The Arizona Partnership for Education and Career Success (APECS) was formed to provide practitioners, policymakers, and education leaders in Arizona with technical assistance and research support to achieve the state’s goal of ensuring that 60 percent of Arizonans aged 25 and older have a postsecondary certificate or 2- or 4-year college degree by 2030. REL West provides APECS partners with coaching to develop their capacity for cross-sector collaboration and data use in service of advancing college and career readiness (CCR) for students across the state. As part of this effort, school, district, and community partners within the Flagstaff area have been working with REL West to coordinate CCR strategies, community interest, and data-driven inquiry for a shared college and career agenda.
Alliance Objectives
Objectives for the APECS alliance include:
- Increasing state and district leaders’ knowledge and understanding of effective practices in data sharing and education and career planning implementation
- Increasing school, district, and community engagement for CCR programming and aligning initiatives to improve students’ education and career outcomes
- Supporting data use to drive college and career readiness strategic decision-making and to track student progress
- Increasing the number of high school graduates within the Flagstaff community who are prepared to succeed in their choice of college or career
Resources
Projects
Understanding Arizona's Education and Career Action Plan (ECAP) Landscape
This coaching project built foundational knowledge across a wide audience of stakeholders about the status of student postsecondary and career planning through the state’s Education and Career Action Plan (ECAP) initiative. The ECAP initiative began in 2008, requiring that all Arizona students in grades 9–12 maintain portfolios that include current coursework, career aspirations, and extended learning opportunities, to be completed prior to graduation. REL West staff created a resource to enhance understanding of the literature on cross-sector education and career collaboration, including implications for strengthening partnerships and programs around data use for ECAPs; mapped the data-sharing landscape in Arizona to help partners identify opportunities for collaboration and to make better use of existing data in developing and improving their ECAP work; and explored the successes and challenges related to ECAP implementation at three high school sites: Flagstaff, San Luis, and Casa Grande Union. REL West staff and APECS presented lessons learned around ECAP implementation, cross-sector collaboration, and data sharing efforts to a broader audience of education and career stakeholders at two Arizona conferences in April and June of 2018.
Education and Career Planning Coaching for Data Use and Student Support
As part of a multi-year coaching project, REL West provides coaching to APECS school, district, and community partners in Flagstaff, Arizona to improve the design and delivery of college and career readiness (CCR) programming and related student supports. The project supports data collection and data use for progress monitoring, goal setting, and improving student outcomes relative to CCR. Four strands of work guide the project:
- Inquiry: Building systems of data-driven school inquiry to inform college and career planning
- Strategy: Supporting district and school leadership in the development and implementation of college and career readiness strategies
- Collaboration: Strengthening community collaboration in support of school and district college and career readiness activities
- Dissemination: Sharing and scaling what is learned about college and career readiness to stakeholders across Arizona
Recent results from this ongoing work include school leadership establishing a CCR vision and goals, systematically understanding and organizing data to inform college and career readiness initiatives, the creation of a data inventory and template to guide partners through a data inquiry process, and collaboration with district and community partners to understand available data and opportunities for CCR alignment and shared activities.
“As educators we often get stuck in the educator mindset and have difficulty looking at data or creating solutions from other perspectives. The consultation work has allowed us to develop strategic change rather than getting stalled in an educational dilemma.”
“Our partnership with REL West is making a huge impact and other members of our organization are now feeling the momentum. Other organizational leaders are emerging, and they are creatively helping us to support and further the mission. None of this would have happened without the framework and ‘nudges’ that we have gotten through our REL-West partnership.”
Connecting Education and Career Planning to Student Outcomes
Arizona stakeholders want to know more about how education and career planning may influence college going and other long-term outcomes of interest. While encouraging evaluation local to Arizona, REL West also identified a national dataset that could be analyzed to address Arizona’s research questions about planning and results.
Using a national dataset, a correlational study examined the relationships between students’ participation in three core elements of education and career planning during high school and their subsequent attainment of key outcomes associated with the transition to college.
Partners
The Arizona Partnership for Education and Career Success includes school, district, and community leadership in Flagstaff, Arizona; key staff at the Arizona Department of Education; state and community leaders from the Arizona Career Leadership Network; and advisors and other education advocacy and support organizations from across the state.