When it Comes to Career Exploration, Are the States Making Middle School Count?

When it comes to career exploration, why do we at ASA talk so much about middle school? After all, middle schoolers are years away from needing to make their first major life decisions about what comes after high school….or are they? The research shows that, not only should the process of exploration and discovery start sooner than it typically does, but also that most high schoolers don’t even feel prepared to make decisions. Just 13%, in fact, say they feel prepared. 

It’s clear that earlier is better and that middle school is a vital time for discovery and exploration programming to begin. We wanted to know, though, to what extent that message has made its way to all 50 states. At AMLE 2024, Julie Lammers, ASA’s SVP of Advocacy and Corporate Social Responsibility, joined Casey Haugner Wrenn from Education Strategy Group to talk about how the states are approaching and measuring success in the area of middle school career exploration. What progress has been made and where is there room for improvement?

Casey explained the work ASA and ESG have been doing to check in with state and education leaders in terms of the investments being made in this middle school career exploration. Namely, they wanted to find out what the vision was, at each state level, for what middle school career exploration means in theory and looks like in practice. 

“We’re looking at policy. Do states have requirements, standards, and expectations that they set for leaders? And finally, do they have infrastructure? It’s one thing to have a law on the books. It’s another thing to actually train teachers, provide funding and curriculum, communities of practice and partnership. So we looked at all of that and rated them on a scale of ‘building’, ‘emerging’, or ‘advanced’ across all of the states.” 

Good work is happening, but there’s not enough follow-through 

The bottom line is that, despite increased state support for career pathways, the actual reporting and tracking of middle school career exploration programs shows a good deal of stagnancy. 

“Even in the states that have made investments in this space,” she explained, “students are still getting the majority of their information from their families. All of the wonderful activities that we’re having them do, their student success plans, their learning inventories…the students we talked to didn’t actually connect those things to thinking about their future.”

The takeaway here is not that these activities are inherently broken or wrong. Rather, it’s that programming needs to go a step further and help students connect the theoretical to the practical; the learning to the earning, so to speak. 

“They need hands-on, actual activities that put students in places where they can experience real-life [workplace] activities…because students aren’t always connecting the dots, otherwise.” 

The good news? The majority of states do offer student success and academic planning activities starting in middle school, which is a great start. However, Casey explained, very few have a network of advocacy or support systems in-place to help leaders implement policy. Very few are monitoring the extent to which activities are taking place, or the quality of the activities. And, clearly, advocacy, implementation, and measurement are vitally important parts of the process of empowering states to overhaul the career exploration status quo. 

Prioritizing the student voice

The work ASA and ESG are doing in this area isn’t just about looking at policy and monitoring results. They have also taken steps to listen to and prioritize the student voice in the process through a student advisory board. They learned that students don’t just need information to help them connect learning to earning, they crave it. And, if they don’t get it, they run the very real risk of becoming disengaged. 

“They start to tell themselves stories about what they’re good at and what they’re not good at, or that school isn’t right for them…So middle school is the perfect time to start giving information to students while they are still inquisitive and while they feel that sense of belonging in school.”

We invite you to read “Extending the Runway,” the collaborative resource from ASA and ESG, which offers a comprehensive 50-state analysis of middle school career exploration!