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ON THE AGENDA

The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda

Alison Kadlec
Feb 1, 2012

This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.

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You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Allison Rizzolo
Jan 24, 2012

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

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The School of Hard Shocks Page 3

Advances in technology in particular have broadened the definition of college. "If college is not just a place but a process," said Kolb, "we need to look at Kaplan and Phoenix and some of the other new ways in which learning is being created and transmitted in our country…We need to rethink it just like we no longer have three network stations, we have a variety, and so we should rethink the structure, the pricing, the delivery, the finance, the fundraising, the resources allocated, the overall investment."

While all young Americans will need certain post-secondary skills, noted Kolb, we need to redefine what they are and how they are delivered. "I think we need to diversify the routes to rewarding careers," said Lerman, "and that's because we have differences in the world, and we have differences in the nature of jobs, we have differences in the nature of learning styles, and we have differences in the natures of motivation…The academic-only approach imposes a kind of sameness of young people that's inappropriate given the variety of occupational skill requirements, learning styles and interests."

"Learning and competence can't be delivered just like some pizza," said Lerman, "you have to have engagement, and when you really want to learn something, you have to use it."

Apprenticeship programs for young adults are one viable and valuable alternative, said Lerman, pointing to Switzerland and German as examples of countries with high quality universities and free education and large majorities of young people opting for apprenticeships before enrolling in college.

Such apprenticeship programs, Lerman noted, bring low risk combined with high pay-off. "In this country," said Lerman, "when you actually look at the returns to apprenticeships you find huge, huge returns at very low risk, because young people don't have to be giving up years of earning power, they don't have to take a risk on some field that they might not do - they can go right into a career and learn."

The economics of educational policy are an important focus for Kolb as well. "We need to re-think the investment," said Kolb, "because the public sector, the private sector, is putting a lot of dollars into this, including the business community, and not getting results."

In pursuing apprenticeship programs and other vocational educational systems, however, it is important to not forget about the inadequacies of the underlying system. "I think we have to be really careful," noted Lingenfelter, "that we don't use [diverse post-secondary educational paths] as an out for the fundamental inadequacies of preparation for work or post-secondary education in many of our urban schools. The fact is that regardless of the pathway you're taking, an awful lot of young people are not being prepared for a successful life, either as a worker or a citizen. And the problem with a lot of the vocational programs we've had is that they've been dead-end."

Questions of accountability, quality and value, which, noted Kolb, have long been examined in the K-12 system, need to be introduced at the post-secondary level. The traditional policy concerns of access and affordability are still "very important," but, Kolb said, "only recently have you begun to see some additional questions asked about quality, what is being learned… where they're actually trying to ask… 'What's the added value of post-secondary education?' …'How can you measure what you're getting for that 45 or 50 thousand dollars a year?'"

With all panelists agreeing that a re-examination of the post-secondary educational system is a necessity, conversation returned to the question of public sentiment, particularly that of parents. "A lot of parents - why wouldn't they think their kids should go to college?" asked Johnson. "We've been telling them that for the last twenty years… They've been good listeners, they've absorbed what they've been told."

Even if parents have started examining the question of whether everyone should go to college, audience member Noel Ellerson noted, for the most part they still don't consider alternative options for their own kids. "We're starting to see a shift in public opinion that yes, we do need more post-secondary opportunities," Ellerson, from the American Association of School Administrators, said. "'It's really good for the general population,' parents may say, 'but my kid will still go to college.'"

"In these times of very high economic anxiety," said Johnson, "people have been told they're gonna have to go to college, they're borrowing money to do it, they're making sacrifices to do it… they are scrambling… we need a more candid way of helping them understand what the opportunities are for them and their kids."

Providing alternatives is important, but more important is ensuring these alternatives are of high enough quality to make them an attractive and valuable route. "I think you need a strategy of 'Build it and some of them will come,'" Lerman suggested. "In some of these programs… they are doing more advanced work than they were doing in the colleges because they had more advanced equipment… If you create quality programs, quality options, then I'm convinced that huge numbers of young people will decide to do that."

Change is "not going to happen instantly," said Kolb. Public Agenda research, said Johnson, indicates an increase in public belief that college is not only a good thing, but "the only thing." Families, she suggested, could benefit from help in understanding alternatives and in knowing more about the diversity of opportunity that exists in different kinds of work.

People, said Johnson, are "trying to follow the rules that society seems to be giving them, and if we're going to have a different conversation now, we have to realize there's going to be some time to back up and build more of an interest and more knowledge about what the opportunities really are."

The most important thing is that the questions are being asked. "There are questions being asked," said Kolb, "about what's the added value of the four years in the traditional college experience. Those are good questions because if they can't be answered, the money shouldn't be spent."

For more on the subject of education after high school, see Public Agenda's Education Insights research reports, including "Campus Commons? What Faculty, Financial Officers and Others Think About Controlling College Costs," "Squeeze Play 2009: The Public's View On College Costs Today," and "The Iron Triangle: College Presidents Talk About Costs, Access And Quality."

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