22nd Installment: Mapping the Evolving Education Landscape

 

Mike Kirst continues to trek on, with vigor, as an ‘Uncommon Academic.’

A few years ago, Mike, and later with a young Stanford colleague, Victor Hau Hong Chan, began to explore and then map out new territory for American education policy makers. UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has just released the results of their exploration in a jointly authored paper, Broadening Our Perspective Concerning America’s Education: Growth, Progress, and Data Gaps. (Click HERE for the full report). This paper builds on Mike’s previous policy interests and expertise but differs from his scores of other books and publications in that it reads like a thoughtful, informed journal from two American policy explorers—somewhat akin to their serving as a “Lewis-and-Clark” advance team—mapping out and reflecting upon mostly undocumented policy territory.

CSHE’s press release heralds the Kirst/Chan report for revealing that “the common narrative of American educational stagnancy is misleading.”¹ The co-authors explain: “Our research demonstrates that stagnancy or decline is not the dominant trend if postsecondary and K-12 education are combined” (emphasis added).  They label this expanded and dynamic terrain “the changing ecology among K-12, post-secondary, and transition to the workplace.”²

Kirst and Chan argue that the public debates about American education often focus on one narrow set of evidence: K–12 standardized test scores. When those scores stagnate or decline, the conclusion is typically that the U.S. education system is failing overall.  However, such a conclusion can be misleading because it derives from only a slice of what education has become. Rather, in contrast, when combining K–12 schooling with what happens after high school—especially for young people ages 16 to 25—they discovered that the dominant trend is growth, not decline.

With this set of “K-16-plus” binoculars, Kirst and Chan found that the “landscapes” where “educational attainment” takes place now, and in the future, probably even more so, are far vaster than what is typically measured before students graduate from high school. When taking a broader view of the American education territory—one that encompasses opportunities and learning beyond K-12 and even beyond K-16—they found at least eleven distinct arenas or what they call “distinct categories of educational pathways beyond the traditional higher education framework” where learning takes place. Many of them have been only rarely or sparsely considered, charted, or measured for their effectiveness. Kirst and Chan encourage us to focus on this expanded paradigm or landscape that now includes:

1. Early College Credit (AP)
2. Dual Enrollment in High School and College
3. Career and Technical Education (CTE)
4. Apprenticeships
5. Completion of 4-Year and 2-Year College Degrees
6. Transfers
7. Remedial Education
8. Non-Degree Credentials (NDCs)
9. On-the-Job Training
10. Military Education
11. Correctional Education³

Kirst and Chan set out to document these largely unexplored territories. When they began to do so for this “scouting” report, they observed that these educational areas may add real educational value, but policymakers cannot effectively manage what they cannot see.

The Measurement Conundrum

A few weeks ago, as CSHE was preparing to release the paper, Mike, now past his mid-80’s, excitedly talked about the research and writing he’s been doing the past several years, as well as about some problems he’s faced in trying to get the word out about his findings. Let’s listen in:

Media 1 (Audio): Mike Kirst: “ My biggest challenge is it deals with three different audiences: K-12, post-secondary ed, and workforce. The other problem is it’s so expansive. …” (1:09 seconds)⁴

Mike speaks enthusiastically about his colleagues’ endorsements of this expanded focus, “I just feel a groundswell that people are really attracted to this” because “there’s never been anything like this in terms of its conceptual base” when crossing the three typical boundaries in American education: K-12, post-secondary, and the workforce. He exudes, “I just got the feeling this is a big thing.”

That turns out to be a problem for Mike as well—how to get the word out about this evolving and expanded view of educational attainment to the three different audiences—those with an elementary and secondary focus, those who work in higher education, and those who focus on workforce readiness. A related conundrum he highlights is that this view “is so expansive, that they just can’t swallow anything this big.”

Mike is a strong believer in the necessity and usefulness of current test scores noting, “they tell us something, but there’s many things they don’t tell us, and we’re just overemphasizing test scores.” And that’s because we have not had any systematic examination of “how different forms of postsecondary and training have grown, evolved, and contributed to workforce development over the past several decades.”⁵

 The ‘Uncommon Academic’ Bucket List

In the audio clip above, Mike notes modestly that he has some “relevance” in each of the three areas: K-12, post-secondary, and workforce and that now, at this stage of his personal and professional life, “I wanted to get a paper like this out there [and] that this was the one remaining big thought I have in my mind”⁶

Then more personally, he shared “I wanted to get these ideas out there … but I had no funding.” So, he took $5,000 from royalties he had earned from his previous publications “saved all these years for travel with [his wife] Wendy,” and thought to himself, “I’m going to use [these personal funds]… to hire a graduate student at Stanford to work with me to frame this out.”⁷ Turned out to be his current co-author, Victor Chan.

Mike’s interest in the disconnect between schools and the workforce actually dates back more than half a century to 1960 when he worked as an intern during his undergraduate Dartmouth years for the U.S. Department of Labor and expanded significantly in later years when he served as the staff director for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment, and Poverty. Even in these early policy years, he was asked to play a key role in expanding federal workforce programs—a source of much of his grounding for the workforce elements of the CSHE paper.⁸

Mike is most widely known for his policy expertise in the K-12 area, however, drawing in part from his most widely read book, Who Controls Our Schools? American Values in Conflict, first published in 1984. Focusing almost exclusively on elementary and secondary public schools, the book, which became a textbook for many current education leaders and journalists emphasized that most policy debates about schooling in America were not on technical or pedagogical issues but rather on deep political and social differences. And, of course, Mike’s policy influence in elementary and secondary schooling was significantly amplified through his work over several decades, especially when he served as President of the California State Board of Education for Jerry Brown during both of his tenures as governor, from 1975 through 1983 and then again from 2011-2019.

During that period of nearly a quarter of a century between Governor Brown’s two terms, Mike’s research and writing interests shifted to the transition from k-12 to higher education when working with his colleague, Andrea Venezia, Their jointly authored influential book, published in 2004, From High School to College: Improving Opportunities for Success in Postsecondary Education documented systemic barriers, including insufficient counseling, misaligned standards, and ambiguous expectations in the “seams” between these two sectors. Prior to his and Andrea Venezia’s research and writing for this and related publications there had been a paucity of scholarly interest in this “seam” for students, especially those who went on to attend junior colleges and more open-access universities.

After Governor Brown’s second term (2011-2019), Mike again focused on higher education with two other Stanford colleagues, Mitchell Stevens and Richard Scott. In 2105, Stevens and Kirst co-authored, Remaking College: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education which emphasized that a combination of factors—labor market forces, new technologies, and an evolving collection of post-secondary providers—resulted in what they called an emerging “ecology” of postsecondary education.  They maintained that the vast array of institutions and educational pathways for students after high school was in many ways more complex to describe and assess than the more traditional college model.

These two collaborations around postsecondary education laid the groundwork for Mike’s work with Stanford’s Richard Scott.  He and Scott examine in more depth the relation between universities and the California technology sector in their 2017 book Higher Education and Silicon Valley: Connected but Conflicted.  They argue that America’s institutions of higher education are pulled in a variety of directions, with no clear priorities or alignment, especially with high schools, a problem Kirst had pointed to in his previous research with Venezia. This research also highlights the disconnects with the workforce needs, especially with the technology sector centered in California and, more specifically, in the Bay Area.

This “ecological” perspective allows Kirst and Stevens to shine an academic light on institutions often overlooked in public discussions: junior colleges, regional campuses, and more open-access state colleges and universities.

This interest is also reflected in the goal Kirst and Chan define for their exploration: “Our goal is to reframe the current conversation around U.S. education attainment and performance by systematically examining how different forms of postsecondary education and training have grown, evolved, and contributed to workforce development.”⁹

The first part of this exploration, as we note above, concluded, “Our research demonstrates that stagnancy or decline is not the dominant trend if postsecondary and K-12 education are combined.” Kirst and Chan also lament that the limited data about the expanded set of opportunities result in their having been “under-recognized” in the conversations about American education, despite many of them–such as Advanced Placement course-taking, dual enrollment options, apprenticeships, military education and credentials—having experienced “dramatic or significant growth in both participation and educational attainment.” ¹⁰

Even as the paper celebrates this often-ignored progress, it also highlights that “these sectors,” especially on-the-job training, military education, and credentials, lack sufficient data to determine trends.”¹¹ 

Responding to my inquiry about what might have been the most surprising aspect of investigating these “critical blind spots” in national data collection, he blurts out, while chuckling, this “astounding” discovery as an octogenarian:

Media 2 (Audio): Mike Kirst: “It’s astounding…the number … of certificates, licenses, credentials, [and] badges…” (50 seconds)¹²

What he has personally found most “amazing” in the California context is that while academics and policymakers still primarily focus on degrees as a measure of attainment, most community college students, at least in California, “don’t even apply for an associate’s degree because they value more the certificates and credits they acquire rather than the degree.”

“Hit’em where they ain’t”

 In the first audio clip of this installment, Mike observes that this paper by him and his young colleague, Victor Chan, is a classic case of “hitting’em where they ain’t.” Mike also offered this famous baseball slogan in a multi-media biography published in 2022, as both a reflection on his entire career and as advice to other education policy analysts and reformers.  Let’s listen in:

Media 3 (Audio): Mike Kirst: “’Hit’em where they ain’t’…You can be a leader there.”  (23 seconds)¹³ 

We have heard throughout this installment about how “working the seam of higher and lower ed” motivated and qualified Mike to explore the growth of the eleven arenas often not considered by education policy makers and almost totally absent in the current discourse about the state of American education.

Now in 2026, more than six decades since Mike began his professional journey exploring and developing the knowledge base around the politics of K-12 and post-secondary, as well as having an abiding interest in workforce training, we see him yet again breaking new conceptual ground and exhorting today’s analysts to acknowledge and build out a new field.

He did it, himself, in the 1970’s when he led the formation of the new field, the Politics of Education. He did again, starting in the 1980s, as a co-founder with James Guthrie of the still widely respected Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) thinktank. As the 1990’s approached, he led the efforts to broaden the scope of PACE’s regularly updated report from the “Conditions of Education in California” to the “Conditions of Children” (emphasis added), reflecting an exploratory expansion to issues beyond the classroom to include children’s health, social welfare, and pre-school considerations.¹⁴ Even today, Stanford’s pathbreaking joint MA—Education/MBA program, which he created with the then Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Ernest Arbuckle is still thriving.  Five years ago, in 2021, Stanford celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first graduating class from this dual degree program.¹⁵     

These are just three examples of his living out his “Hit ’em where they ain’t” leadership philosophy working in the seams.

We are also reminded of the explorations of Lewis and Clark (1804-1806), which opened the way for Americans’ geographic knowledge of the West and which became the model for later scientific advances. They and later, John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 led the first official U.S. government-sponsored passage through the Grand Canyon, insisted that policy makers stop treating elements of nature as separate entities with distinct purposes (land for farming, rivers for transport, forests for lumber, minerals for extraction, etc.) and recognize, instead, that the relationships among those natural resources—the seams—were where enlightened policy making should focus.  Indeed, improved recognition of the connections among our natural resources has yielded progress in improving the water quality of our rivers, reducing soil erosion, heralding and protecting certain endangered species, and other developments toward a healthier and more vibrant environment.

Similarly, this, Mike’s latest clarion call—exhorting us to recognize, define, and measure effects from a multitude of education providers beyond those granting degrees—can and should lead to an improved vision of what American education is and what it is producing.