Education Week - January 13, 2016 - S13

EDUCATION WEEK

January 13, 2016

Extending the Digital Reach > www.edweek.org/go/digitalprogress

take self-assessments and talk about jobs while
using the platform.
Randy Gibson, a science teacher at Hughes
STEM High School, leads a group of about 20 students through a 45-minute advisory session every
Wednesday morning. (Some Cincinnati schools hold
the sessions more often.) Gibson admits he was
skeptical of the process at first.
"You're going to get kids talking about careers
that are 10 or 15 years off," he remembers thinking.
"To me, it seemed very far-fatched."
But Gibson's perspective changed when he saw
how the self-assessments engaged students. Some
were startled when their assessments suggested
they might have a future in an unexpected area, like
engineering or biomedicine. Others were surprised
when they saw how much, or how little, different
careers paid, based on labor data Naviance collects.
"It's just getting them to think about who they
are, and what their [career interests are], and that
the thinking should start now," Gibson said.

Data-Privacy Concerns
Janay Rose, a 7th grade student in Gibson's advisory session, says the process has brought focus to
her ambitions.
One of the 12-year-old's self-assessments described her as a "present and future thinker," which
she thinks is on point. Janay said she hopes to become a math or science teacher someday. The advisory sessions have reinforced her view that she
needs to excel in those subjects, and eventually get
a bachelor's degree, to achieve her goals.
"I think about the future a lot," Janay said. "To have
a dream goal, you have to do what's expected now."
School districts' interest in platforms like Naviance have grown as state expectations for career
planning have increased.
Florida, for instance, in 2006 required all students
to complete a course in "career and education planning" by the end of middle school. Last year, the state
hired Kuder on a five-year contract worth $3 million
annually to provide a career-planning tool for schools.
The system, run through a Web portal called My-

CareerShines, is being used in a growing number of
middle and high schools, and recently began work
with higher education. It will also be used in elementary schools, with the goal of giving students a lighttouch introduction to careers, said Pamela Northrup,
the CEO of the Innovation Institute at the University
of West Florida. The institute administers MyCareerShines through a state virtual program.
Kentucky requires students to explore careers and
postsecondary options by creating "individual learning plans," and it hired Career Cruising on a contract
worth about $365,000 annually to help administer that
program. Career Cruising has contracts for similar
work in Delaware, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
The growing number of state mandates for career and academic planning have been "absolutely
essential" to schools' use of platforms like Career
Cruising, said Matt McQuillen, the company's CEO.
While schools' interest in having students explore
careers dates back decades, technology allows districts to help students promote a more "comprehensive approach" to connecting student interests,
career ambitions, postsecondary goals, and academic-planning advice, McQuillen said.
But online career exploration has taken hold as
schools' concerns about protecting students' data
privacy have grown.
Khaliah Barnes, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's student-data-privacy project, argued that the platforms should function as
"privacy-enhancing technologies" and should not need
to collect students' personally identifiable information.
Much of students' data could be collected anonymously
and still provide them with useful information about
possible careers and college choices, said Barnes.
"Do the companies need to collect all of this information?" Barnes asked. "The answer as we see
it is 'no.' ... At the end of the day, whose data is it
anyway? It's the student's."
More than 200 companies have signed a studentdata-privacy pledge sponsored by the Future of
Privacy Forum and the Software & Information
Industry Association. Naviance officials said they
plan to sign the pledge but need to update their own
privacy policy first. Kuder has not signed it, but a

company official said the company follows many of
its core principles, including not selling student information and not targeting information based on
online behaviors.
Career Cruising came close to signing the pledge,
and is considering doing so, McQuillen said. The
company is examining whether language in the
pledge that puts limitations on providers retaining
student information would undermine students'
and schools' ability to use Career Cruising and return to their data as needed.

Building in Flexibility
Technology that introduces students to career options is a good thing-particularly if it pushes them
to grapple with academic planning as early as middle
school, said Claus von Zastrow, the chief operating
officer and director of research for Change the Equation, a nonprofit that seeks to promote learning in
science, technology, engineering, and math-known
as STEM fields.
Some students become intrigued by engineering,
medicine, or other STEM careers well into high school,
then realize "they haven't even tackled Algebra 1," von
Zastrow noted, a gateway course that leads to morecomplex math and is often taught in 9th grade.
At the same time, von Zastrow cautioned that any
career-focused technology platform needs to be flexible enough to introduce students to "a broad array
of potential careers," rather than narrowing their
ambitions. He pointed out that many students' personal and academic interests-he cited quantitative
ability as an example-are valuable across fields,
and that industries' needs for workers with those
talents shift. Tech platforms, he said, need to account
for those changes.
McQuillen said Career Cruising is calibrated to capture those nuances. It helps students understand the
range of career options available to them, he said, and
their interests and preferred career paths are almost
certain to change as they do more research.
Exploring a career is "very much an investigative
process," McQuillen said. "We're trying to encourage
that through our system" and "support all pathways." n

S13

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Education Week - January 13, 2016

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