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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Another good thing about Michael Hill moderating those gubernatorial debates, you New Jersey listeners will get to see what he looks like if you tune in. Coming up in the next couple of weeks, Michael Hill co-moderating those gubernatorial debates. Can't wait. Well, now, we continue our series about making a good living without a college degree.

To recap, and we've just got two of these to go today and tomorrow, we've talked about alternative pathways across sectors into the workforce for people who don't have or can't get or don't want four-year degrees. We've also talked about how some employers and policymakers are pushing for skills-based hiring, recognizing what someone can do, not just where and for how long they went to school, we talked about this yesterday, at the level of policy because there are people in various states trying to get policies enacted where they can't have a four-year college degree requirement automatically if it doesn't relate to the job.

Today, we turn our attention specifically to changes inside the K-12 public school system, reorienting in some ways to do better for students like that and the supports available to youth and young adults outside of the school system, especially those who may be out of school and out of work. My guest today, we're very happy to have Jane Martinez Dowling, who is the chief of Student Pathways at the New York City Department of Education, and Marjorie Parker, president and CEO of JobsFirstNYC, an organization driving economic and employment opportunities for young people by connecting a network of over 200 partner agencies. Jane and Marjorie, welcome to WNYC.

Marjorie Parker: Thank you for having me, Brian.

Jane Martinez Dowling: Hi, Brian, nice to hear from you.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, let me start with you. The city of New York, the Education Department, offers programs like FutureReadyNYC, youth apprenticeships, and what you call early college. Can you give us a snapshot of what's available to students now and how they find out about it that may be different from in the past?

Jane Martinez Dowling: Sure. First of all, thank you so much for having us. We are really excited about the work that we have been doing on our pathways team and really across all of New York City public schools. Specifically, the FutureReadyNYC model really started about between 2021 and 2023. That was really building the foundation that was very research-based, which you have alluded to earlier in your conversation and in some of the other folks that you have had on that the world of work is changing and really changing fast.

The skills that are needed for a given job have already shifted by 25% in the last 10 years since 2015. They're actually expected to double by 2027, and yet 70% of US employers cite a skills gap in the workforce and many can't find the talent that they need. We are saying that in addition to academic excellence, which is what schools do and what families and parents are expected of our schools to do, we also really want to have a strong plan for education after high school.

Given the rapidly evolving nature of work, students also need real skills and work experience to give them a head start on their future path. FutureReady was founded a couple of years ago with that research in mind and it's based with five components. One is personalized advising, where we are identifying career destination and knowing that those with high school that have helped chart paths forward have a 1.3 times more likely to report that their kids are thriving, their students are thriving.

The second part is career-connected instruction. Career preparation is really powerful. The more, the better. Respondents that we've worked with that have had nine or more experiences reported an 8% boost in income. The third piece is that we are really starting to work with our higher education folks to ensure that there are early credits and credentials while we still have our students in our classrooms. Professional certificates differently boost outcomes at every education level, but only 10% of the survey of the students that we did on the internal research have completed them. We really need to increase that while we still have our students.

The fourth component is work-based learning. We have scaffolded that to ensure that we're providing internship experiences aligned with career interests, which are particularly impactful. We are starting with first having apprenticeship opportunities and career exploration and ultimately leading to paid experiences. Then finally, the fifth piece, which is the final piece of the FutureReady model all in is we are trying to make sure that kids are having an opportunity to really understand financial literacy, finance, and life skills because that has shown that three times more likelihood that they have access to supports that they need in having financial literacy education.

Brian Lehrer: It's interesting about all of that, certainly about the interns, which people may associate more with college students than high school students. We happen to have a New York City public high school intern right now working with the show this term. They're doing a great job and just to say yay for high school internships where appropriate. I want to play a clip for you. Here's a call we got in a previous segment in this series. It's from Mike in Queens, who used to be the principal of Bayside High School in Queens, where, as it happens, I went to high school. As you may know, so did Mayor Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. Here's a little bit of what former Principal Mike in Queens had to say.

Mike: One thing you had asked about was where these stars are coming from. It might interest you to know that your old high school, Bayside, has converted from everybody goes to college to career and technical education, where the kids now graduate with college credits, but they also get professional certifications. They have digital media, art, music production and recording, cybersecurity programming, personal training. Then one person earlier, they also have nonprofit management, which includes grant writing and grant research. It's a situation where the kids are given choices. They could start their career right out of high school or do the college route. Either way.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Well, I wish I was in high school when Mike was principal. If I got sent to the principal's office, I might have had an interesting conversation with him. Seriously, Jane, what do you think hearing Mike? In the context of your first answer and how fast the skills are changing that are needed in the workplace, how can Bayside or any other school keep up with that? Classically, education bureaucracies move pretty slowly. If the skills that are needed to be trained for are changing that fast, how can you and the schools keep up?

Jane Martinez Dowling: The FutureReady model, we are trying to scale that up as quickly as we possibly can. In 2023, we had 33 high schools that we started. We enrolled 4,000 students across those 33 high schools to do the program. This year, we're ending working with 15,000 students at 135 high schools. Our real goal is that by 2030, 100,000 students are going to be in career pathways in all of our New York City high schools.

We are really scaling FutureReady to ensure that every year, we have at least 50 new schools in the program that there's high-quality program implementation that we increase the numbers of employers and folks like yourselves who are taking interns to work with them to get that high-quality work-based learning. In addition to that, we understand that the FutureReady model is really focused on a high school, but this is also something that we are doing. It's pathways, right? We have to do it across the entire continuum.

We're working closely with our literacy folks in the New York City Reads and New York City Solves as well as our computer science work that we're doing to build computational thinking. It's a two-pronged approach. We are really putting in this bold futures agenda by ensuring that all kids have the foundational skills that they need to succeed in workforce and also building out this very specific FutureReady agenda to support as many students as possible and to sustain it across all the changes that are happening both in the workforce and in our city.

Brian Lehrer: Marjorie Parker, president and CEO of JobsFirstNYC. For listeners who may not know JobsFirstNYC, why don't you introduce us to your work briefly and who your programs are designed to support?

Marjorie Parker: Thank you, Brian, for that interesting conversation about career-connected learning in school. If I sound a little bit groggy, I'm suffering from some jet lag. I just ran the London Marathon-

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Marjorie Parker: -and got back last night.

Jane Martinez Dowling: Congratulations.

Marjorie Parker: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: You're finished?

Marjorie Parker: I finished, which is the important thing. I run for a group called New York Roadrunners Club Team for Kids New York that helps to support after-school activities around sports-

Brian Lehrer: Was it raining?

Marjorie Parker: -that a lot of young people need here in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: It was London. Was it raining?

Marjorie Parker: It wasn't raining, Brian. It was actually very hot.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs]

Marjorie Parker: The folks there are so gracious and they had plenty of water on the course. It was just fun to see a lot of folks from across the planet running for their various causes. It was wonderful to run through the various neighborhoods and understand who people are, where they live, and what happens in the places where they live. Similar to when we run the New York City Marathon, run across the five boroughs.

Brian Lehrer: That's great. Hot in London in April. I believe that's why they moved the New York City Marathon from October to the first weekend in November because with global warming, it was just becoming too hot too many years on the older date. All right. Now, tell us about JobsFirstNYC.

Marjorie Parker: As you mentioned, it's JobsFirstNYC. We are a workforce intermediary. What that means is that we help communities by developing, testing, and scaling innovative economic solutions. We work across sectors like government such as the New York City public school, philanthropy, nonprofit, and the private sector, especially private sector employers, and with about 200-plus institutions across New York City to collaborate on increasing economic opportunities and connecting people with better jobs, ensure that they have the skills that are in demand in the marketplace, understand how those skills are changing.

The World Economic Forum reported that 50% of all jobs will be affected by automation in the next 10 years and that we don't even know what those jobs are. Part of our role is to really figure out how jobs are changing and what skills we will need for those jobs. Then generally, our work's really about improving the overall economic health of communities that are economically challenged and disadvantaged. There are 108,000 young people in New York City currently who are out of school and out of work. There are close to five million across the country as of the 2023 census data.

When we were launched by philanthropy through a community collaboration process 16 years ago, it really was to address this issue. At the time, New York City had about 220,000 young people who are out of work and out of school. Our work centered really around, how do we ensure that across education, across employment, across policymaking, and across investment that this particular group of young people are getting the type of focus and attention that is needed to help them and the communities where they live to address some of the challenges that prevent them from connecting--

Brian Lehrer: How do you do that? I have a friend who taught for a number of years in one of those high schools for people who had dropped out, and then they're coming back to give one more shot to graduating from high school. Some of them might have been even 20 years old. My friend told me how tough it was for many of those students. You're talking about young adults who are navigating real challenges. Housing, finances, mental health. What's an example of a program that is either finishing high school or maybe even not finishing high school? This is pegged to not finishing college or not doing a four-year degree, but that's worked well either in place of even high school or in conjunction with trying to finish high school for people in those situations.

Marjorie Parker: We work with about 200 institutions. I'm glad you're doing this series on stars. Most of these nonprofit institutions do workforce development. They understand that there is a subset of students, young people across New York City and heavily concentrated in 18 neighborhoods across New York City that are not in school. They either stop out, which is the term we use now. In the old days, it would be drop out.

Brian, they could be from high school or they could be from college. Especially at the community colleges, we have some higher stop-out rates. These nonprofits, many of them have been around older than us at JobsFirstNYC, this is the work that they do. They recruit in these neighborhoods where they know these young people are most likely to be. They're most likely to stop going to high school. They're most likely to stop going to college. They know these neighborhoods and they recruit in these places.

That's how young people often hear about these nonprofits. Many of them have really strong established reputation like Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, for example, which is in Brooklyn. They've been around for 30 years. They are a partner of JobsFirstNYC. They work in Sunset Park, in Bushwick, in Bed-Stuy. Those institutions understand where the young people are. Young people learn about these institutions because they're well-connected in their local communities.

They're connected to some of the high schools. The high schools know where to connect young people who've decided that they're not coming back to school, to connect them to these programs. What they get at these programs, Brian, are they get to get their high school diploma. This is the high school equivalency diploma, but they also get to enroll in some of the type of skills training that was just mentioned at the top of the conversation that is now being integrated into career-connected learning in the high schools.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap this up, Jane, for you, as the person who's running these alternative programs, chief of Student Pathways as your title is, at the New York City Public Schools, for families listening, if a student is unsure about college or wants to explore other paths, where should they start? That's a heavy decision.

Jane Martinez Dowling: I think from our point of view, we want to make sure that we talk about a double helix, right? Every student should be prepared for their path to success. That may include college right away. It may include college down the road. It may include having career technical education, but they should be armed with the skills to be able to do what they want to do and be able to make that choice.

I think, for us, our aspiration is that as the largest public school district in the nation, we're the first to model career-connected learning at scale and through the public education sector. The aspiration is that students should not have to go and look for this, Brian. It's that it's going to exist in their schools. As I said at the beginning of the segment, we are growing quickly. We are not at every single high school. Certainly, as they're getting advising and advisement in their schools, their counselors and folks in their high school should be able to circle back with us. If the school is really interested in doing the whole FutureReady program, there's an application process where schools and school leaders can apply.

Brian Lehrer: Let me tack one thing on, Jane. I want to acknowledge that as we've been doing this series, some listeners have objected to the emphasis on being upwardly mobile without a four-year degree, saying college is not just about preparing to make a living. It's about knowledge and that shouldn't get lost. I wonder if you have any thought about that as the public school system enables these non-college pathways.

Jane Martinez Dowling: Well, I think when you think about the phrase "work-based learning," people are always learning. You may be learning on the job. You may be learning in a classroom. Ideally, it would be great to be able to do both. Lots of our programs enable that possibility. I think to say that the only way that you can learn is in a classroom is probably shortsighted, given the way that what we've seen in terms of all of the research. Then I think the other thing that I would say is that we are not saying that students should not go to college.

What our alumni have told us is that sometimes that's a very direct line. For many of our students, sometimes you have to have those experiences that really tell you, "I really want to do this and I really want to get more skilled and learn even more about the things that I'm interested in." We are hopeful that we're giving students the opportunities to do that all through kindergarten, all the way to what we call the 14th grade. To say that you can only learn in a college classroom is probably not arming folks for the world of the future.

Brian Lehrer: Jane Martinez Dowling, chief of Student Pathways at the New York City Public Schools system, and Marjorie Parker, president and CEO of JobsFirstNYC and just back from running the London Marathon. Marjorie, hydrate, stretch. Take it slow. Thanks a lot for coming on, both of you, in our series about being upwardly mobile without a college degree, four-year degree.

Jane Martinez Dowling: Thanks, Brian.

Marjorie Parker: Thank you.

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