From The Aurora Institute - 14 Recommendations For More Equitable Education
In late October, the Aurora Institute released a book entitled A Promise for Equitable Futures: Enabling Systems Change to Scale Educational and Economic Mobility Pathways. The Aurora Institute’s mission is to ‘drive the transformation of education systems and accelerate the advancement of breakthrough policies and practices to ensure high-quality learning for all’.
In this book, the authors call on state leaders (governors, legislators, and executives) to actualize The Learner Promise: ‘a series of policy and structural changes that mean every learner will exist within a supportive and personalized ecosystem, in which they have access to a universal system of pathways’. The book includes 14 recommendations on how a paradigm shift can be made to the current education system which was designed over 100 years ago:
Organize and coordinate state-level and regional pathways by creating shared governance structures.
Streamline and align planning, funding, and accountability to support cooperative action across sectors.
Develop integrated, transparent, and learner-centered data systems, including a universal learner record, to support cross-sector coordination and empower learner agency.
Build a knowledge-sharing ecosystem by facilitating structures for shared learning, improvement, and sense-making.
Stimulate innovation and create incentives that can help regions develop and oversee pathway systems.
Build infrastructure that enables continuity of learning from K-12 through employment.
Enable anywhere anytime learning.
Redesign curriculum and assessment to support universal pathways.
Invest in innovative, robust, and relevant systems of learner development and advisement.
Support and scale innovative approaches to school and program design.
Support and scale innovations that modernize, diversify, and prepare the teacher workforce.
Engage diverse stakeholders to share stories and experiences.
Invest in research, learning, and engagement efforts that build knowledge, will, and collective capacity to create universal pathways.
Advocate for policy and systemic solutions that will promote social and economic equity.
With these recommendations, the authors say that states could disrupt inequalities experienced by students of color and low-income students in order to boost their educational access, engagement, and attainment. The recommendations would shift education away from formal institutions with linear, time-bound learning sequences to a learning ecosystem. Such an ecosystem would be responsive and customized to the learner – enabling them to navigate pathways across schools, workplaces, and communities while working toward a purposeful, living-wage career.
The book also summarizes that in order to navigate these learning pathways, students must develop an occupational identity: ‘their vision of who they want to be in the workforce based on their interests and perceived abilities’. The authors suggest that by adolescence or earlier, students must have equitable access to career exploration that is free of biased stereotypes and media messages. Couragion is honored to be highlighted in the book as an innovative career exploration solution that helps students to develop occupational identity in STEM. The author’s cite how Couragion, with its diverse career role models, is positively moving the needle to improve the awareness and perception of STEM careers among students of color and females.
You may learn more about the 14 recommendations and Couragion’s solution by downloading the book. In addition, you may register to attend the Aurora Institute’s December 3rd webinar where the authors, Dr. Katherine Casey and Susan Patrick, will discuss the book’s findings.
