Career literacy is increasingly recognized as a developmental capability that shapes long‑term readiness. Jen Perry connects insights from Education Week and Project Evident’s K–12 Career Exploration Framework to show how early, integrated learning builds durable skills, self‑discovery, and adaptive navigation.

Strategic Learning & Leadership Advisor; Designing Systems Where People Thrive Why students are drifting, disengaging, and choosing new paths — and why the response, across almost every cause, starts in the same place. Superintendents across the country are asking the same question: “Where did they go?” For some students, the answer is concrete — they moved to virtual school, enrolled in a microschool, or chose an alternative pathway. And for the students who are disengaged o

The complexity of chronic absenteeism calls us to dig deeper into the roots of thriving. In Part 2, we looked at how to measure connection — making visible where relationships exist in a school and where they don't. In this piece, we go a step further: what does it actually take to build those relationships intentionally? It's a question the Search Institute — a nonprofit research organization that has spent nearly four decades studying what young people need to thrive — has

Part 5 of a Series: Beyond Attendance The students who have become inaccessible to the systems meant to support them and what it takes to find them. In Part 4, we looked at two patterns that live inside your building and your data: the disengaged student, present but already disconnecting, and the drifting student, whose absences are accumulating in front of you. Both are, at least, visible. Both are somewhere someone can still reach. This piece is about the students who aren

A Note Before We Go Further in the Series Before diving into the specific patterns of students who are drifting, disengaged, disappeared, or re-routed, it's worth pausing to understand the landscape that shapes the current conversation on Chronic Absenteeism, and why this moment, for all its difficulty, carries a genuine opportunity. Chronic absenteeism did not begin with the pandemic. Roughly a decade ago, approximately 15% of K-12 students were chronically absent — missing