Providing High-Quality Career and Technical Education Programs for Underserved, High-Need Youth through a Pay for Success Model Program

THE CHALLENGE
In the U.S., there are roughly 5.5 million teenagers and young adults between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither working nor in school¹. This translates to one in seven teens and young adults. These numbers, while discouraging, present a tremendous opportunity for retooling our nation’s career and technical education programs and scaling up promising practices to address the needs of our nation's most vulnerable students.

OUR RESPONSE
Pay for Success (PFS) is an innovative funding model that tests and advances promising and proven interventions, while providing taxpayer (or other) dollars only for successful outcomes for students, families, communities, States, and regions. PFS financing models leverage philanthropic and private dollars to fund services upfront with the government paying after certain outcomes have been achieved.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) awarded a $2 million dollar grant for a 48-month period to provide technical assistance for assessing the feasibility of PFS projects in four sites and then to structure selected projects. This project began in October 2016 and will be conducted through October 2020. Through a national competition, four sites were selected: Mahoning County Educational Services Center (MCESC), focused on regional collaboration between stakeholders in northeastern Ohio; NAF, focused on expanding work-based learning and paid internships for their work in Dallas, Texas; Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District, focused on expanding their agriculture career pathways in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas; and South Bay Community Services in San Diego, California, focused on launching and scaling their Back on Track program.

In phase one, feasibility studies were completed in the four local CTE sites. In phase two, support for transaction structuring was provided for up to three out of the four previously identified local sites to the extent that the local site’s CTE PFS project was determined to be feasible. The ultimate aim of the CTE PFS technical assistance program is to improve outcomes for underserved, high-need youth through fully structured high-quality PFS projects ready to be implemented in local CTE programs.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES
For further information, please visit the Perkins Collaborative Resource Network at https://cte.ed.gov.

¹ Lewis and Burd-Sharps, Kristen and Sarah (June 10, 2015). "Zeroing In on Place and Race: Youth Disconnection in America's Cities"(PDF). Measure of America, Social Science Research Council. Retrieved 6 October 2016.