Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Master Plan for Higher Education in California

Good afternoon, everyone. There it is. Perfect. Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us. Today. I'm assemblymember Marc Berman and I want to welcome everyone to this informational hearing on career education.

This hearing is being live streamed and recorded and will later be available to view on the Select Committee webpage, which can be found on my assembly website under the Higher Education Master Plan Tab.

I chair the Select Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, which we first established in 2017 to conduct a thorough legislative review to ensure that the master plan reflects the current needs of students and responds to a host of issues never previously envisioned.

In 1960, California developed a visionary plan for the future of higher education known as the Master Plan, promising to its students an accessible, affordable and high quality higher education for all California students who qualify.

However, much has changed since 1960, population growth, increased student diversity, a change in leading industries and their need for talent, as well as the field of education itself.

The Select Committee convened five hearings throughout California, which focus on the status of higher education in California, workforce needs, the needs of students, the needs of faculty and staff, and an overview of higher education finance.

The Select Committee also released a report that found that the transfer process, which is an essential component of the master plan's commitment to access and affordability, is too complex, difficult to navigate.

As a result, the Select Committee held two virtual conversations on transfer, ultimately leading to successful legislation which reimagined transfer from the student perspective as a clear path instead of a maze.

Today's hearing will build and touch upon some of our previous work examining California's workforce needs and the intersegmental nature of transfer that aligns with this hearing's topic, which is career education.

This afternoon, we will specifically focus on the current efforts underway to develop a new master plan for career education, and I look forward to this timely discussion and learning more about the recent developments. Our first remarks will come from the governor's office and will provide the background on launching a new master plan for career education.

Next, there will be a panel discussion on the existing challenges and opportunities surrounding career education from key stakeholders, including a student, a practitioner, an employer, from our labor partners, and a disability advocate.

Following, will be an in depth panel discussion from WestEd, who is leading the effort to gather statewide input to inform the master plan for career education and will provide an update on its development. There will also be an opportunity for public comment at the end of the hearing.

I'm also grateful to be joined by my colleague, but we think throughout the day colleagues, and really grateful to chair assemblymember Chair Fong for being here today and for his participation in a lot of the hearings that we've had.

The Members of the Select Committee have been invaluable participants since the Select Committee was first created, and I look forward to their engagement today as we turn our attention to career education. With that, I'd like to offer Chair Fong an opportunity to make any open remarks you might have.

Thank you so much, Chair Berman. And thank you for convening us here for the developing a master plan of career education, for your leadership and efforts around the master plan of higher education here in California. Really grateful to join you and everyone here today.

We know that last year, in August of 2023, the Governor proposed an initiative for the development of a statewide master plan for career education.

A year later, and after eight listening sessions around a stay with close to 900 participants, the governor's office has recently released a report with community input and considerations for California's master plan for career education, which synthesizes the sessions that took place in the spring.

I appreciate that the report provides an overview of the master plan for career education and regional design sessions, but also appears to be common threads that have come to light regardless of region. And those threads are access and affordability, career pathways, hands on learning, workplace learning and apprenticeship, and state and regional coordination.

I would also want to just throw out there maybe possibly a fifth pillar of connectivity and really making sure that last year we passed ACR 16 on opportunity youth and really looking at how we reconnect the 500,000 young people that are disconnected from school, from work and efforts.

And also this hearing is very timely, as the chair has mentioned, and looks forward to hearing from the presentations from the governor's office and from the Administration and from everyone here as to how we can continue to amplify career education here in higher education, and to really make sure that each of the roles of secondary, post secondary trade sector employers play a critical role in ensuring that our students are able to make the most informed decisions as they prepare for their careers and workforce.

With that. Thank you so much, Mister chair, for having us here today.

Thank you. Thank you, chair Fong. So with that, we're going to start off with our first presentation on California's master plan for career education.

And I'd like to introduce Michael Wiafe, who's assistant deputy cabinet secretary, office of Governor Gavin Newsom, who will be sharing remarks on behalf of Nicole Munoz Murillo, deputy legislative secretary, who is not able to join us today. Please, Mister Wiefe, thank you.

Sounds like you can hear me good afternoon, Chair Berman and Members, thank you for holding this hearing regarding the development of the master plan for career education. My name is Michael Wiafe and I serve as assistant deputy cabinet secretary in the office of Governor Newsom.

And unfortunately, Nicole Munoz Mario is unable to make it here today and had intended to deliver these remarks, but due to Covid will not be able to join us. We wish her a very speedy recovery. It's my pleasure to provide perspective for our Administration.

Almost one year ago, on August 31, 2023 Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N 1123, which launched this effort.

The governor's Executive order directed the state to align and integrate the implementation of programs supported by billions of dollars in funding, to prepare students and workers for high paying careers in the workforce of tomorrow, including those that don't require a college degree.

At the time, the Governor had said all families, students and workers deserve the freedom to succeed, to build real life skills and pursue careers again, including those that don't require a college degree. California is leveraging billions of dollars in investments to prepare students and workers for good paying, long lasting and fulfilling careers.

The governor's statement was a recognition of partnership that we've had with the Legislature over the past few years, investing billions in education and establishing programs that are consistent with this aim.

This includes $200 million for dual enrollment programs, another $200 million for youth apprenticeship programs, $500 million for golden state pathways, billions of dollars in educator and healthcare workforce pipelines, more than $400 million for what we now call jobs first regional investment initiative, investing in regions across the state and $250 million for the k through 16 regional collaboratives.

We're proud of all of these efforts in partnership with you all. But we also realize that in order to maximize what our schools, universities and regional economies are doing, we need to make sure that theres coherence between programs and that there's a plan that guides us forward.

To that end, the governor's Executive order directed state leaders in education, workforce development and economic development to work collaboratively with leaders of the state's public education systems and employers. Along with legislative partners and stakeholders representing diverse students, parents, education professionals, labor, business, community groups, we can continue going on to develop the master plan for career education.

The purpose of the master plan is to guide the state in its efforts to strengthen career pathways, prioritize hands on learning and real life skills, and advance universal access and affordability for all Californians through streamline collaboration and partnership across government and private sector. There are four foundational efforts, four foundational objectives to this effort, excuse me,

the first is to break down silos. We aim to identify opportunities for alignment and coordination across sectors, both public and private, to ensure more career and skill building opportunities for students and workers. We also hope to strengthen career pathways.

We believe that all students should be encouraged to discover and explore good paying, fulfilling and long lasting careers, again, including those that do and do not require college degrees, and be guided to pathways to those careers.

Prioritizing hands on learning and real life skills we want to see students and workers have multiple opportunities to learn by doing, especially via paid earn and learn opportunities to be trained in real life skills that can be certified and reflected on academic records. Prioritizing hands on learning and real life skills sorry, excuse me.

Advance universal access and affordability. We aim to continue to reduce the cost of career training and education and simplify access to support, including financial aid, career guidance, and disability services, with a focus on streamlining bureaucratic processes.

In the fall of last year, the agencies and departments named in the Executive order, such as the State Board of Education, the labor and Workforce Development Agency Gobiz, and Department of Rehabilitation, alongside the leaders of the California Community Colleges, the California State University and University of California, with the Superintendent of Public Instruction, submitted their initial ideas on how to integrate and align our efforts with these objectives in mind.

In order to ensure that we've heard from the field and communities across the state, we partnered with philanthropy to Fund our work with Wested. This ensured that we were able to hear from individuals all across California so that their perspectives and lived experience would be central to the considerations that would be part of the final recommendations.

From the beginning of this year, we have said we're having conversations to have more conversations. We're excited for this hearing today because we're grateful to the hundreds of individuals across the State of California who've taken part in the development of this plan so far and have been part of the many important conversations part of this effort.

We're on track to finish the development of this plan by the end of the year and anticipate that the recommendations will drive our administration's education and workforce priorities in years to come, and anticipate that these changes will come through legislative and budget actions. So to that end, we look forward to many, many more conversations with you all.

Again, I want to thank you for today's hearing, for allowing us some time to speak as well, and look forward to hearing more about what the panelists have to say. And again, here to deliver remarks on behalf of Nicole Murillo, Deputy legislative secretary. Thank you.

Thank you, Mister Wiafe and first off. We wish Deputy Legislative Secretary Munoz Murillo a speedy recovery, and we'll make sure to relay any questions that we have to her once she's back in the office. But really appreciate you representing her and providing those remarks.

Grateful to the Governor and his whole team for all the great work that you're doing to get this up and running. And I like the conversations to have more conversations. The process is important, and it sounds like you're undertaking the right one. So appreciate you being here today. Thank you. Thank you.

And so next up, we're going to move to our second panel, which is existing challenges and opportunities. We have five panelists. Each panelist will have five minutes each. I'd like to introduce Dyami Ruiz Martinez, former student trustee at San Bernardino Community College District. Am I bringing everybody up at once? We're going to bring everyone up at once.

Angela Shull, Executive Director of Redwood Coast K 12 Educational Collaborative. Aziz Amiri, CEO of the Regional Chamber of Commerce, San Gabriel Valley. Jeremy Smith, Chief of Staff, State Building and Construction Trades Council of California. Tania Morawiec. Thank you. Deputy Director of planning and regional office operations, California State Council on Developmental Disabilities and I think maybe we'll do the presentations in that order and then we'll have time for Q and A. So first up is Dyami Ruiz Martinez. Good afternoon. We're gonna do a little test. If I hit this red button. Yeah.

Okay. Sounds good. Okay, good. Good afternoon, distinguished Members of this Select Committee. We are at a crucial moment in time where. zero, okay. Up. There we go. Right. We are at a crucial moment in time where technology's roles in industries is expanding at an unprecedented pace.

This transformation requires that our public institutions of higher learning rethink traditional methods of instruction to ensure that the next generation of professionals are not only well educated, but also equipped with the skills needed to enter the workforce efficiently. My name is Dyami Ruiz Martinez.

As a first generation student, I have advanced from community college, where I completed my prerequisites for my real estate license, to UC Irvine, where I graduated with my degrees, and now as a graduate student at UC Riverside. This journey has given me a deep understanding of the challenges students face.

This perspective has guided my role as a student trustee on the San Bernardino Community College District board and as a Member of the Student State Senate for 2023-2024. I have also served on very assured governance committees within the college system, including the Working Learners Task Force and the State Master Plan for Career education, Inland Empire convening.

My focus has been on making higher education more accessible, especially for non traditional students and for first generation students. Students today face a significant challenge, primarily due to the high cost of living and the cost of obtaining a degree. Many students must choose between maintaining a 12 unit class schedule or working additional hours to meet basic needs.

In the Inland Empire, it is common for students to juggle multiple minimum wage jobs just to get by. Even though the California community college system is relatively affordable, the cost of textbooks and course materials still remain a substantial barrier. For example, especially in the STEM field.

For example, a calculus textbook can cost you anything between $200 to $300 in organic chemistry class, including lab materials, can exceed $500, and that's just one class. Navigating the community college system and the transfer process is still confusing for many non traditional students.

While I was fortunate to receive good guidance, counseling, and good ideas from instructors, many students lack the support needed to navigate deadlines, course requirements in the transfer application. Finally, entering the workforce is challenging. Internships and fellowship opportunities are limited at the community college level and often require students to do their own independent research.

Many jobs in intended career fields demand three years of experience, which can disqualify graduates who haven't had the chance to gain the practical experience. To address these two issues, the master plan for career education should include the following elements: Support relevant curriculum, incorporate more hands on learning opportunities such as internship, fellowships, and apprenticeships,

strengthen partnerships between educational institutions and industry leaders to ensure that the skills students are learning are applicable to the current job markets. This approach will enhance job placement opportunities and bridge the gap between theory and practice. Expansion of pathway programs expanding educational pathway programs that simplify entry into specific career fields.

These programs reduce stress and shorten the time for degree attainment. Short term pathways that lead to certification and state licensing can also serve adult learners or those seeking entry into the workforce.

Equitable resources access to resources enhanced career services and workforce development, focusing on underserved populations expanding access to career counselors and mentors who can assist and with career placement, development and planning. Additionally, education needs to be re incentivized by making them more affordable and providing social resources that ease the high cost of living for students.

Today, I have highlighted several critical issues that prevent and discourage students from transferring and completing their degrees in the limited time, there's simply not enough time to cover everything. But I hope this testimony has highlighted the urgent need for an inclusive and effective higher education career master plan that addresses the needs of California students.

Thank you. Thank you Mister Ruiz Martinez and next up and we're going to do q and a just at the very end, once everyone has a chance to present. Next up, we have Angela Scholl, Executive Director, Redwood Coast K through 12 educational collaborative. Please.

All right. Can you hear me okay, yes, a little bit closer. All right, perfect. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. It's an honor to be here today. My name is Angela Shull. I am the Executive Director of the Redwood Coast K-16 collaborative. I want to start by sharing a little bit about our Redwood region and our collaborative.

Our vision is to bring education and workforce partners together to more effectively braid our efforts to create a grow your own labor group.

This is particularly true in our region within the education and healthcare systems, as there is a current shortage of skilled workers within our region and that shortage is expected to increase significantly within the next decade.

Within our region, we have eight identified award partners and each award partner is awarded funds through our fiscal agent, Cal Poly Humboldt, and those funds are provided to support our grant objectives. If you'll go to the next slide, please.

Of our eight award partners, six are located in our region and those would be the four county offices of Education College of the Redwoods located in Eureka and Mendocino College, located in Ukiah. Sonoma State University is not in our region.

However, it was identified as an award partner as many of the lake and Mendocino students, particularly those who attend Mendocino College, we wanted to ensure that they also receive supports as they transfer to Sonoma State and the warm handoff as part of our grant requirement.

We were also we also wanted to partner with a UC and Davis was a natural fit as part of our healthcare initiatives. Next slide please within our grant priorities, our main focus is to increase pathways for students to enter into healthcare and career healthcare and education careers.

We do this by creating sustainable partnerships between the continuum of educational institutions and workforce partners. Our top priorities include increasing A to G graduation rates, increasing access to early college credits, and increasing opportunities for students to engage in workforce partners as early as an elementary school.

We especially want to create these highly transparent pathways to be accessible to first generation college students and those who are historically underrepresented in high earning jobs in our region. This is particularly inclusive of our tribal populations, who oftentimes live in our most remote regions with inadequate access to resources. Slide four please.

We have challenges that exist within our region. Some challenges are indicative of regions that are remote and rural, such as the Redwood region. Those include consistent access to public transportation and consistent access to broadband. Within the redwood region, we have a specific need to completely restructure and reprioritize industries that create livable earning wages.

This is something within the Redwood region that we have struggled to do since the mid 1980s with the fall of the timber and fishing industries.

As a quick side note, as a third generation Humboldt County resident, my grandfathers, my uncles, my dad were all in the timber industry and were all able to provide a single income to their families with home ownership. And that is something that is nothing, not a reality today.

And so finding those industries that create livable wage incomes is a definite priority. We can do that through healthcare and education industries. Another interesting note, within our region, we have two community colleges, we have one CSU, and we have one of the lowest college going cultures in the state. Next slide, please.

Lastly, I just want to note that with the convening that occurred up in Eureka in April 2, things became very apparent. One was the appreciation of regional perspectives in state decision making, particularly with career education. And two was the continue.

It was the continued support of the continuum of elementary through high school in career and college exploration to create strong partnerships between education and workforce partners. With that, I thank you for the opportunity to speak today on behalf of the Redwood region and on behalf of career education efforts.

Thank you, Miss Shull. And I also want to welcome my colleague, SLM Member Soria, who joined us for today's hearing. And we're going to keep going with presentations and then do Q and A, maybe introductory statements if you want to, after the presentations.

Next up we have Aziz Amiri, who is the CEO of the regional Chamber of Commerce of San Gabriel Valley.

Good afternoon, Chair Berman. Chair Fong. Assemblyperson Soraya Good afternoon. My name is Aziz Amiri, CEO of the Regional Chamber of Commerce, San Gabriel Valley, which is a network of businesses and organizations dedicated to promoting economic growth, collaboration and community development in the southeastern San Gabriel Valley region in Los Angeles County.

Under the directive of the Executive Order n 1622, issued by the Governor, I'm here today to give employers a voice in redefining the education plan and establish a system that paves the way for workforce success.

The Executive order emphasizes the importance of employer engagement as partners in development of the new plan, moving beyond the traditional role of employers as end users. The economic output of the southeastern San Gibbo Valley region is part of a broader economic landscape of the entire San Gabriel Valley, which covers 400 sq.

Mi and includes 31 cities and five large unincorporated communities. Key industries driving growth in the region are healthcare, education, manufacturing, tourism and technology. In 1923, the region's payroll grew to a combined $22.1 billion in first half of the year, reflecting a 2.2% increase in annual wages.

The number of businesses in the region increased to nearly 91,000, indicating a 2.6% year to year gain. The healthcare sector, a major contributor to the total economy, added 3000 jobs in 2023, while the leisure and hospitality sectors saw a significant recovery, adding 3500 jobs. What are the areas of challenges? According to the employer?

Soft skill deficiency employers frequently report that graduates lack essential soft skills such as communication, teamwork and problem solving. Emotional intelligence interpersonal skills are often areas needing improvement. Practical experience while theoretical knowledge is strong, many graduates lack practical, hands on experience. Internships and real world projects are sometimes insufficient or not effectively integrated into the curriculum.

Graduates may not be fully prepared for professional work environment, including understanding workplace etiquette, managing time and handling job responsibilities. The transition from academic life to professional setting can be very challenging.

Skill gaps rapid changes in technology and industry requirements can create skill gaps between what is taught in educational institution and what is needed when they arrive at the workplace. Continuous learning and up skills are often necessary to bridge these gaps. Graduates sometimes have unrealistic expectations regarding job roles, salaries and career progression.

Aligning these expectations with the realities of job market is crucial. While today's graduates bring many valuable skills and perspective to the workplace, there are notable gaps that need to be addressed to enhance their work readiness. Both educational institutions and employers have roles to play in bringing this to light.

What we recommend is establish industry led advisory board expand work based opportunities through paid Apprenticeship continue to provide financial support to career technical education CTE provide coaches and mentors to develop students who show promise of excellence and creativity.

By working together, our stakeholders can help ensure that graduates are well prepared to meet the demands of the modern workplace. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you Mister Amiri. And next up we have Jeremy Smith, Chief of Staff at the state Building and Construction Trades Council of California and I also want to just welcome chair Muratsucci for joining us. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it.

Thank you Mister chair. Thank you to all of you for being here today. Appreciate being here myself and being invited to partake in this important hearing. Jeremy Smith here on behalf of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California. We are a council of about 150 construction trade unions up and down the State of California.

I'm also here as part of the get real coalition, relevance in education and learning. We've been around. The Getrail coalition's been around since the early two thousands and the building trades co chairs it with the California Manufacturers and Technology Association.

We are joining this coalition with other partners, including the Sheet Metal and air conditioning contractors, the California Ag Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and the California Renewable Transportation alliance.

We came together about 24 years ago because our individual groups were not seeing kids graduating high school prepare to enter the workforce with skills that were not relevant to enter the workforce directly. High school used to be about preparing someone to go to work after they graduated.

It has become instead about preparing a graduate to go to college. We need to go back to college and career so students have a choice. This paradigm shift leaves kids behind for whom college is just not an option.

They don't know that there is a lifetime of work out there for them that does not require a traditional four year University education. Racking up student debt and graduating with a degree that does not immediately help them get a job. Not a lot of young men and women entertain a dream of being a construction worker.

Many do, but not everybody does. Not every family pushes their kids to work directly after high school. We understand that. But there are kids who out there who want to do that, who have to do that, who do not have the choice to attend a four year University or a community college.

It is incumbent then to figure out ways to expose kids to a work life that does not require a traditional four year degree pathway. And the best way we have seen is by providing state grants to districts to create CTE with robust, deliverable requirements like the career technical education incentive grant CTIC.

Make no mistake, we are in favor of higher education after finishing an apprenticeship averaging three to five years depending upon the craft. Not only have apprentices been working and earning a while learning, there is a career waiting for them once they have journeyed out of their apprenticeship, and it's essentially free.

And in many areas of the state there are partnerships so that some of those apprentices do end up finishing with community college credit. This is quite clearly college for construction workers and is no less a secondary education than a traditional four year University degree.

But how do we expose kids to this world of work outside of the high school setting? The truth is that it is incredibly difficult with all of the state requirements that a student needs to graduate. Oftentimes there just literally isn't enough time in the day to add a CTE course.

But we should because the industry is ready for these students. The state's apprenticeship system for this training is robust and effective. The joint apprenticeship training Committee system currently, over 65,000 young men and women have made the choice to become construction apprentices in California, but that number could be higher.

We've also created a pre apprenticeship curriculum called the multicraft core curriculum to get people ready for what a career in construction looks like, the so called alarm clock skills, but also exposes them to all of the crafts so they can pick the one that best suits them.

The numbers of apprentices could be higher if we gave better access to any of the CTE courses that are provided in high school so young people knew about these pathways. Meanwhile, all of you have been creating the need for more construction workers.

There is so much pending construction work out there for new apprentices to use to journey through their programs. There are literally billions of dollars of work that needs to be done to update our state's infrastructure.

Many of you passed SB 1 in 2017 that raised the gas tax for the first time in a generation and is providing billions of dollars for that type of work. The ongoing need for affordable housing in California, those are career opportunities that apprentices can use to journey through their apprenticeship program.

Furthermore, over the last several years, the Legislature has decided a skilled and trained workforce should be required for certain public and publicly funded private projects. And the Legislature has also embraced project labor agreements, which allow for the local hiring of workers on projects that might otherwise be underserved. So you are all creating demand for more construction workers.

We need those workers to learn about our careers as early as possible. So what do we want to see from this master plan for correct technical education?

We want to see dedicated and sustained funding for high quality CTE programs that exists now through C TiG could be tuned up, could be made a little better, but it's there with strict accountability about how the funding is dispersed and used. The CTIG currently meets these requirements, but as I said, could be a little better.

We also need statewide and regional leadership to assist teachers and industry partners all over California to properly implement these high quality C Tig funded programs and increased access to CTE programs that are required, funded, and measured.

And incidentally, there is a problem to think about as well on the teacher pipeline for CTE that also needs to be addressed. Fewer and fewer folks are graduating from the CSU with a credential to teach CTE. Closing thoughts almost all the policy and accountability incentives in the 7000 page ed code ignore or undermine CTE.

The only drivers propping these programs up are dedicated funding streams directly tied to career preparation programs. Those streams include C Tig, federal Perkins grants, the Ag incentive grant for the for the students in our schools who, our high schools who are doing have an Ag career specialty.

And then 500 million is usually you're marked in all the school months for construction of CT facilities at high schools. That's it. But it's not enough. And that's why we're here today. We need a step.

We need the state to step in with funding and direction to ensure that CT exists for those kids who realize they want to work with their hands in the construction industry.

We also need this master plan to reflect the reality on the ground that we are pushing kids to college when there are thousands of career opportunities out there for them that do not require the time and debt load that a University based education demands. Everyone can benefit from a higher education.

Let's not fall into the trap that a higher education must mean traditional college. Thank you.

Thank you, Mister Smith. And last but definitely not least, is Tanya Morawiec. Morawiec, right on. All right. Deputy Director of Planning and Regional Office Operations for the California State Council on Developmental Disabilities. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me. I'm going to start by just sort of setting the ground here. Disability is very common in the nation. One out of four individuals have a disability, and the unemployment rate for individuals with disabilities is almost double that of their non disabled peers.

And in labor force participation, those without disabilities are literally three times as likely to be participating in the labor force than those who have disabilities. Next slide. So that presents a need for us to act, and to act quickly.

There's also a legacy of tracking within the educational and employment system, where teachers continue to either parse students, students who have disabilities, into a post secondary vein or an employment vein. And sadly, the employment vein is not really representative of the diverse array of stackable credentials and livable wage opportunities available to most students. Next slide.

Additionally, subminimum wage up until this year was really paying people below minimum wage to do work that wasn't necessarily in alignment with growth the sectors across California. With the passage of SB 639, that is no longer an issue.

But we are trying to catch up and right size to make sure that people who have disabilities are provided with opportunities in the mainstream workforce. So right sizing next slide is very important where people with disabilities cannot be subsumed into other populations.

Often in career ed, people with disabilities are lumped into other groups, like those who are foster youth or opportunity youth or dislocated workers. And while a high percentage of those individuals do have disabilities because of institutionalized and longstanding inequity like subminimum wage. We need to do more to create an equal playing field for those individuals.

Next slide one of the most important things and solutions to helping people find employment is providing benefits, education and work incentives. Planning both to those who have disabilities and their family Members on an ongoing basis and allowing them to receive that education and awareness through multiple pathways. Next slide please.

One of the most promising interventions has been providing intermediaries marketing and that is intermediaries to help navigate the complex system of services and supports both to those who have disabilities and employers who want to employ a diverse workforce.

Those entities and funding streams programs don't often share data, so there is a large disconnect between initiatives and that provides challenges with strategic planning. Next slide please. Interagency collaboration and cross training is essential.

There's not just one pathway to find employment and I'm going to throw the Alphabet soup at you right now where CDE and Selpas and DoR and AJCs and Dir and DDs and post secondary ed need to communicate a little bit more to create those pathways and inform each other's systems so that people can move through sequentially.

I can provide all the information on what those are, but if it confused you, imagine the layperson's response to hearing that same Alphabet soup. One of the solutions that's been posed across the state is creating feedback loops where those different entities share information up to the state level.

The state synthesizes, points out best practices and brings it back down to amplify what's happening on a regional level that's actually having an outcomes based values purchasing impact. Next slide.

What else we've seen that has been helpful is really wraparound supports to help people not just engage in these programs, but retain in those programs and find employment and maintain the positions that they obtained.

So linking some of the employment and career to self determination, helping people be more aware of flexible options which include part time work solutions tied to transportation, financial planning, which includes that benefit, support that I talked about and peer support.

People need to see other people who have disabilities finding employment, maintaining employment and going up a career ladder and achieving things across industries, not just one industry or another. Next slide please.

Field of practice those practitioners that assist people who have disabilities, negotiate with employers and facilitate communication in the educational system need to be provided with opportunities to upskill, learn vernacular around different career pathways, establish a community of practice so on an ongoing basis they can supplement didactic learning with real time problem solving and strategizing. Next slide, please.

Soft skills are important. I've heard that mentioned already and starting the conversation earlier. We hear a lot about transition and if people are waiting until high school to figure out what to do next in their lives, they've waited way too long.

So better equipping teachers to introduce pre apprenticeship apprenticeship align the different pathways and growth sectors in their environments on an early basis will help those students achieve success in those different career fields.

One specific thing that would be very helpful within the education system, California Education Code Section 45125.1 requires that for work based learning, which is the primary indicator of future employment success, require any school to have every work site hosting a learning opportunity. Have fingerprints across the entire site. It's cost prohibitive. Employers don't want to engage.

And what's happening is that early workforce exposure is not occurring due to the prohibitive guidelines intended to protect students, but having a negative outcome. So we're looking at increased need for alignment. Really, you know, make sure this master plan is talking to other master plans. There's a DDS master plan which will include some career education and employment.

We have special ed, local planning areas, we have selfas and skills based needs. Assessments are paramount. I talked to some career education trainers in schools, community colleges, who said, we have no assessment for students who are coming in here to help them determine what they want to pursue.

So they're getting to college without having explored, in a functional way a career path that creates a livable wage and they don't know what to administer in terms of an assessment that's helpful. So we pointed them in terms of skills based assessments to customized employment and discovery.

All of these links are on this PowerPoint for your viewing pleasure, and I want to close it with the last comment, which is profoundly important business bottom line, there is a benefit to hiring a diverse workforce and diversity includes disability. There's innovation tied to that.

There's reduction in turnover, there's increased safety, adherence, higher morale, profound positive impacts on employers. And that needs to be shared across industries. So employers and others see that disability is a part of diversity that has a positive impact. And there are vehicles in California to help employers learn peer to peer things like bacs.

The link is there and then I'm going to close with this is not one entity's responsibility. I just recently read a study of post secondary education students who had disabilities. In that study, only 20% were open to DoR, which means oftentimes government relies on DoR to provide the supports that are essential and they are the experts.

But if 80% of students in post secondary education who have disabilities are not utilizing those services, they have a need to access them in other places. Which is why we need that cross industry co training and understanding of services so we can do sequential strategic planning for positive outcomes. Thank you for your time.

I know I went over.

Thank you very much, Miss Morawiec. So with that, I want to turn over to colleagues. If colleagues have any opening remarks they want to make, if they have any questions they want to ask, comments, anything of that nature, please send Bresoria thank you chair.

And I want to just appreciate all the panelists for the information that you guys provided. I represent a region which obviously in the central Valley, one of the poorest regions in the area.

When we look at just the access to higher education, I think about 53% of the population in the valley go to college in some shape or form. I think we're probably in the lowest percentage.

So when we're talking about looking at career technical education and other and getting creative, I think that that's very critical because in my region, 50% of the population essentially are getting left behind and we're not meeting the needs of our region consistently.

When I talk to the various chambers and businesses, similar to the remarks made by Mister Amiri, in terms of just basic skills, and I think we have to get back to the basics when we're talking about our students and the future workforce.

I couldn't agree more with Mister Smith about also opening up the opportunities earlier on when it comes to our young people, our young men of color, which continuously continue to be left behind. When we look at the rates for higher ed, it's also women that are seeking these opportunities of higher education, which is amazing to see that.

But we're leaving our men of color also behind.

And so I am hoping that obviously this will provide an opportunity for us to have broader discussions on how this within the bigger master plan of education, and I would suggest that we're probably the master plan of education is not meeting the needs of today, certainly not in my region.

And so I look forward to exploring opportunities on how to address some of those challenges. In particular, one of the issues that I'm very interested in is in healthcare and the healthcare workforce. You know, the State of California has focused on increasing access and by expanding coverage, well, coverage is one piece of it.

If we don't have the workforce to meet the needs of this, you know, access that we've created, then there's no true access in what we are doing here in Sacramento. And so I'm very interested in that.

That is why, you know, this year I'm proposing a policy to allow community colleges also to get into, more into that space, especially when we're talking about communities like mine that are more rural, that community colleges are that space.

Some of my folks, the single mom, they cannot travel over an hour to go and take two classes at Fresno State or at Stanislaw State, versus staying in her own community college and accessing those opportunities. But I think getting creative and innovative in terms of regionally too, right?

Every region, I think, has different sectors, and we can't just be a one size fits all. We have to have more flexibility in our system in order to ensure that Californians across the state have the opportunity to thrive. And it just doesn't always have to be college. I am obviously a big supporter of college and University.

As a first generation daughter of immigrants, that was my ticket and way out, and I want every person to have that opportunity.

But if we know that the statistics are in my district, only half of the people, you know, go that route, what are we doing so that we're not forgetting about the other half that haven't had that same opportunity. And so that's what really I'm interested in.

I'm glad to be part of this Select Committee and figuring out opportunities, how to invest in programs that already exist, that are showing some positive fruits, and then also rethinking of, you know, some of the investments that we've made and holding ourselves accountable. And if it's not returning, you know, the, the return on investment is not great.

I think we have to also be able to learn how to pivot and do things differently on behalf of the folks that are looking to us to make those decisions. Thank you.

Thank you Esmeralda Soria. Thank you for being here. Thanks for your participation. Please assemble. Member Muratsuchi.

Thank you Mister Chair, for convening this very important hearing. I had the opportunity to join the Governor when he announced and launched this effort for the master plan for career education. And as chair of the Assembly Education Committee, I want to join all of my colleagues.

Bipartisan agreement that career education, career technical education, whatever we call it, is a top priority for all of us. And going to Mister Smith's comment about how it shouldn't be college or career, it should be both career and I, college and career education.

Having said that, you know, I've been working on this issue for over 12 years now. I served on the board of my local regional occupational center, the Southern California Regional Occupational Center, Board, starting the late two thousands, where we were implementing successful programs and getting high school kids that they were bored in class.

But once they were able to work on electrician work or construction work, their eyes lit up and they became engaged. They saw the relevance of education to what they wanted to do with a real career that they can see themselves in.

Since arriving in the Legislature, I know that with the passage of the Local Control Funding Formula, we dramatically changed how regional occupational centers and programs are funded. They used to have direct funding that was replaced by Governor Brown with, you know, this effort to split up all funds to local districts.

And we saw that local districts were not funding career technical education the way that they used to. And so then we came with the CTIG program, the career, the CTE incentive grant program.

And while that, you know, continues to be one of the main sources of direct funding for CTE programs, like has been noted, there are ways that we can try to improve this program.

Last year, I had Assembly Bill 377 that was supported by the majority of career technical education providers in the state to try to consolidate the strong workforce programs with the CDE, the Department of Education, and the community colleges to combine the program to address this issue. That's highlighted in the administration's comments about the fragmentation of funding.

So I wanted to. While I appreciate the Governor highlighting the importance of career education as an educational priority for the state, I'm still waiting for specific proposals how to improve upon what we currently have. I know that this is part of the process and that the final report and recommendations are still going to be forthcoming.

I want to take this opportunity to ask, starting with Mister Smith as well as anyone else, if they might have any thoughts on whether we should consolidate the career, the strong workforce funding with the Department of Education and the community colleges.

You know, I just wanted to know that, you know, last year the community college chancellor did not oppose the consolidation, and yet. Still. Yet the Bill was. Did not move out of the Senate. Mister Smith, do you have any thoughts on whether, you know, consolidating the strong workforce program would be a step in the right direction?

In terms of addressing this fragmentation of.

Funding issue, I do agree with you. It would be a step in the right direction. I think we supported your Bill last year, maybe not an open Committee, but I can have a conversation with you offline about how that all started, where that came from. I think you were around when it finally started, or first started.

But yeah, I think the community college system is great. We love it. We have partnerships with it, with some of our apprenticeship programs, as I mentioned, and they provide community college credit. We have a great relationship with them. We really feel like access to CTE should be before that.

And one of the previous speakers said something I wish I had said, which is really, it's middle school, high school might be too late.

Elementary.

Elementary school. Elementary school, that's right. And so to the extent that that fragmentation of that money, if we put it back to the Department of Education and could be pushed down, we could start some of these programs sooner at an earlier age. You're right.

Once a kid in high school understands, using your electrical example, why algebra is important to be an electrician, it just clicks over and over and over again. It's a contextualized learning. Right. So we agree with you.

Yes, thank you. And I don't know if any of the other panelists. Okay. Seeing none. Thank you, Mister Smith. I'm hoping that the Administration will consider that as one potential solution to address this fragmentation of funding issue.

But I know that when Governor Brown first proposed to blow up the silos and to try to get more regional collaboratives, getting the local educational agencies, the community colleges, and local employers to be working together, that that was part of the intent.

And breaking up that funding, between the funding going to the k 12 schools through the Department of Education, and to the chancellor's office to go to the community colleges, have we learned any lessons in the past 10 years?

I mean, I just realized it's a 10 year anniversary of not only of the Local Control Funding Formula, but of that elimination of the direct funding for the regional occupation centers and programs where the part of that effort was to break up the silos. And I see that as one of the bullet points for this master plan.

And yet, you know, it's one thing to talk about, it's another thing to actually make it work.

So I want to see if any of the panelists might, you know, have any insights in terms of, did we learn anything in the past 10 years in terms of this last effort to try to, you know, blow up the silos and promote regional collaboration, and how that should inform our efforts going forward?

I have a thought on that. I think the intent of breaking up the silos is one that was a wonderful intent, particularly for regions that have limited resources. However, part of what didn't occur naturally in some regions is that there is no articulation between elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, community colleges, CSUs, and workforce.

And so part of what didn't happen naturally was because there's no articulation, those silos maintained. And there wasn't necessarily a directive or a group who naturally was able to bring those folks all to the table to start that articulation process. And I think that that is something that is happening now.

I see California jobs first, starting that process right now, which is really great. K 16 has been working really closely with California jobs first on that, and then, you know, bringing in the Golden State pathways funding is also going to support that as well.

And so in the last 10 years, and I'm speaking, and I'm speaking mostly from a very small, small region with very limited resources. And we are taxing our resources because we did not know how to articulate all of our opportunities.

And so I think that was one consideration that we were not able to remove that barrier for, but we are making progress on it now.

Yeah, I wanted to add to that in terms of articulation, you know, having things for people who have disabilities, specific to sharing information from 504 plans and ieps that are going up through the system to share the interests and help sort of coordinate with growth sector industries in that area, I think could be part of the solution.

And where I've seen different regional entities really take off with local partnership agreements that are weaving in workforce, with post secondary, with elementary school, there are some lessons learned and some positive impacts there. The problem is, it stops at the LPA as opposed to being sort of elevated for a cross state learning opportunity.

So a little bit more cohesion and organization at the top when that best practice is being manifest.

And showing how it's possible with places that are still trying to figure it out could be significant in terms of return on investment and shedding a spotlight on innovation and real impact in terms of bringing people back into those growth sectors, really blowing up pre apprenticeship, apprenticeship, teaching those essential soft skills that employers are saying currently do not exist, that needs to be part of the education system.

And I think there's vehicles, entities, and knowledge capital that exists to deliver it, but not everybody is aware of it. So we may be evolving out of silos, and there's a lot of information, but frankly, the information is in 15 different places, and we ourselves struggle to find where it all is.

So one possible solution is somehow aligning and creating a repository that goes across all of these issues that we're seeing. So there's a one stop shop and a little bit of sequencing and clarity around what the different funds do for what and whom. Right. Because it varies.

And one of the biggest challenges I've seen is when there is short term funding and you're building a groundswell of funding or best practice and then the funding ends. The funding ends at the point where everybody's like, zero snap, that funding is great, we need it, but then it doesn't exist anymore, right?

So we kind of get caught in this cycle. So crosswalks, a one stop sort of connected shop instead of everybody kind of having, this is what we do here, never to share with what they do there, I think is part of the solution. I think there is an impact.

Awareness is Low and I don't know who the entity is to do that. Analysis, synthesis and report out at the state level, but also at the regional levels and then down at the super granular level to the elementary school and to the parents. I want to add one thing specific to students who have disabilities.

Parents are still being told now when they go to the Doctor, your child will never live a normal life, your child's not going to go to school, they're not going to have a job, they're not going to get married. And that's just not true. Right.

But if we tracing this all the way back, it's really a shift in thinking and cross systems education. So that's not the message we're giving or getting.

Yeah. Thank you. If I may just wrap up my comments. I mean, first of all, I know I've seen some of our leas working with the Regional Centers to really provide, you know, real opportunities, real career, you know, opportunities for our disabled students.

And so I absolutely agree that we need to make sure that we promote those programs. I just want to close with what you were saying earlier about not only needing to address the fragmentation of the funding, but the fragmentation of sources of information.

I think that was part of the intent to try to consolidate that strong workforce program so that, you know, providers, CTE providers didn't have to go, you know, searching, you know, applying to different places, but also looking for different sources for information, but that we can try to consolidate that.

And lastly, you know, to say that I hope that the Administration, in finalizing this master plan to recognize that a lot of the silos follow the funding. So when school districts receive their own CTE funds, I know my school districts, they develop their own CTE programs.

They didn't, you know, they don't have the resources to be, you know, sharing with others, you know, if you get the funding, that you're going to hold on to that funding.

And so while the intent of breaking up the funding was to try to incentivize collaboration, what it actually did was that it just gave different pots of monies to different school districts, to community colleges, some to the regional programs.

But they ended up just focusing on, you know, trying to acquire and spend their own pots of money rather than incentivizing regional collaboration. And so I'm hoping that the Administration will take that into consideration in their final recommendations for the master plan. Thank you very much.

Thank you Senator Muratsuchi, Senator Fong.

Thank you so much, chair Berman, and thank you to my colleagues and to everyone on the panel here for this very robust conversation. And just to follow up on the conversation from Mister Mursic on the fragmentation of funds and information.

Before I served as a college trustee and they're a chair of the Committee on the ad hoc Committee on jobs and economy, we brought together labor and business workforce development boards, thought partners like the LA Economic Development Corporation and other entities to look at trends.

And that was a regional approach and now as a statewide approach here and with all the different regions and different sectors here, there's so much work in this space here and I'm just excited about the work ahead here.

And at the same time, there's just a lot of challenges and opportunities that has been framed here by all the panelists and by the Administration going forward as well. I know that when we had our Budget Subcommittees on strong workforce, there were a lot of conversations on the $500 million that were spread out across the state.

And then just over the break I was speaking with the La regional consortium that was made up of the 19 community colleges in the La area and they're building out their training programs.

And as somebody said, it's when a program gets going and it's going well and all of a sudden it's like, zero, we don't have the funds to scale it up down the road, but also the partnerships.

And really when we look at these partnerships on a regional, wide level and a statewide level, my question would be also looking at the recommendations going forward.

Are there plans to have a coordinating body statewide to really coordinate all these different entities and to look at the funding streams and then also to follow up on Mister Mercy's point on the strong workforce and CTIC funds.

Like, I think there's a lot of opportunities when we look at different regions of the state, there's booming areas of tech, booming areas of healthcare, biotech, entertainment, different sectors that are growing. And so when we look at how we can best allocate these funds and resources, I think those partnerships and sharing information is critical.

So is there plans for a coordinated body? I would just want to put that out there as well. And I'm not sure if anybody, the Administration, anybody wants to address that. Thank you. A follow up question. Yes, our Committee, I'm sorry, next panel. Also, thank you.

There are definitely recommendations for such coordinators.

Yes, that sounds good. But I really appreciate the comments and the conversation here today. Excited about the work, Eddie. Thank you, Mister chair.

Thank you. Thank you, Assemblymember Fong.

Any additional questions or comments, I just want to quickly ask and maybe for everybody to go around, and some of you have already said this as a part of your comments, but can you help us identify one or two things that we're currently doing that you think are going well, that you think we should sort of double down on and maybe not.

So no pressure, don't dig too deep, but if there's things that pop to mind that you think are going well, that should get more resources and more attention and expansion. Would love to just tease those out. You hear crickets? We got work to do. No. Well, I would just say again, Mister chair, you know.

But CTE courses, especially in our space, but I think generally are expensive. Yeah. Equipment, you need a bigger classroom sometimes. You need different things than a normal English classroom. I don't mean to disparage English classrooms, but there's just a different setting.

You need a warehouse.

Yeah, a big space in a school or a warehouse, right. So, you know, I know that incentive grant is, you know, being used and we have good clawback language in there. Right.

Could be tightened up, but you got to give some money back if you don't do what you said you're going to do with the money. So I think it's working. I think that's an answer, your question. But I think it could be improved upon and added to just to get some of these programs off the ground.

Yeah. Thank you.

I know I spoke about soft skills.

I was going to dive into that, so please do.

Yes, but there is a strong support for the CTE program. When I speak to the school district and colleges, they asked me to emphasize the fact that they continue to fund strong workforce and Perkins grant and they also identified challenges of recruiting CTE instructors. So I wanted to share that with the group here.

Yeah, appreciate that.

Well, we're here for one, so that's good. I think we're on the right path. And I wanted to mention a couple of other things. The employment first office was funded and that going to be housed in CHHS.

And that is going to be really shoring up a lot of different disability employment initiatives and creating that synergy, reducing some of the siloization. So looking forward to that. DIR is doing some great stuff in their IACA Apprenticeship Committee. They actually have a disability Subcommittee which is informing all of the other committees. Right.

So that multi multi-identification and interrelatedness is being explored there. Another thing that I think we're doing well, there's a Business Advisory Committee. Right. So bringing the businesses together to talk about their needs, some of their challenges with the systems and government, I think is funding innovative practices.

DOR and DDS are both funding competitive integrated employment opportunities and we have a repository of information. I think the state is doing that well. We're just not reflecting on it, I think in an intentional way and levering it up into some of these master plans.

So, for example, the Employment First Committee has several reports with recommendations around how to create more inclusive workforces and connect disability populations to some of these career pathways. There's a California Workforce Pathways Joint Advisory Committee that has general information through the California Department of ED, another great resource of information with recommendations.

And we can always reflect on the WIOA state plan, which lays out some of the recommendations of what the master plan is looking to achieve. So those are examples, I think, of success that we can optimize and leverage to create some meaningful, meaningful change.

Thank you.

Just to reiterate, you know, what is going well, is this work on the regional level of really braiding resources? We're bringing together chambers of commerce, we're bringing together workforce partners and the continuum of all educational institutions, California jobs first, really with the lens of supporting students through their educational journey into the workforce and into college.

And I am, there is a huge relief and a sense of relief amongst students and amongst parents that the push is not just for college. And that is another thing that is going really well.

College, of course, is a terrific vehicle, but it is not necessarily the right vehicle right out of the gate for all students. And as that sense and as that understanding begins to trickle down to a lot of our students and a lot of our families, that has become a huge weight and it makes school less cumbersome feeling for them. And so two things that are going well is that braiding of resources and again, the focus on career and or college.

Thank you.

Okay. Yeah. So. All right, so just a few things that are going pretty well. Definitely the expansion of basic needs centers in institutions of higher learning. That is a big, big step forward. But at the end of the day, the high cost of living inflation, there's still more that students need.

Additionally, pathway programs that are being instituted that really cut down that time for students that want to enter a specific career field. It lays down that foundation straight track, but it's just capacity. We have a lack of capacity on those programs and it's expanding that capacity so that more students could take advantage of that.

And in addition, is also streamlining the common course numbering. That's a big one right there. Streamlining, making it simple for students to go ahead and take the classes that they need, don't get confused with the classes that they don't need and are able to transfer.

Yeah, and just another big one is just right here, having students involved, ensuring that they're a part of the communication. Because at the end of the day, we're the ones taking the class and, you know, we're the ones that could say, hey, well that's great, that research is great, but I, we never heard about it.

Where was it?

Thank you, Mr. Ruiz-Martinez, did my Legislative Director, Alan Green give you that answer? Because those were all things that we've worked on. Basic needs centers, increasing capacity in the pathways, common course numbering.

But the reason we worked on those three things is we heard about it from students and all of those were from a student centered perspective, that was the driver behind that legislation. Well, I think we're getting to wrap up time.

Any last remarks that anybody, anything that you didn't cover that you want to make sure that we heard from you about, really appreciate the testimony and the answers to the questions and taking the time to participate. Any last thoughts?

Another thing to keep an eye out for, SB 153, number 57, California Center for Inclusive Colleges. This will be providing TA that could very well wrap into some of these master plan goals. So we've got to hunt down this information. It just comes from the sky sometimes. Then we write it down.

Breaking down the silos means kind of archiving and collecting it everywhere so we can take advantage of opportunities when they show up.

Appreciate that. Thank you everybody very much for participating today. Really appreciate it.

So next up, we're going to have a panel on the development of the master plan for career education, and we're going to hear from Randy Tillery, Director of Economic Mobility Post-secondary and Workforce Systems and co-Director of the Center for Economic Mobility at WestEd, and Kathy Booth, co-Director of the Center for Economic Mobility at WestEd.

And you each have 10 minutes each and then we'll have some Q and A. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Berman, Members of the Committee, it's great to be here today. In addition to what you said, my role at WestEd, I was actually formally a senior dean of workforce and economic development and a regional dean in the California community college system for a number of years.

And so these issues about the divisions between CTE and General education or college going versus career going have been a central and passionate part of my life for a very long time. So it's great to be here today.

Approximately a year ago, WestEd was asked to support the Administration with gathering community input and stakeholder input to actually to identify what should go into the career education master plan for the State of California.

This work began last fall when we conducted a series of interest holder interviews with public employees, constituent groups and other interest groups to actually get their input into the plan and then that was bolstered by written input from the named agencies, actually in the Executive order.

WestEd then synthesized the themes from those into four broad areas of potential action that were then shared in a public webinar last January. And those included, they're going to sound very familiar, improving access and affordability, strengthening career pathways, providing more hands-on learning opportunities, and establishing structures for state and regional coordination, as you were all discussing just a few minutes ago.

These concepts were shared, as I said, in a public webinar. We've also had dozens of meetings with constituency groups, people who have reached out to the governor's office or directly to WestEd to want to provide their input into the plan.

And those efforts, I should say, are really still ongoing. In fact, we're basically doing a regional event in the South Central Coast last week because they didn't get their own in person event, we want to be sure that their voices are heard as well.

In addition to that, we actually use those same four major themes of the work that were derived from the interviews and the written input to lead eight regional, we called them design sessions, particularly because we didn't want to give regional folks like, here's a list of ideas, thumbs up or thumbs down.

The goal was really to have them tell us what they thought should be in the plan around those four major themes. Those were in-person events that went all the way from the far north to the southern border.

We worked very closely with regional partners, K-16 collaboratives, jobs-first collaboratives other regional interest holders to determine the best way to really maximize participation in those events.

So, like in the southern border region, it was very important to that region, which covers most of Imperial County and San Diego County, that they actually have it at Imperial Valley College because rural areas are often, it's harder for them to get access, and they actually bust people from San Diego out to IVC for them to be able to participate in the event.

So the regents really worked very collaboratively, worked very closely with us to really maximize participation in every way they could. In total, over the eight events, 840 basically interest holders participated in these.

These included TK-12 representatives, community colleges, four-year colleges, including private colleges, adult education providers, workforce training providers, community-based organizations, representatives of organized labor, and employers. And we really saw a good spread of voices across all of the events. In particular, K-12 adult education were very heavily represented.

But in some cases, we saw some really strong representation from employers and labor as well, and that was very exciting to see. The sessions were highly interactive. They really weren't meant for us to be doing a lot of talking and we didn't do a lot of talking. We really wanted to hear the voices of other people.

And so there was a lot of breakout activity, there were a lot of interactive design sessions. It was really interesting to note that we noticed at the first event and really throughout that people weren't on their phones and they weren't on their computers. People didn't bring work to these events, they actually came to do the work.

At the end of the southern border event, I remember being in the last breakout session, people are wandering in and I'm like, oh, you know, there's going to be some attrition, we'll have fewer people. And then one of the people's like, I don't think so. People are having fun, they actually want to be here.

And I've been doing this work for a long time. And to see that level of engagement for like six or seven hours in eight different events was pretty extraordinary for us as a team. So there were two basic types of activities. So in the morning we had people within their sort of segments.

So, you know, adult educators, community colleges, K-12 sit down and really articulate and document the pain points that they think are keeping them from doing the work they need to do to help more people realize living wage employment, to really leverage education, to realize their goals, their dreams, and their future.

From that we had 3,214 individual sticky notes gathered from various pieces of paper. It was incredibly analog, but we wanted people to have that sense of physically doing that. It looked like a big art activity. You walked in, there was stuff all over the tables. We wanted people to play, we wanted them to really get excited.

And so we had to synthesize all 3000 of those from just from the morning activity alone. In the afternoon what we did is according to the four major themes that we mentioned earlier, we had them go into what we call design sessions.

So they literally would have a blank board, a design board, and for like kind of state or regional coordination or career pathways or access and affordability, they would identify what their ideal solutions would be. Very often what you see. I've been working with educators a very long time. I was one myself for a while.

People are more than happy to tell me all the things that make their lives really, really hard, but everyone's got that vision of what the world should look like and what it could be like. And that's what we wanted to get from them were those ideas. We had over 600 different ideas.

Obviously there's some duplication from session to session that have really been a part of the thinking we've shared with the Governor's office that we think will actually inform the master plan. So, as I said, the engagement with interest holders is going on in constituency groups.

But I do want to sort of, before I finish up, I want to talk about two quotes that we heard in the sessions, and these are sort of the drop-the-mic moment. So one was an adult education practitioner talking about adult learners.

And they're like, the problem for adult learners is in order to be able to use the system, they have to be an expert in the system. They have to know, do I go to the adult school, do I go to the community college, do I go to the job center?

And the fact of the matter is they're just trying to get a better job. They're just trying to figure out the next best thing they could do. And they had to have really tremendous amounts of expertise to understand how to navigate the systems that aren't very well connected.

Kind of going back to that theme of fragmentation that you all mentioned earlier. The second was actually a quote from the Inland Empire, which is actually where diamond was.

We actually had a student who said, the problem is you taught me how to walk and you taught me how to run, and then you threw me into a swimming pool. And what they're trying to reference is the process of trying to really navigate college and career.

After going through school, they learned math and English and a lot of really incredibly important things, but there were incredibly high-stakes decisions that they needed more information to be able to make and they just didn't have those tools. And this goes back to sort of, I know people were talking about it like elementary school.

The fact that college and career education has to go basically all the way down to early grades. It needs to sit at the center of curriculum. So you're not giving us the life skills and the decision-making skills to really make those decisions.

And so with that, I'm actually going to pass over to my colleague Kathy Booth, who's going to talk about some of the substance of what we learned in those events.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I'm so glad that you got to hear from the panel first because many of the things they said were things that we heard over and over again across the state. So there's a report that's up on the career education website that tries to summarize those 3000 sticky notes.

It's 45 pages long, so I'm going to try to bring it down to about 10 minutes worth of content. But I really encourage everybody to go take a look at that report. We organized it thematically so it's easy to skim and it's full of quotes. And we just had so much wisdom that we heard from the field.

So one of the things that was surprising to us is that we assumed that there'd be a lot of variation from one part of the state to the other. But in fact, we found that the comments that people made were remarkably similar. There was a recognition that challenges are different in different areas.

So, for example, people talked a lot about what rural students experienced, but they talked about that in every part of the state. So this list here is some of the things that we heard of pretty consistently.

So foremost was a concern when people were trying to figure out how we could make it easier for people to participate in education and workforce training and to get credit for what they knew. The first problem they listed was financial barriers.

It is simply impossible for people to find the resources to be able to step out of the workforce, to be able to participate.

There was a lot of concern that nobody seems to have a good understanding about what the career opportunities are, that the educators in formal education aren't sure, that folks in the workforce in adult education systems tend to be helping people get into the first job, any job, and not necessarily one that's going to lead to a living wage, and that even employers seem to be struggling to explain exactly what it was that they needed because their needs were changing so rapidly.

There was a real sense that right now our education programs and jobs are not well coordinated. So you heard this echoed by the panelists earlier, that people are learning all sorts of valuable things in school, but they don't know how to explain to employers what's relevant about that.

We also heard of a lot of concern about the disconnection between the different training systems. So one of the things that I think that's important to recognize in this plan is we're absolutely talking about conventional K-12 to college pathways and CTE, as was discussed at length.

But we're also talking about all the other places where training happens for work. So that might be a Department of Rehabilitation program for a person with a disability. It might be adult education, it might be apprenticeship, it might be a workforce training program. And those systems are very poorly coordinated.

So if you are a person who gets a partial training in one area, and then you need to get to a different area, it's almost impossible to make that jump. And that is really underscored by this incredible lack of coordination between funding and underlying data, as you also heard described really clearly earlier.

So in trying to find a way. And next slide, please. To encapsulate all of the different recommendations, we chose to sort of create some visions for the future. So the place where we saw the most variation in responses was based on that education or workforce training system.

So we've got sort of divided up the different concepts according to that. So the first vision that I want to talk through is the one for TK-12 people in these meetings envisioned is a place where there's a broader emphasis on career and life skills across all elements of the curriculum.

So you should not have to find a CTE program to be getting those critical skills that you need so that you know how to swim when you leave high school.

This would mean that the activities that people do in every class would really be applying those concepts into real-world scenarios and also making very clear to students how things that are taught in nonvocational programs build those soft skills that employers are feeling that students are really not learning.

So you can actually actively talk about communication and problem solving and teamwork in any class that's taught in K-12, and that in doing so, you need to make sure that those lessons are designed thinking about a variety of different types of students.

So as you heard described, that a student with a disability is not being told, oh, this is not for you. The feeling was, this would best be done if these lesson plans were co-designed with employers.

So this is the place to create the dialogue, to say, this is what's important to us right now, and not put the burden on teachers to try to figure out what that thing is. Next slide, please. As you heard from the panelists, there was a real feeling that this exploration needed to start much, much earlier.

We definitely heard both elementary and middle school emphasized as the place that this should start. And one of the reasons that people thought it was important to start early is that students can't be expected to know what they want to do in their first try.

So you need to give them a chance to actively say, oh, I think I really like healthcare. And then you discover a lot of it is about dealing with people's bodies. And you might say, oh, I don't like that. Maybe I'd like to be a counselor.

Maybe I actually don't want to be in the helping professions at all. And I really want to be the scientist that designs the medicines. You want to give students multiple opportunities to figure out what they like.

Another thing that was really interesting is that where we were in talking about financial literacy was pretty nascent at that point when we were in the field, but the folks from the communities were talking about it quite a bit, and they said, if we're going to have financial literacy training, that should include information about how to understand the costs of the different pathways I could take to education and training.

If I don't want to do college, what are those choices? And how much money could I make in those jobs? Or if I do want to go to CSU, how much is it going to cost me, and how do I manage my debt to be able to get there?

And finally, there was a strong feeling that we need to have parents and legal guardians engaged in these activities from the get-go, both because a 14-year-old still probably is not going to be really good at cost-benefit analyses, but because it's an opportunity to let those parents know about opportunities that they may not realize that they have access to, especially for helping people understand both financial aid and other public benefits that make it possible to afford the full cost of attendance.

So that was the vision that we had for K-12. Next slide, please. So next I'm going to talk about college pathways, and in this I want to make clear that we're talking about community college and their certificate programs and their links to apprenticeship in addition to a University education.

So one of the things that people talked about is that unfortunately, despite all the work to streamline transfer pathways and to create this idea of stackable credentials, if you pick one pathway, if you go the certificate pathway, it's very difficult to come back and pursue a degree later.

So we heard a real emphasis that colleges should do a better job of making sure there's alignment between these opportunities. So over a lifetime of learning, somebody can come back. So you could imagine you start out in early childhood education in a certificate program. You realize you want to be a TK teacher.

You go through a teacher apprenticeship program and you translate those apprenticeship and the skills you learned running your home daycare center toward the bachelor's degree that you need to get that job. That's the kind of pathways that people were talking to us about. This would mean that we'd have to have much better articulation of courses.

So you heard from our student representative of why common course numbering was important is because you can be taking a class in one place and a college down the road doesn't accept credit for it. You finish a class that's eligible for one CSU campus and it's not accepted by another.

So we need to figure out a way to make this less difficult for students so they don't have to retake their coursework. And this also reaches all the way back to high school. It was fascinating the number of times people said, it's so confusing.

People don't know if they get an AP score of three on chemistry, will it count? Because that's treated differently at every institution that that student might be thinking about attending. We heard a lot of concerns that dual enrollment courses are not being counted toward people's majors.

And the feeling was that, that whatever the decision of the education institutions was, that information should be completely transparent to students so they can get credit for what they've done and know when they won't get credit for it. And this led to this concern about what happens when adults go back to school.

So we have systems underway with dual enrollment. We even have it for adult education, but we don't have good ways to figure out, if you served in the military, how that relates to your making progress toward a business degree or a healthcare-related degree.

And so the feeling was that there should be a very clear and transparent process by which those opportunities got evaluated, which would give people confidence that the student that was given that academic credit is in fact ready to go on the next step. But that needs to be made less up to each institution to figure out.

Next slide, please. People also talked a lot about the problem with just getting into college.

They said that things like filling out the application forms for community colleges and CSU and UC is incredibly onerous, especially for dual enrollment students where they have to go and they have to get separate transcripts for every community college where they may have taken a dual enrollment course.

So they were envisioning a place where you could just click buttons and your records would pass seamlessly. And that means that the advisors could spend time helping people think about their college and career plan, rather than making sure they're getting credit for all the things they've already taken.

Another concern, and I think you heard this from our student representative as well, is that they can find out about fascinating career opportunities and they understand the education pathway to get there. And there simply are not enough seats available because of impaction.

And so if we could get all the various institutions together at the regional level and figuring out ways to work cooperatively to make sure there's enough seats available in programs and tell students, maybe we don't have enough room here, but if you go down the road, these are your opportunities.

And finally, we want to make sure that all students, when they finish, can articulate clearly to employers what they've learned, that's going to make them a valuable employee. And that's just as important for the English and psychology majors as it is for our future nurses and firefighters. Next slide, please.

So this brings us to ongoing education and training. So this is all the training that happens outside of conventional academic institutions. And originally, we were thinking about this as a place where we were talking about adults, but it became very clear in the course of the convenings that people are very concerned about opportunity youth.

So we've had two incidents happen in close succession. First the pandemic, and then two years of problems with the FAFSA.

And the concern is that there's going to be an enormous number of young people who will leave high school unclear about what they're supposed to do next and who are going to need to get reengaged with education systems. And they probably aren't going to think about college as the first place that they want to go.

So what we need to do is provide places where adults and opportunity youth can get information about this complicated world of work and the fact that pathways are rarely linear.

So they understand what they are, what they know, what they care about, and they understand all the different ways they can get to the career of their dreams, whether that's going into apprenticeship or if it's absolutely going to require a college degree to enter the occupation of their choice.

And as they learn about those opportunities, they need to understand about all the different aid options they have, financial aid and public benefits that will make it possible for them to stop working or to not be in a homeless shelter and actually be able to engage in this type of learning.

There is a real concern that this workforce training, if we're really looking at what career pathways look like, needs to be done with employers at the table as equal partners, because it is very difficult for people to understand what those pathways are.

And while it's admirable that we get people into first jobs and more stable jobs, we need to make sure that we all understand what those career ladders are so people can move forward. Next slide, please. This was a place where we heard a lot of concern about the needs of different populations.

So we definitely had a lot of representatives of people with disabilities, because that was one of the named constituencies in the Executive Order. But over the course of the convenings, we heard a lot about opportunity youth and immigrants and people that have been incarcerated, a variety of populations.

And the feeling was that you need to provide information to people that takes into account who they are. So if you have someone who's an immigrant who is very, very good in childcare, we should be offering opportunities for them where they're building language skills and the language they need to be able to get toward that bachelor's degree, including being able to understand all the academic terms that are used. You need to have opportunities for work-based learning that are designed for people with disabilities by having a universal design approach so someone isn't told, oh, I'm sorry, this thing is not for you.

Whenever possible, people wanted opportunities to be paid. They were very enthusiastic about apprenticeship because they said, even with the amount of financial aid and public benefits that are available in the state, it probably won't be enough to cover the full cost of attendance.

So the more that we can have people doing on that job training where work-based learning is paid, that that's going to do the best to get people into a better place. And finally, they were very enthusiastic about an idea that was first floated by the Governor that he termed as the career passport.

So the idea here is that employers would like to hire based on something besides your educational attainment, where you got your bachelor's degree, but they simply don't have information to evaluate what your skills are. So people around the country are working on this. They're usually called a learning and employment record.

We can all agree that a career passport is easier to say and understand. So this is the idea that there would be some sort of mechanism where an individual could curate for the employer what their relevant skills were wherever they learned that information. Next slide, please. Which brings us to coordination.

This was the one thing that everybody agreed on. We heard it in the interviews, we heard it from the agencies, we heard it in every single meeting that there was a feeling that we needed to have greater alignment, and that could only happen through intentional coordination.

So one of the things you heard from the panelists about what works is when there's somebody in charge of helping things work at the region, that funding is set up in ways that it becomes, this is what's mine. I'm doing what I need to do, so somebody needs to be there to help get it done.

If we did that, if we had employers at the table, you know, the education institutions, the workforce training providers, representatives from labor, representatives from the community organizations that help people make the connections that they need to, you would end up with pathways that are much better aligned.

You could do planning and resource allocation, so you could make decisions about what happens with all these different funding streams, when it's appropriate to braid them, when it's appropriate to consolidate them so that we can make sure that the funding is more sustainable.

And the thing that we heard over and over again that you heard at this table is that people have a fantastic thing and they've got steam. And then the short-term funding ends and they have to start all over again.

And what everybody said is, please give us more stable, simpler funding so we can focus on doing our jobs rather than chasing new opportunities. And finally, the feeling was that that coordination has to happen both at the statewide and at the regional level because there are different issues that are needed to be resolved for each.

So I realize that was a lot of information to give in a very short period of time. Again, I really encourage you to take a look at the report and we're so glad to have a chance to bring forward the ideas of the community to you today.

That was great. Thanks for the synopsis and kind of summary of a lot of the conversations that you facilitated and the work that's been done. I did want to say to Mr. Tillery's point about being taught to walk and then run and then thrown in the pool.

I went to law school, took, as did Mr. Muratsuchi, I don't think Mr. Fong's a lawyer. It took con law and crim, law, and elections, law and tax, and all these things. And then I went to work for a law firm as a corporate lawyer.

And I remember one day driving back from a client meeting and the partner telling me, you know what I wish they taught you in law school? How to use excel. I was like, what? You serious? But really aligning education with, with the needs of industry and the jobs is really important and often does not happen.

And that's a huge waste. And everybody ends up, employers and employees end up disappointed when that happens. Well I'm going to kick it over to colleagues for any kind of questions or comments they might have or suggestions. Assemblymember Fong?

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our thought leaders here on this and thank you for your work and efforts on this. Really appreciate it and had the opportunity to connect with you a few months back and really appreciate the conversations then.

And I think it's been said, but really the regional convenings, I think Ms. Booth just hit it on that really bringing together the representatives almost as a regional collaborative with labor, business, academic institutions, community colleges, the workforce development boards, state agencies, like really having that coordinating body and really to look at resource allocations and funding models as we look at the different areas that are growth in different industry sectors, but also having employers at the table and then having faculty engaged in the development of the curriculum.

I think all those different pieces are so critical in the development of successful career pathway workforce development programs. And also just wanted to touch upon my earlier comments about opportunity youth as well in our state Assembly and we passed ACR 16 last year to really look at the 550,000 opportunity youth in California.

You touched that briefly in your remarks as well. And on page seven of your report you mentioned opportunity youth and the stakeholder groups there. But really as a group how we can continue to connect them, an opportunity to our educational systems and pathways as well.

But really with all the work and efforts being done here, I really look forward to future conversations and really want to make sure that we have all the different groups and stakeholders engaged at the table in these conversations and really being a thought partner with the Legislature and Administration and really appreciate the administration's efforts in collaborating with the Legislature on this career education plan and as we go forward to continue those conversations.

Thank you Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Mr. Muratsuchi.

Thank you. I apologize, I had to step out and take a meeting and so I, please forgive me if I had cover something that was in one of your presentations.

So, you know, having been working on these issues for over 10 years, I'm hearing the same themes and I'm looking forward to the actual recommendations as well as, you know, most importantly the actions to follow. You know, what's going to come out of all of this effort.

You know, my perspective is that, you know, I was on the board of a regional CTE program. It was a joint program of six school districts that recognized that, you know, CTE is expensive.

They wanted to achieve economies of scale and so they decided to form a JPA to provide CT programs to all of our high school kids in the six districts. And they were receiving ongoing funding, direct ongoing funding. And I'm going to blame it on Governor Brown. Governor Brown dramatically changed how these ROCP programs, you know, are funded.

And I know that, you know, my regional occupational center program has been struggling ever since, you know, because like Torrance Unified, where I was a school board member, they were a member of that regional occupational center program. They would send their kids to the regional program.

But after they started, you know, everyone became eligible for CTEIG. You know, Torrance unified applied for and received a CT grant. And so they bring the CTEIG program in house.

They have, you know, aerospace, you know, engineering programs at our high schools, you know, and so it seems like, notwithstanding the rhetoric, you know, what has been happening in the last 10 years has been going the opposite direction.

That rather than going to the regional, at least, you know, from what's happening in my area, rather than going more regionally, it seems like it's becoming more balkanized, you know, districts having their own programs. It's undermining a successful regional program that had been in existence for now over 50 years.

And so it's coming from this experience that I will admit I'm a little skeptical about what's going to come out of this. I don't want to sound too negative.

I approach this with optimism, with the renewed intention that the Governor is giving to this, but with a healthy level of skepticism that I'm hoping what will come out of this is more than just the rhetoric, but actual results of regional collaborations.

So with that in mind, it's my understanding that the plan is to submit the interim report to relevant agencies and asking them to come up with action plans. How, you know, these are the same agencies that have, you know, failed to collaborate, and why do we expect different results?

I think there's two things I want to highlight, and so one of which is sort of one of the byproducts of the master plan process, which has not just been these regional conversations, but, and so we work very closely with a number of state agencies on other projects and other work.

We are seeing conversations between agencies that I haven't seen before, partly as a byproduct of having to sort of think about this through the master plan process. And because it didn't just live and die with agencies, it started kind of with the agencies, and then there was a community process and engagement process.

The agencies have really had time to think about this and chew upon this. I'm much more closely connected to the community college and sort of the labor agency side of this. I have seen conversations between those agencies that I've been hoping would happen for years.

The other thing is, I think that the regional collaboration work can really be helpful with the K-12 CTE context in terms of thinking about how you regionalize approaches to this. The other thing that got called out a lot in the regional meetings, people talk about the fragmentation of funding.

And it's not just K-12 strong workforce and CTIEG, it's K-12 strong workforce and CTEIG and Perkins, and now Golden State pathways and local control funding. And so we have people saying things like, I do nothing but write grants. I am pursuing funding year-round.

That is all that I do in order to fund programs is to just have some basic amount of funding related to them. So I think there are some technical fixes the Legislature probably can do.

It's not my place to recommend what those could be, but I think the conversation you were having earlier about how you actually consolidate funding sources, that came up a lot as a recommendation in the regional meetings, and that would at least create that stable funding base a little bit. Now, how you want to call out the role of the ROPs and ROCPs the way they were previously, because some of those have actually continued to go, might be something you want to look at.

But the other piece of this in the regional coordination is that even with those ROPs, that was a separate regional conversation from the community college regional consortia, which was a separate regional conversation from the WIOA planning areas, which is now separate from the California adult education program regional consortium plans.

So there's some level of sort of planning across the plans. That doesn't really happen. You have regionalized sort of processes and structures, but those regional structures actually don't talk to each other. And now you have California Jobs First and K-16 collaboratives, which are adding another layer or another dimension.

So the desire for some level of consolidation around thoughtfulness and planning and about how you actually stabilize funding for programs that are fighting for funding in a daily basis was really front and center, I think, in practitioners minds as we went around the state.

And I think there was just this incredible concordance between what the agency said to us in December and what people in the field said to us a couple of months later. Only it was amplified because we were hearing it from so many different types of people, from so many different perspectives.

So, I mean, I do think this is things that we've all heard. I've worked in this field for 20 years, and a lot of this is, yep, check the box.

I remember hearing that before, but there's a level of urgency, and maybe it's what you were describing that people are watching things get more and more difficult to manage because the funding is so fractured, like the unintended consequence of having more resources was it splintered people's attention.

So if everybody is pointing to the same set of problems and the solutions that people are proposing are very similar to each other, I would hope that would give everyone the opportunity to say, well, maybe we've got agreement and it's time to just do the thing.

Well, I'm just hoping that, you know, it's great that people are talking to each other more. This effort has spurred renewed regional conversations, but ultimately, what's going to sustain efforts going forward is some kind of structure tied to funding that incentivizes regional approaches.

And so, like, giving grants, you know, rather than ongoing funding to different entities, in my mind, it's clear it's incentivizing balkanization. And so I'm hoping that it's, you know, what will come out of this report is a proposal, you know, maybe something radical, something significant.

But, you know, I don't want to talk about creating new bureaucracies, but some kind of regional entity that's going to be, have ongoing funding that's tied to incentivizing regional collaborations rather than just a lot of talk about, yeah, we should be working together more.

Yeah. I mean, I remember when sort of the doing what matters framework came out and sort of, I think Tim Rainey and Van Ton-Quinlivan were running around the state saying, you all should work together. Right. And I'm like, where is it in writing that we have to work together?

Because unless it's in writing that tells us we have to work together. And there's a structure for that. It's actually not going to happen. And we heard those calls for formalized decision-making processes that were binding, where people were making real-life decisions about money and about how things were going to be allocated.

We're going to lift up these kinds of programs because it's aligned to the skills that employers need, and we're going to do less of this, which are hard decisions to make. But there was really that kind of ambition for that. The other thing we heard is related to this fragmentation. There's just initiative fatigue.

So how you centralize things and make a process that people can attend to, that's like one process rather than here's another, here's another, here's another bucket of soft money. We're going to chase this and then we're going to chase this, and then we're going to chase this.

And I was in that business for a long time, so I know what that's like. The people are looking for a different answer right now, particularly in the regions. And I hope you're going to provide it.

Thank you.

No pressure.

No pressure. That's exactly right.

Quick question on an issue that's been mentioned a lot, which is early exposure to career pathways and helping students make choices and giving them more information earlier, which I think sounds fantastic, but also gives me a little pause that I know some constituents who would say, well, you're putting eight-year-olds on a track.

You know, you're really far too early for young people to realize who they are and what they want to be and all these things. Can you talk a little bit about how we can get the benefit of that exposure, but not the negatives of possibly tracking elementary school kids?

I do think that there is, and some people do approach it this way. That is, if you're doing career education, earlier grades, you're asking young people to make a choice at an age where they're probably not ready to make that choice. I've raised three children. I had three teenagers.

They were all kind of crazy in different ways, and I didn't trust their decision-making processes that much at times. However, at the same time, we're also not just giving them enough information to make that choice when they're ready to do it. Sort of the point about apprenticeship and the trades.

A career should be at the center of everything, but in a way in which you're expanding opportunities, it should be an expansion. So I could go here, here, here. If I want to go straight to college to do a four-year degree and become a sociologist, I'm probably going to work in business management, and I know that.

Or be a teacher, which is what happens to sociology majors. We know that. Or, hey, I could actually go into the trades, I could become an iron worker, and I could make $150,000 a year. Putting career at the center doesn't mean asking students to make a choice.

I think asking a 14-year-old to make a choice for the rest of their life is about the craziest thing I've ever heard. But I do think there's a place for giving them the tools for what decision-making looks like.

My kids made decisions at all different ages, and I didn't get to choose when the switch flipped. But at least I know if they have some base knowledge about the relationship between education and work and earnings, that they're probably going to be in a better position, I think, to make a good choice.

And the thing about career education being everywhere is that we tend to think of CTE as being like the extra thing gets layered into high school. Like. Like high school is this big, empty container and you can just keep pouring things into it, as opposed to having career-centered education be the center of every curriculum.

It's like, does it live in the English class? Does it live in the history class? Does it live over here? So the CTE thinking and career thinking is really central to the entire experience of high school. The problem is that high school is not, it's not infinite, right?

You can't keep adding more things and they're big content things. And so there's more and more things you have to do in high school.

A lot of problem challenges facing things like link learning, which is huge on linked learning, is that how do you restructure high school in order to be able to make room for those things, which is really about the experience of high school and not just about the value of CTE?

I keep on trying to jam more things into high school, and Chair Muratsuchi keeps on stopping me. You got the right person in the right place. So there are already many different regional entities, as has been discussed.

How's the vision that you mentioned different from what already exists in the existing framework, and how can we get from where we are to your vision?

So we divided up the questions in advance, and you're asking all the questions that I got aside, just pointing that out.

You know, I think that what I saw, and I'll relate so much to my experience, having worked across all these systems and structures, like, so I was a dean and there were eight different places I went to have conversations about regional collaboration, and I think it's not about creating one more thing.

And I think if Secretary Knox were here, he would tell you the same thing. It's about how do we think about restructuring all the things that are there so they work together and you're somehow pulling together something out that's greater than the sum of the parts.

So it's a little bit of a collective impact kind of approach in terms of how to think about this. The challenge is we have lots of regional collaboration. We have it all over the place in a million different places. The problem is you don't want to build a new structure that all those things feed into.

You want to build a structure that actually collects those things into a common container that makes it very clear about how decisions are made. So the different systems and stakeholders and folks, and it has to be focused as much on communities as it is on employers.

If you're going to say opportunity youth, then what are the systems and structures that we have to create? Because no single agency can serve opportunity youth, it takes a collective community effort across a variety of systems. For that to happen, you have to have a regional collaborative conversation about the role of different entities in that.

So I think that's the hope as you lift up something that really looks different, that brings the best of what exists that's already there into more of a collective conversation.

Any last questions or comments? Any last thoughts you want us to leave with us?

I think that one of the things that I found really exciting about the regional meetings is that it gave an opportunity for people who didn't always get together to be in one place and to generate ideas. So what happens with the Legislature, what the agencies decide, what the Newsom Administration moves forward is all important.

It's really going to change if things are different on the ground. So we left the regional convenings with people coming back to us and saying, this is exactly what I needed. I just needed a moment to step back and look at the big picture and remember what I'm here to try to do.

So again, I really urge people to look at the report. There are so many tangible suggestions that could be implemented right now by folks on the ground together without having to wait for legislation.

And while it always helps to have a set of rules that drive your behavior, we also know there's lots of just talented and dedicated people that do the right thing every single day because they're trying to help Californians have a better life. And so please take a look. There's just a treasure trove of information.

I love it. Thank you both very much for the work you're doing in the presentation and chat today. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So we're gonna move on to public comment. We've allied 30 minutes. Can I get just a show of hands from folks?

Everyone's already getting up about how many people want to give public comment. I think we're probably going to do 90 seconds. We're going to do 90 seconds per public commenter. So I'm going to make it as hard as Ellen as possible to track that so that we can hear from as many folks as possible.

Thank you for your understanding. Please also feel free to reach out to my Legislative Director, Ellen Green, who's the point person for the Select Committee, and share any additional public comments or feedback that you have. We would be happy to hear from you and discuss the work of the Select Committee.

And with that, I'd like to thank Ellen Green, who I'm guessing everybody here already knows very well, who's been my point person on this effort for eight years now. And I'm very grateful to her. We wouldn't have gotten done anything that we've gotten done without her. And if you'd like to speak, you already beat me to it.

Please line up behind the microphone. Include your name and organization in 90 seconds per speaker, please.

Super. It's a pleasure to speak with Ellen. I'm Fred Jones. I'm with the Get Real Coalition, of which Jeremy Smith is a co chair as Lance Hasting with the manufacturers as well as our co chair. And we're focused on middle school and high schools because they're a captive audience.

Once a kid becomes an adult and they're out of high school, it's herding cats. Instead of trying to teach a 28 year old a new career, let's talk about the 14 year old and expose them. So that's our focus for the last 20 years has been on middle school and high school regional delivery.

The California Department of ED used to have subject matter consultants regionally located to provide statewide support and accountability. Carrot and we would love for that to come back to the Department. So if strong workforce money comes back, let's make the Department what it used to be.

Only agriculture has that program today and that's because they have the ag incentive grant. We need to get UC and CSU to separate their admissions criteria. Polytechnic is career. UC does not have a career workforce development mission. So this is the higher ed Committee. Select Committee. Let's get the higher ed education institutions focus on workforce development.

Thank you very much.

Thanks Fred. Good to see you.

Thank you Mister chair and Members Chris Bollinger on behalf of the Opportunity Youth Schools Coalition, the OISC is thankful for California's focus and attention on the importance of creating pathways to success for California students. The OISC is a small group of public schools serving opportunity youth and at promise students.

We want to ensure the plan shines a light on the needs of these students and will help reduce persistent economic inequities endured by opportunity youth.

We have three specific recommendations further defined who the opportunity youth are, remove the age range for opportunity youth and just wanted to highlight the need for flexibility in hiring teachers, specifically CTE instructors with specific expertise in the fields we are creating pathways in. Thank you very much.

Thanks Chris.

Hi Chair Berman and Members Tiffany Mock on behalf of CFT, a union of educators and classified professionals. We first want to thank you for this great hearing and discussion. I think the title as the governor's task force also has about career education. But CFT really believes that education is lifelong learning enrichment and for the community.

So we just wanted to bring that in, whether we're talking about soft skills, navigation, you know, that further emphasis about how to navigate life is one we wanted to bring into the conversation as we focus on individual workforce career development. Second, we wanted to note that we are proud co sponsors of the Bill.

AB 2586 by Assemblymember Alvarez. It relates only because it's about an opportunity for all undocumented students to access employment. And we really want to thank the support of all of the Members present and just highlight how it ties to the opportunity overall in career education and lifelong learning.

Finally, I want to echo the points of Fred Jones, ironically about career education and also Jeremy Smith on the panels. And also that finally, as we discuss further about higher education generally, that we should definitely discuss the impact AI on educators and the workforce. So thank you so much. Appreciate your discussion.

Thanks, Tiffany. Tiffany, did you know Dara Adler lives in Sacramento?

I did not, but thank you for that and for random points. Assemblymember Berman and I also loved our CTE requirements in high school.

That's exactly right. When we were in high school together 25 years ago. So yeah.

To the Mister Chair and Members of the Committee, Kathy Van Austen, on behalf of John Burton, advocates for youth just would like to draw your attention to the importance, just how crucial it is that as you're considering this master plan for career education, that you specifically address the needs of those youth in foster care, homelessness, and who have had exposure into the juvenile justice system.

These are really vulnerable populations, and their outcomes across all domains is not great. In fact, when you take a look at the General population and then you take a look at even Low income populations, these groups fare really far worse. Want to thank you, Assemblyman Berman. We've worked together with JBE and Ellen. Thank you.

To work towards an improved system in community college for these youth. Career education should have the same types of focus, the outcomes, you know, oftentimes, in particular, foster youth and those who are homeless don't finish high school, often don't finish their secondary education, and finding a livable wage is very challenging. So I will cut it off there.

I got the sign. But just encourage you to really consider these populations as you're moving forward. Absolutely.

Thank you. And send any additional comments to Ellen. Thank you.

Hi, Chair Members Anna Matthews, on behalf of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. As you know, the California community colleges have prided ourselves on being a 100% open access institution, and we've provided classes for the whole community, whether that's CTE, ESL, GED, transfer level classes. But unfortunately, a lot of this has been mitigated by recent policy.

As Mister Smith mentioned, CTE and other such missions of the California community colleges have largely been sort of pushed to the side in favor of, like, emphasizing transfer, and we've sort of like built a system wherever, you know, we're trying to streamline so hard that, you know, CTE welder students are also supposed to be like taking transfer level math and other things that won't necessarily lead them straight to that high paying job.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is especially faculty are being pulled in sort of two different directions, and those are kind of hard for us to reconcile. So we hope that we can continue putting money, time and effort into this.

Professional development certainly is going to be really important to this conversation as we continue to move forward and really looking into the difference between theory and practice as we go forward with implementing this. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. Zero, I'm gonna move this up just a little bit. Thank you. Hi, Wendy Broineku, President of Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, Professor at College of the Canyons, and I've been teaching in the CTE program for almost 30 years. Community college districts are incentivized through the skiff to place students on the transfer pathway.

And at community colleges, our funding sources and incentives need to be revisited to ensure resources are available for CE program pathways to be realized and widely available.

Additionally, as of fall 24, all community college, which is now all community college students, will be automatically placed on the ADT pathway, which is designed to facilitate transfer to the CSU system. While this policy aims to simplify the transfer process, it may have unintended consequences of directing students away from CTE programs they may be more interested in.

And then we're also concerned about the over involvement of private partners in this work, especially through possible subsidization of workforce training. We need to make sure that we're financially supportive of the community colleges so we can provide the CTE programs that are thank you, Ellen. That our students need. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Chair Berman, Chair Muratsuchi and Chair Fong, Austin Webster with W Strategies. I have comments on behalf of three different entities, so hopefully I'll get through this before Ellen gives me the sign here.

On behalf of Anaheim Union High School District, which is the leading school district in the state and the nation on student centered learning outcomes and career education, we want to definitely echo Mister Smith's comments that high schools should not be solely about preparing students for college.

However, to better support k 12 outcomes in career ed, we recommend the state revisit barriers like seat time requirements, the compliance focus of current assessment models, and the funding formula for K 12 schools that often negatively impact innovative career rop and apprenticeship pathway programs.

On behalf of the California Community Colleges Association for Occupational Education, which represents all of the workforce programs in the community college system. I want to echo Mister Tillery's comments that as we're looking at regional collaboration, we want to make sure that there aren't stacking or duplicative efforts that make this more complicated than it needs to be.

We'd also like to highlight the fact that this year's current budget reduces the amount of strong workforce funding that's made available that goes towards those regional coordination efforts. And obviously we recognize challenging budget year, but as we go forward, we definitely need to make more investments in that space.

Lastly, on behalf of the academic Senate for the California community colleges, which represents all faculty in academic and professional matters, as Mister Fong alluded to earlier, we definitely want to make sure that we're engaging faculty in the curriculum development process.

We encourage the Administration to more directly engage with stakeholders that have specifically assigned roles in this whole process to make sure that we effectively implement this whole plan. So look forward to engaging in this more as we move forward.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Chair Berman, Manny Rodriguez on behalf of the Institute for College Access and success, also known as tikis. First, we'd like to thank the Committee and everyone still being here to put this on. And we'd like to thank West Ed governor's office for listening to stakeholders throughout the state to put this plan together.

TiCus really appreciates the attention that's been put on affordability within this plan, uplifting financial aid and public benefit programs as crucial levers to build out universal access to high quality education and training programs.

To support the success of students and the master plan, California must look not only to enrollment, but also to ensure that affordability centers around covering students basic needs and other critical non tuition costs.

We look forward to collaborating with all stakeholders to move California towards a statewide affordability pledge, which weaves together state federal institutional financial aid with public benefits to cover the total cost of attendance for students so that they can reap those benefits from their educational experience and prosperous careers after graduation. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon Chair and Members. AJ Johnson with California competes higher education for a strong economy. We are in support of the master plan for career education and want to echo a lot of the thoughts due to time here today. Certainly what Tikas just shared around affordability.

And thank you for the work you have all done to streamline access to financial aid for those Californians who need it the most, as well as public benefits access that can make college and career training more affordable, particularly for people with children. You can't join a women in construction program that starts at 04:00 a.m.

if the child care center doesn't open until eight or nine, right. So thank you for all your work on access. We are really in support and have made recommendations around creating a coordinating statewide body to help streamline all of these decisions that are going to happen over a number of years.

We also support the investments that have been made in the cradle to career data system, but that's going to need some more data in it to be able to tell are these programs working? Are investments leading to that living wage that Californians need to thrive?

And just appreciate all of the discussion on streamlining those funding streams and we'll send the rest of our comments by email. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Hello Chair Berman esteemed Members, my name is David Palter with Silicon Valley Leadership Group. It's a privilege to be here on behalf of our 250 Member companies in support of reimagining the state's education and training systems. As all of today's panelists have affirmed, student success and long term economic viability require expanded on the job training opportunities.

The key to creating these opportunities much, much deeper industry education partnerships. But how do we get there? How do we ensure that the incentives are aligned for employers to engage with training partners? These are questions that intentional, employer informed pre planning for the master plan can help solve. Crucially, what do businesses large and small need from educators?

What do they need from the state? In partnership with the San Diego State University Career center and Wested, the leadership group will be surveying thousands of employers over the next couple of months to find the answers to these questions.

We hope to have an opportunity to share our findings with this Committee and to collaborate on the policy solutions they can help to catalyze. Thank you.

Thank you, David. And tell Ahmad to reply to my text. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Berman and Members. My name is Valerie Johnson with the Campaign for College Opportunity. We appreciate the governor's transparency and the Legislature's transparency in developing the master plan for career education. Sorry, I'm short. zero, I thought you're telling me to do it.

We commend the draft plan's emphasis on aligning education and training options with industry and evolving workforce. However, as we consider new CTE pathways, it's crucial that we do not create additional redundant pathways on top of existing ones. Instead, these efforts should build on the successful frameworks already in place.

Like the associate's degree for transfer to avoid unnecessary complexity, the ADT has proven to be an invaluable tool in strengthening pathways between community colleges and universities. And the ADT exemplifies how intersegmental collaboration can align higher education with workforce demands, providing students with clear and efficient routes to successful careers, and to fully realize the potential of such initiatives.

We believe it's a critical need for a statewide higher education coordinating body. This would ensure cohesive and strategic alignment across all segments, fostering stronger partnerships between higher education, industry and workforce. Thank you for your commitment to advancing higher education in California, and we look forward to working together to achieve the goals.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Chair Berman. Assembly Members, I'd like to thank Wested for this great report. It's very thorough and represents the regional convenings. My name is Blaine Torpy. I'm the Superintendent of the Eden Area Regional Occupational program in Hayward, California. I want to say a little bit about what's going right. Our programs, we have waiting lists.

Students want to be in our programs. They want to be in career and technical education. They want to be at a regional occupational center. We have 17 grants coming from $20,000 to 2.10 million. Not one of them is longer than two years. So for us, the dependable funding is huge.

I think that regional occupational programs can be the model for career education, to scale it up, apply it to the regions. And I thank you very much for your time and commitment.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Lee Angela Reid, on behalf of the Krop, the California Association of Career and College Readiness Organizations, the California Association of School Counselors, the small school Districts Association, and a number of other programs and leas, I want to thank you for this hearing. Really helpful.

I want to thank Mister Muratsuchi for his consistent and continued leadership in this area and for fighting for k 12 programs. While this is a higher ed meeting, we would love to see more k 12 involved, because as Blaine said, and I'm very proud to get to work with him, there's a lot of things going right.

There are articulation agreements in place that they're just sporadic. Everything is sporadic. And from the fending down to the pockets of excellence and the pockets of challenge, we'd love to work with you. We have a lot of things that we can share as we move forward.

But I think this is more than anything, an opportunity, not for adults, but for students. And I think that it's a chance for us all to make sure our futures are taken care of. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Chair Members. An Alvarado. On behalf of the California Edge Coalition, we want to thank the Administration. Wested, our partners here in the Legislature and the community. For all the work that's been done so far.

For the master plan, we'd like to uplift some key themes that we will hope to see in the final master plan draft that includes ensuring that Cal grant reform is fully implemented strengthening career technical education and apprenticeship offerings increased flexible learning approaches like dual enrollment and credit for prior learning strengthening the use of statewide data by leveraging California's cradle to career data system and empowering opportunity youth with resources and pathways towards economic mobility.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Chair and Committee Members. My name is Imran Majid on behalf of the California Community College's chef's office. First of all, I just want to thank you again for holding today's hearing on this important topic and really also just emphasize the role of the California community colleges in this space.

Across our 116 campuses, we educate more than 2 million students annually in our career education programs, provide real life training from expert instructors and industry professionals as a leader in workforce and economic development.

Our colleges also offer a broad range of career oriented certificates, associate degrees, and applied baccalaureate degrees that are critical to filling the high wage, high skilled jobs of tomorrow.

As California continues to undergo significant changes to the structure of its economy, we must respond by first and foremost prioritizing the closing of equity gaps for students of color, Low income students, and students with disabilities.

As you heard during today's hearing, another systems roadmap known as Vision 2030, we are driving innovative policy, institutional, and systemic changes to lift up our most vulnerable Californians and empower them with social and economic mobility.

The governor's master plan for career education is directly aligned with Vision 2030 and presents an amazing opportunity to address the longstanding inequities in higher education. We are grateful to the Administration for helping craft this future vision to achieve the goals of this new master plan.

We are committed to closer collaboration with our labor and economic development partners to strengthen career pathways and again, ensuring that our programs are actually meeting the needs of employers. We must also expand equitable access to dual enrollment opportunities and create new pathways that bridge secondary postsecondary education. And we must leverage robust data systems.

Again, as you heard from some remarks today, when we align dishonored systems and provide coherent pathways, our students in California wins. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Jake Bremner, Deputy Director for Policy and Public Affairs with the California Student Aid Commission. Thank you, chair Berman, Assembly Members, for holding today's hearing. We want to express our appreciation to Governor Newsom, the Administration, the Wested team for bringing forth such an important conversation for California students and its future.

It's befitting that affordability is cited on page one of the community input report. You heard it from our student panelists earlier today. You heard it in the comments from Wested.

That's really top of mind not only in California but across the nation as we're looking at how we can communicate the value of post secondary degrees, but also training opportunities to those that are going to benefit from them.

Financial aid and its integration with public benefits is central to accessing programs, training and degree that position students for careers, helping them be successful in realizing that outcome as well as advancing equity in both of those pursuits. California is a national leader in this space.

We have a lot to be proud of, thanks to the work of the Legislature and Governor, but we know there's more to be done. Gallup polling conducted a survey of adults aged 18 to 49 who had not completed a post secondary degree or training program. They'd either not enrolled or they dropped out.

Number one cited barrier to enrollment cost. Number 2 and 3, I need to work too much to enroll. And inflation. That's another way of saying cost and affordability, right?

So we know that realizing the goals of the master plan is going to really require us to look at affordability and how we weave that throughout each thread of this work moving forward. And we, of course, stand ready to work with the Administration and the Legislature as you refine and develop those recommendations. Thank you.

Thank you.

I'll make it quick since I'm the last witness. Sylvia Solis here on behalf of the California Faculty Association, we simply ask that labor remain an integral part and partner to the ongoing development of the master plan and allow for timely stakeholder input. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And thank everybody for the participants, for people who provided commentary in public comment, just really appreciate everybody's engagement in this.

I kind of walk away from every one of these hearings just feeling more confident that, you know, we're going to continue to improve our policies and programs to help students, because that's the goal that we all share, which really matters.

At the end of the day, I want to give my colleagues an opportunity to say any closing comments?

Chair Fong thank you so much, Chair Berman, for this robust hearing today. I really appreciate you and your staff for working with the Higher Education Committee on this very important topic.

To all our stakeholders here today, thank you for your comments as well, to the governor's office, to West Ed, to all the partners of stakeholders, really appreciate the communication and collaboration here today and that spirit of collaboration.

Look forward to future conversations as we look at achieving a final product of a master plan for career education that we can all be proud of and resulting in ensuring that our students are prepared, with academic rigor and hands on training workforce development to meet the needs of our ever growing, changing workforce here in California.

I look forward to committed to working with each and every one of you. And with that, thank you so much, Mister chair. Thank you.

Thank you also, Mister chair for convening all of us, bringing us all together today. I want to thank the Governor for again highlighting the importance of career education. I am encouraged with all of the discussions, regional discussions that have been taking place, bringing stakeholders together regionally throughout the State of California.

But the bottom line is the action that's going to be taken, that it's not going to be just a lot of talking. And we need a blueprint on how to structure and incentivize the career education in our high schools, our community colleges, locally as well as regionally. I know it's a lot, it's a big challenge.

It's something that we've been trying to work on for years. But I am hopeful that this master plan is going to lead us in the right direction. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Muratsuchi. I'm hopeful, with Chair Muratsuchi and Chair Fong as leading the way in the Assembly, that we're in very good hands.

I would be remiss if I didn't read the closing comments that Ellen wrote for me, but it was great to have this timely discussion and I look forward to following the continued development of a new master plan for career education.

And for information on the work of the Select Committee, please feel free to check the Select Committee's webpage, which can be found on my Assembly website under the higher education master plan tab, or reach out to Ellen in my office. Once again, thank you everybody participating and the hearing is adjourned. Thanks.