and employers.
These insights sparked an idea: what if we took the treasure trove of information we learned from students about why they dropped out of college, shared the information with colleges, and teamed up with them to help our students persist? If we preemptively worked together to create systems change that led to student success, we would broaden our impact and Alumni Lab wouldn’t need to exist on the back end.
The College Persistence Coalition Model
Unlike broader top-down, district-level initiatives that might take a long time for actionable results, CPC’s two-pronged design lab and practicum model is specifically focused on short bursts of innovative ideation of prototype solutions generated by teams of high schools and colleges seeking to address common pain points for their organizations. These prototypes get shaped into year-long action research pilots that foster synergistic collaboration between high schools and colleges to problem solve, share feedback and data, and learn together to form proof points that can then be shared within the broader K-12 and higher education communities for replication.
There are no shortcuts to bridging the gap between institutions that have been siloed in our own echo chambers for years. We need to put in the work. There is no quicker way to build organizational trust than to experience shared success in the initiatives we deem most valuable to the young people we collectively serve.
The quarterly Innovation Design Lab convenings focus on three key barriers to college persistence: 1) curriculum and instructional pedagogy, 2) socioemotional development and mental health, and 3) career core competencies. Through the incredible insights from our first CPC Design Lab, three CUNY schools will be piloting year-long initiatives in those key areas with DOE and charter high schools this coming year–LaGuardia Community College, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College.
What’s special about this approach is that instead of waiting for larger, multi-million-dollar systems-wide initiatives to trickle down, we are asking high schools and colleges to pool together and line up resources so that we are working smarter with what already exists. With the backdrop of volatility in funding streams for all educational organizations, the CPC model fosters the creation of long-term, sustainable infrastructure that doesn’t require huge monetary infusions to keep alive.
What’s Next for CPC
Beyond continuing to bring together senior level stakeholders in both K-12 and higher education, this year’s Innovation Design Labs will feature the inclusion of current and former college students, employers and workforce partners from diverse industries, and high school teachers and college faculty so that their voices are amplified in this collaborative process. If you are interested in learning more about our model or think your organization can benefit from membership in our coalition, please reach out and share your story!