One of the few policy areas that Democrats and Republicans still agree about is career pathways. These programs, usually focused on high school and the years immediately before and after, help connect education and workforce systems to give students the skills they need for good careers and economic mobility. These are not your parents’ vocational-technical programs; they are rigorous programs that prepare students for college and career, and they’re wildly popular with parents and politicians alike.

The issue, though, is how to actually build them.

Fortunately, we’ve learned a lot since I started doing state-level career pathways policy work about a decade ago. That’s why I’m writing a series of policy briefs that explain the concrete, practical steps that policymakers can take to increase economic mobility for young people. It’s called Pathways Policies That Work: Practical Advice for Policymakers. I’ve teamed up with another former state pathways policymaker, Quentin Suffren, to write them.

All the briefs will be posted on Education First’s website. The topics in this series are:

• Brief 1: Braiding funding for effective pathways

• Brief 2: Recommendations for reauthorizing Perkins and improving federal pathways policy

• Brief 3: Expanding effective career pathways models

• Brief 4: Pathways to high-wage, high-demand industries in the age of AI

The briefs were generously funded by Arnold Ventures.

Explore the Full Series

Brief 1: Braiding Funding for Effective Career Pathways

The first brief in the series is now live:

Brief 1: Braiding Funding

Braiding funding is a powerful tool for policymakers hoping to build high-quality career pathways programs in their state. It might sound wonky, but it is often the best answer to the eternal question that sinks so many good policies: "How are you going to pay for that?"

Braiding is essential for career pathways because: (1) it breaks down funding silos, reducing the risk students fall off in the transitions between K12, postsecondary, and the workforce; and (2) it leads to a more efficient use of limited funds for the high cost of career pathways programs.

This brief offers a common set of principles for braiding and action steps that state leaders can take to get started.

Stay tuned for the next brief in the series, coming later this month. It will explore how states can use a brand new federal tax credit to fund career pathways in public schools.

It’d be hard to come up with a better metaphor for the Trump Administration’s approach to policymaking than the White House’s East Wing–or, more accurately, the hole where the East Wing used to be.

Trump used executive authority to quickly tear down the historical structure, but discovered (from a court ruling yesterday) that it may require Congress to build something to replace it. Sound familiar?

Destruction by the executive branch is quick and easy. Construction by the legislative branch is slow and hard.

With the East Wing, the result of this combination is a big hole in Trump’s literal back yard. So how do we avoid a similar situation in our (less literal) back yards?

In the realm of education policy, this pattern of “quick executive destruction / slow legislative construction” has played out a number of times in the Trump Administration, and we’ve seen a common response strategy emerge. It generally looks like this:

• Avoid the destruction: Do not overcomply with federal executive actions that exceed the government’s legal authority. If the “mission risk” is high (i.e., complying would threaten your organization’s mission), carefully evaluate the actual “legal risk” before complying.

• Do your own construction: States have a lot of authority over education policy, regardless of the federal administration. If you want to advance solutions-oriented education policies for your state’s needs, look to governors and state legislatures rather than Congress.

Through my work at Education First over the past year, I’ve seen cross-state coalitions as an effective approach for both strategies. First, these coalitions avoid unnecessary destruction by sharing the cost of legal advice about potential overcompliance. Second, they allow leaders to share and copy constructive policy ideas from other states.

So you want to avoid “pulling an East Wing,” I’d recommend trying those strategies first.

I wrote about some of this over a year ago as part of Education First’s Facts in the Flood series, and the advice still seems as relevant as ever:

Slide from: Facts in the Flood: Strategies for Responding, Education First, 2025.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

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Here's one key idea that really resonated with me: the importance of what we called "pathmaking teams”. These are a group of mid-level leaders from K12, postsecondary, and workforce who are senior enough to make decisions but close enough to the work to be deeply knowledgeable about its progress.

When I was leading Rhode Island's career pathways initiative, PrepareRI, this pathmaking team made all the difference. We needed an executive champion to push things forward (in our case, then-Governor Gina Raimondo) and the education and workforce commissioners to mobilize resources within their agencies. But our secret sauce was the cross-agency pathmaking team that met weekly for years to solve the countless implementation challenges that make or break career pathways initiatives.

The Commission for Purposeful Pathways was facilitated by Education First and supported by the Gates Foundation.

View the full report of the Commission for Purposeful Pathways here:

View Full Report

But as the most visible parts of ICE’s enforcement recede from our streets (and headlines), public attention cannot recede with it. How can we maintain the political will to grapple with the devastation left behind, especially when our cell phone cameras can no longer capture the depth of the damage?

The truth is: ICE’s widely-publicized violent actions were just the tip of the ICEberg.

For our communities and schools, the full scale of Operation Metro Surge’s disruption on students’ learning and mental health is not yet visible. In the past few months, protestors blew whistles to warn about immediate threats from ICE. We need to do something similar for the hidden threats that remain after they leave.

I wrote about ICE’s full impact on students—and what we should do about it—in a commentary for the Minnesota Reformer. See below.

Read on the Minnesota Reformer site

Commentary

See the whole ICEberg: Minnesota students need resources to cope

COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina offer useful lessons for aftermath of ICE incursion

Spencer Sherman

March 6, 2026. 6:00 am.

Large-scale disruptions don’t end when the headlines do. I learned that during two other crises: I served as a state education official during COVID-19 and as a teacher in post-Katrina New Orleans.

During Operation Metro Surge, student absenteeism increased on a scale unseen since COVID. Though the pandemic began nearly six years ago, our students and schools have not yet recovered. The rate of chronic absenteeism today is higher in every single state than it was before the pandemic. Enrollment in public schools is down by 1.2 million students, leading to a vicious cycle with reduced enrollment driving funding cuts. Students’ test scores are still far below pre-COVID levels, effectively wiping out more than 15 years’ worth of hard-won education gains.

But the COVID comparison doesn’t quite capture the psychological impact of students witnessing large-scale instability in their communities and the separation of families. Consider the lessons of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Researchers estimated that over 40% of students in post-Katrina New Orleans met the criteria for a mental health referral. Psychologists now know that adverse childhood experiences, like the sort experienced by students in New Orleans then and in Minnesota now, increase the risk of a variety of negative outcomes later in life, ranging from unemployment to chronic disease.

For educators and parents outside of targeted enforcement areas, it may be tempting to believe that their students and children will not be affected. But new research shows that increased immigration enforcement in Florida last year, which was far less intense than in Minnesota, has already lowered test scores for students, including citizens.

While COVID and Katrina are sobering precedents, they also hint at potential solutions. In both crises, once education policymakers saw the full scale of the problem they were facing, they implemented bold solutions (such as tutoring and new school models) that improved student outcomes.

Changing What We Measure

To assess the true impact of Operation Metro Surge and develop adequate solutions, policymakers must confront three measurement gaps.

1. Attendance: At the Rhode Island Department of Education, we created a live statewide attendance dashboard to track chronic absenteeism after COVID, which allowed the state to build targeted and effective policies to bring students back to school. The Minnesota Department of Education should implement a similar solution: a public, statewide attendance dashboard showing how current attendance patterns compare to pre-Operation Metro Surge.

2. Enrollment: Minnesota law requires schools to remove students from their attendance rolls if they are absent for 15 consecutive days. For districts experiencing massive ICE-related absenteeism, this policy artificially undercounts absent students, preventing policymakers from seeing the full scale of absenteeism while simultaneously reducing schools’ funding when they need it most. Policymakers should adjust definitions of absenteeism to avoid these unintended consequences.

3. Mental health: Many districts conduct qualitative surveys of student attitudes at the end of the year. ICE-impacted districts should conduct those surveys now, so we can better understand how ICE has impacted students’ mental health.

MDE should aggregate this data statewide and create a public report showing any changes compared to last year.

If Minnesota wants to support its students, it has to see more of the iceberg. By accurately measuring and calling attention to changes in attendance, enrollment and student well-being, we can design the policies that true recovery demands.

Spencer Sherman is a principal consultant at Education First, and former Chief for Innovation at the Rhode Island Department of Education. He lives in Minnesota.

Photo illustration by Getty Images