1. How did district leaders envision the scope and goals of career-connected learning (CCL), and how did they enact this framework districtwide?
2. To what extent did student participation patterns reflect district leaders’ goals for CCL?
This is the first report from a two-phase study of career readiness opportunities in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) by the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative (IWERC) and the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. This report lays the groundwork for understanding equity of access to career readiness opportunities in Chicago. Forthcoming reports from this series will look at the outcomes related to participation.
This landscape study describes CPS’s vision and enactment of “career-connected learning” (CCL), a framework initiated in 2017, which aims to unify college preparatory and career readiness activities districtwide. Chicago is one of many districts in Illinois and nationally working to establish and implement a modern CCL framework. These efforts have largely outpaced research and community knowledge on the current state of career readiness opportunities in high schools. Our study begins to fill these gaps using novel district data which includes, not only student participation in career and technical education (CTE), but also on work-based learning (WBL) and advising activities, including the district’s Learn.Plan.Succeed. (LPS) Initiative, combined with interviews, document reviews, and student responses to the 5Essentials Survey.
Key Findings
This landscape study found that district leaders focused on two key strategies to evolve CCL:
Strengthening existing high school CTE programs, in which participation has been relatively stable over time.
- The district’s 32 CTE programs of study across 12 career clusters vary across high schools, with some schools offering one or no CTE programs of study and others offering five or more. CTE programs of study are more commonly offered in schools located on the city’s south and west sides.
- District leaders have concentrated CCL resources in a subset of schools that offer numerous CTE programs of study, aiming to optimize investments in CTE program quality and student supports by directing them to schools with strong and established CTE commitments.
- The district has expanded access to CTE pathway-aligned college and career learning opportunities.
- Through credit articulation agreements with the City Colleges of Chicago, the district has increased the number of CTE courses that students can take for dual credit. Indeed, most students who have enrolled in CTE also have participated in college-level coursework, such as dual credit, dual enrollment, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate courses. However, CTE students have slightly lower participation than non-CTE students in AP coursework.
- Though the district intends to expand access to WBL, the vast majority of WBL participants have so far been CTE students whose participation was embedded into their CTE programming.
Establishing a districtwide CCL framework, unifying existing initiatives and systems to increase coherence for students from grades 6 through 12.
- Through the district's Learn.Plan.Succeed. (LPS) initiative, students track their completion of college and career exploration and preparation milestones via an Individualized Learning Plan. The district has established software, curricula, and advising frameworks to monitor and support LPS, making it a promising system for organizing college and career advising across students over time.
- LPS requires that students select one of six post-secondary pathways by grade 12 and provide evidence of their post-secondary plan in order to graduate. Regardless of pathway selection, all students must complete the FAFSA and apply to at least one college.
- College (two-year or four-year) was the most prevalent selection among CTE and non-CTE students alike. CTE students were less likely to select four-year college and more likely to select two-year than non-CTE students, but these differences narrowed between the graduating classes of 2020 and 2024.
- Approximately 13% of students selected non-degree options, such as employment, trade school, certificate programs, and military enlistment, which the district refers to as NEXT (Non-degree, Enlistment, eXperience, and Trades) pathways.
Two forthcoming reports from the first phase of the study will focus on participation and student outcomes. The second phase of the study will focus on the district’s 23 CCL-centric high schools, which are designed to provide students with a comprehensive and coherent career-connected learning experience, examining effects on student outcomes.
This project, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences Career and Technical Education Research Network 2.0, is part of a broader research collective tasked with describing the landscape of career readiness opportunities across the U.S. and the impact of those opportunities on student outcomes.
