The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved.

Opening Remarks

Rich Portelance

Hi, everyone. My name is Rich Portelance. Welcome to the EdGate Powers Podcast series. This autumn, we are doing a new campaign called CTE Rising. I am super excited about this. EdGate does a ton of work in the CTE (career and technical education) space, and we wanted to open up the conversation in the fourth quarter. We always talk about the state of standards, and we'll come out with material that supports, you know, what's happening in the world of standards, and today–more than ever–CTE is on the rise. 

And with me today is Daylene Long–she's going to give us a little background. I'm very excited about this conversation. Daylene's also going to be on our upcoming executive forum, which is going to take place on December 10th. We're also going to have Jane Swift from Education at Work and Rita Ferrandino. And if you don't know who Rita is, you should look her up, because she is one of the major influencers in our space today, and it's going to be a fantastic panel. So, without further ado, I'll let Daylene introduce herself, and then we'll kick into the podcast. Daylene?

Daylene Long

Well, thank you, Rich, for having me. I really appreciate it. CTE is near and dear to my heart, and I've also been working in that space for a little over 20 years. So… so it's something I like to talk about, and I'm just so excited that you invited me to this, and that you invited me to the forum in December. So, that's exciting.

My company is called Catapult X, and we specialize specifically in science, STEM, and CTE education from a strategic standpoint and from a market research standpoint. So, I like to think of it like this. We really connect the district leaders, the teachers, the educators who are in this world today, where things are changing super fast, with the education companies that are providing materials for them and needing feedback. That's the main conduit that we are, is making sure that leaders have what they need when they need it, and they know that things are changing, right, all the time. So, that's the core of my business. We also do the Educators Pick Best of STEM® Awards, where we again bring in teachers to give feedback to companies on the products that they are making for the classroom. So that's kind of my background. 

The only other thing I would add that is relevant to CTE is that I was a CTE kid, and so was my child. So, I was that kid that, in high school, my family was going through a hard time, and I was looking for, “Okay, I'm going to need to learn some things, make some money,” those kinds of things. So I did the internships, I did the healthcare track, I did all of that, and it made a huge difference in my life. My child then went on to a local school here called the Beaverton Academy of Science & Engineering from sixth grade to 12th grade. He was a CTE kid. He was more on the engineering side, but he was a CTE kid, too. So, it's ingrained in who I am and in what I do. 

Rich Portelance

And that does make all the difference. And I thank you for that because that's a wonderful context. And I know when I spoke to Rita, who introduced me to you, she had a very high opinion of not only your capabilities and Catapult X, but also your background, and so, thank you for sharing that with us.

Daylene Long

Absolutely.

Discussion

Rich Portelance

So, I guess, you know, we– understanding some of that background, what first drew you into education research, and what makes CTE particularly compelling to you today as opposed to, you know, maybe 10 or 20 years ago?

Daylene Long

Yeah. It's a really good question. I'm going to break it into two parts. So, what drew me to education market research really has to do with the fact that I'm a problem solver at heart. But I'm also– I studied science in college, and I've worked for a lot of science education companies, so I also– I think more like an engineer, but the science background means that I like to frame business decisions in claims, evidence, and reasoning, which any CTE or science educator out there is going to know what that is, and that's the way I'm always thinking when I'm working with my clients. So, that's the part that drew me to education market research. 

On the second part of that, what makes CTE compelling today? Things are changing so fast, and we have– since 2020, things have just been changing faster than they've ever changed in this space. So what makes it compelling today is that kids are leaving high school, they're leaving college, and they're not sure if they're going to have a job. And they're worried about AI; they're worried about a lot of things. And so, this notion of getting kids to really be thinking through, “What is it that I'm naturally good at? How can I get an education around that? How can I have experiences to tell me whether or not a certain pathway is going to be right for me?” And I'll tell you a funny little story on this, and hopefully my niece never hears this podcast, but– 

Rich Portelance

We're pretty widely distributed, so you never know!

Daylene Long

I know. I know. Even if she does, okay, here goes the story. So, I have a niece that is brilliant, and she was a biochemistry major, and she knew she wanted to go into healthcare, and she was, you know, “Do I want to be a surgeon? Do I want to be a general practitioner?” All of those kinds of things. And I remember thinking, it's going to be really interesting where this young woman goes with this. And then when she graduated from college and she got ready for grad school, she said, "Aunt Daylene, I don't like touching people." And I said, "Okay,” I thought, “This is going to be difficult for you if you're going into healthcare." She's like, "I’ll go into the admin side of healthcare." She said, "I've done some exploring. I did some internships. I did all those kinds of things. And I think that's going to be a better path for me.” To me, that's kind of the essence of what we need to give kids or students, is that structure around it–is this really going to fit with who you are, what you want to do, how you want to live your life, those kinds of things. So, my niece is a good example of that. 

Rich Portelance

It's a wonderful story, because it does talk to, you know, finding out about your own personal preferences, capabilities, interests, you know, and how important that is. And, you know, Daylene, you sit at the crosshair, you know, when you talk about speaking to students, speaking to the instructors, talking to the leaders and the providers, right? You're right there. And I'm kind of curious what you might be hearing from the educators’ standpoint that they believe the leaders and solutions providers may not be hearing well enough or responding to.

Daylene Long

So this gets a little interesting, because what the… what the educators are asking for isn't more technology. What they're asking for is real-world connections to industry. That's the important part that they're looking for. They want students to have that kind of experience that I just described with my niece. They want them to be able to really understand if this is a path they're going to go down, to ask questions about what it's like to actually do these things as a job. They want the real-world connections. They're really not looking for prepackaged, canned stuff for CTE–they want that whole relationship with industry as well. 

We– And… so, I told you earlier that I was looking at this from a claim, evidence, reasoning standpoint. In this particular one, I've… I'm finalizing a report that comes out November 1st, and it's on CTE, and we talked to 400… we surveyed 423 educators, and we had about 396 that responded. And what they told us was that the majority of them, the majority of them, their highest priority for their students is work-based learning. And flat out, that's what it was. And then, on the other side of things, we look at it, and we think, “Okay, but we're hearing a lot about AI, and do they need to be trained for AI? Do they need to be ready for those AI skills?” Only one in eight actually prioritized having their students understand AI. And I thought that was interesting, and may even be a disconnect with some of what the education companies are hearing.

Rich Portelance

So, in your 2025 research, you identified expanding internships and apprenticeships as a leading priority among CTE educators. What's driving that emphasis on work-based learning?

Daylene Long

I think it has multiple factors, but if I could break it down, I would say that school boards are getting input from the industries in their area–from the major businesses and the smaller businesses in their area. And they're hearing that students aren't coming to a job prepared to work and bringing the critical thinking skills that they need. So, first of all, I do think it's school boards hearing the industries in their areas, and that… that's an important piece of it. I think… One of the things that the data showed us was that administrators were more likely to choose work-based learning. I think it was–I'm looking at my numbers here–I think it was 62% to teachers at 53% that were looking for work-based learning as the solution, which it kind of tells me–because it's at the administrator level–but it is coming down from the school board. 

Rich Portelance

Okay. So, I just want to pull on something there because, you know, what I'm hearing from you and what I've heard from others is that students lack certain basic skills when they step into internships, and sometimes that's perceived as the students being lazy, or uninterested, or unable. Do you believe that that's true, or do you believe that there's something underlying in the education that's not providing the proper tools to these young people so they can be successful in those instances?

Daylene Long

It's a really good question. I think about this from multiple different angles. I've been on the business side; I've hired hundreds of people in my life, so I understand what it's like to have interns coming in, and I've hired a lot of interns. There are a lot of different reasons that students come in not prepared, and I don't think one of them has to do with educators not caring or not preparing them… efficiently. I don't. I think… I think that things are changing. So, in all of the time that I've done market research, the one thing that always comes out that employers need and that teachers say is the hardest for students to learn is critical thinking. So, employers are saying, “That's what we need.” And teachers are saying, “It's the hardest thing to teach and the hardest for students to learn.” 

It's not that they're not motivated–they are. They just need the experience earlier. There aren't this– I'm going to date myself here, Rich. I had my first job when I was 15, and I had a lot of different kinds of jobs, and my successes and failures and that helped me enter my first really professional job well, because I had the chance to succeed, I had the chance to fail and learn from it, and apply it to the next job. So, I think when we get into work-based learning, that's the piece that's missing, and that's the part that administrators are saying that students need the most. It's in a workplace, not in a class with a rubric where you can say, “Here's my rubric, and here's– I'm checking off all of these things.” We all know that in work it's different than that. That's where I think it's coming into it that educators are rightfully saying that our students need work-based learning, and the students are coming in not having enough of it, which is making them not ready for the workplace. And I could tell you a million intern stories if we have a chance to get there, but that’s my overall view on it. 

Rich Portelance

Well, that's a thread that we'll definitely have to pull when we get on the executive forum with Jane Swift, because she's, you know, placing these young people into job scenarios and giving them internships. But, you know, I'm curious to see what, you know, if she's seeing some of these disconnects, and the critical thinking component, and how they may be teaching that to– mostly these are kids that are in college already. And what I'm hearing from you is that we kind of have to figure out how to get that into grade school kids and how to make them better critical thinkers. So… And that’s not for us to solve today, but it's the question that I'm, you know, here–  it's resonating from the conversation. Is that fair?

Daylene Long

It is fair, but it's also breaking down those skills that are needed when you enter your first professional job. Whether that professional job is something that is working in a restaurant as a– as a… a cook, or whether or not that is in a professional setting being an AI engineer. That's what I hear educators saying.

Rich Portelance

Okay. Now, the CTE Rising campaign, it explores how career and technical skills are shaping educational standards. From your perspective, where are standards helping educators, and where are they struggling to keep pace?

Daylene Long

So, I was on a phone call–I'm an affiliate member of the state… the Council of State Science Supervisors, and I was on a call, and what really came to light for me was that these were these state science supervisors who were also starting to talk to the state CTE people, and I found that really interesting. And what they were finding is and what they clearly made known to me was that, in K-12, if you take CTE and kind of partition it off, but you take the rest of K-12, they're all going after academic standards, right? They're going after the math standards, the English standards, the science, the social studies, and that kind of thing. They are academic standards, and they are different from the CTE standards that ACTE (the Association for Career and Technical Education) has put forth to get kids ready for that job. So, that's one thing. It's– the academic standards are helping them to get to the test, but it's the CTE standards that are going to help them to be successful in the workplace. 

But there's an interesting bridge there. And the bridge is that in the CTE world, they have– I believe they call them durable skills. I'm not exactly positive what they call them, but I think they call them durable skills. In science, they call them the science and engineering practices (SEPs). There's a lot of overlap there. They're both hearing and seeing things the same way, and I think that those skills are the bridge to bringing academic standards together with workforce standards.

Rich Portelance

I think a while back they were called “soft skills”, and now they've transitioned to durable skills, which I think is a more appropriate and better name overall, because, you know, “soft” just leads to a bad connotation. But, you know, they are durable skills when you think about things like, you know, interpersonal communication and critical thinking. These are things that you need every day in order to be successful that don't necessarily relate to a specific task, but relate to everything in general, right?

Daylene Long

Right. Right. I think that's definitely it. Calling them soft skills doesn't work because it makes it sound like they're not important. And… and so I just find it– And from my perspective as an employer, when people– when students come in, those skills that are durable that last you your whole lifetime are really, very important.

Rich Portelance

So, kind of going from insights here to action, how can programs balance specific technical skills with transferable abilities, such as communication, problem-solving, and adaptability, like we're talking about? Going from program balance from those skills to the durable skills?

Daylene Long

Yeah, good question. So, I was talking to a department chair once, and she gave me an insight that I think about a lot. She said, "One of our most important strategic objectives in technology is to prepare students for a future we can't yet fully define." And that doesn't mean AI, necessarily. It might, but what the– Basically, she was saying that we don't know what these students are going to need in 20 years. We don't know which are going to be the hot jobs… well-paying jobs that let you live a life. What we do know is those skills that we were talking about earlier; those are the ones that they're going to need no matter where they land, no matter how their job morphs, changes, and requires different things of them. Those durable skills, those science and engineering practices, that ability to be able to look, break down problems into chunks to solve them, to learn from your problems, and learn from your mistakes, that's where you take technology, and you put them together to teach those durable skills.

Rich Portelance

Okay, that's– that's… I appreciate that, and it makes a lot of sense. So, I know when– as my kids were growing up, my wife, who is an educator, she would often say, you know, “Chunk it out.” You know, “You're trying to, you know, boil the ocean here. How do you take a little piece of this and solve it, and then, you know, build on that?” And that mentality that all problems can be solved if you take it in bite-sized pieces rather than, you know, trying to do the whole thing is a great way in which to approach solutions, right?

Daylene Long

Yeah. And if I remember correctly, your wife is an art teacher? 

Rich Portelance

She is. Yeah.

Daylene Long

Yeah. It's– and you know what? Those durable skills are the same in art as they are in science, and business, and other subjects. In art, you can take something and break it down into little chunks. You can look at a painting and decide, I want to do something kind of similar and break it down into the chunks and the skills that you need. It's the same with engineering, and if you want to build something, break it down into small chunks. So, I think that's just an important skill for anybody to have going into a job.

Rich Portelance

You know, my tendency is–and maybe because I'm a guy or just who I am, I've heard, you know, men want to solve things. You know, I always look at, you know, what is the– how do we get to a place where we can, you know, fix the problem? And… you know, just from the conversation, it just lends me to some hope that, you know, with some project-based learning, we will be able to help young people get some of these durable skills. You know, we're not going to go back to the 70s when we grew up or the 80s, and, you know, the hands-on jobs, you know, are different today. But, you know, if we bake some of this project-based learning and a little bit more interconnected learning, I guess I would call it, with different subjects coming together to, you know, help to create solutions. It seems to me that it's… there's something there to reach for. I mean, does that resonate with you, or am I off-base?

Daylene Long

It does. And actually, when I think about the school that my son went to, the Beaverton Academy of Science & Engineering, when I think about that, they had an interesting thing that made my kids sit up and say, "This is the school I want to go to." And it's a lottery school, so it's public, but you have to put your name into the lottery to get in as part of it, and that kind of stuff, and they draw in all the different neighborhoods. 

But my point with that is when we went to the evening where they were talking about the school and how they approached things, one of the things they said that had my kid just sit up was that they would take a style, they would take a subject that they were studying–let's say it's viruses–and viruses would be part of the curriculum in their reading and language arts, in their writing class, in their art class, in their engineering class, in their science class–all of them happening at the same time. So, you're exploring all of that together. And that was the thing that had my kids sit up and say, "Okay, this is cool." So, I think that kind of ties together with what we were talking about.

Rich Portelance

Yeah, I definitely– I think so as well, and especially at that formative age where, you know, he's heading into a period where the basic subjects, you know, have kind of been covered, and now where– how do you apply these things into real-world terms, and it sounded like he had a great opportunity there. So, what do education companies most often misunderstand when they enter the CTE market?

Daylene Long

So, I think this one is fascinating. I think that the companies look at the Perkins V money and they say, "Okay, Perkins V is what's funding CTE. Let's pay attention to Perkins." That's such a fraction of what goes on when you really understand how CTE gets funded at the school level. We talked about the school boards earlier and the school boards reaching out to industry. I call it… I call it funding that sits under the invisibility cloak, to use a Harry Potter term on that, because what happens is… Let's see if I can give you a specific example. I was speaking with a CTE director who was at a two-year college, and she was developing a program–she was in the LA area and she was developing a program with… one of the major, major, major, huge industries in that area. And they were coming to her and saying, “Students aren't coming into our business ready with the skills that they need, and we're having to recruit from all over the US. We want to recruit locally.” So, they developed a program and funded it, but never really revealed the significant amount of money that they were putting into it to work with the two-year college to develop the skills that that business needed. And that two-year college was charged with working with the high schools in the area to seamlessly kind of put the pieces together and transition them, so that, like a senior could take classes at the two-year college and get CTE credits and work experience that way. It became this thing that was not funded by Perkins, but it was a significant CTE program. 

And so, I think the things that companies misunderstand the most is they just focus on the budgets that they can see and Google, and… that type of thing. But every district is different, and understanding how each different district is focused on different types of skills is really important.

Rich Portelance

Wow. That's really… that's fascinating. So for the educators, or, excuse me, the companies, you know, they can have influence; they can build programs. You know, yes, it does cost money, but if you're getting a pipeline and starting to get the talent that you need with the skills that you need, it makes all the difference. And if you flip that around, how does that… how does an educator perceive that? And are they open to having employers, I don't want to say dictate, but ask, you know, and say, "Here's some money. This is what we're looking for." Do you see that paradigm is changing? Because in the past, that would kind of be frowned upon.

Daylene Long

I think that it starts with how CTE advisory boards are set up. So, if we look at… and I don't know how much your listening audience knows about how the advisory boards are set up, but the way those work is that a district has an advisory board for jobs they have to pull in from industry. So, if I'm sitting on that one because I'm looking at technology skills, I can, as a business person, I can sit on that advisory board, and the K-12 people really want you there. They really want somebody from a two-year college there; they want other educators there, and they want a well-rounded source. So, it's not that the companies are coming in and dictating what it is– the programs that get developed. They're coming in and saying, "These are the skills that your students aren't coming to us with, and we want to be able to place more of these." And then they're specifically outlining what those skills are. 

And a two-year college, or maybe even K-12, I don't– I haven't seen an example in K-12, but I have seen it in two-year and K-12 merge. That's where educators do what educators do best, and they can write a curriculum to say, "Okay, so if we're missing manufacturing in biotech, what are the skills that students need to have? What opportunities can we give them in high school and in two-year colleges so that they're ready to go into the workforce?" 

Rich Portelance

Okay. And whose voices tend to be missing in that process, do you think? Are there any voices missing?

Daylene Long

Students. So, the way that it's set up now, it's school boards talking to industries, talking to teachers. But in the research that I do, what I hear most often is that students are sometimes kind of shoved into the CTE role, and sometimes they have to pick a path, and they're not interested in any of those paths because it's just what their school offers. So, determining which courses to offer, I think they need more student input into that–it's exploring what interests them. 

And if you put a kid into a healthcare CTE pathway because it's the only one you have, and they actually really want to learn to be a welder, you're not going to have a match there. The healthcare stuff isn't going to be interesting to them. And that's where I think change could really come about is getting more… not just input, but influence over what is taught from the students.

Rich Portelance

I would agree with what you've stated here, and I'm just– yeah, I'm curious how that dynamic evolves, because the student voice is critical in the solutions, right? How do we– how do we get to a point where students have a little bit more opportunity, and perhaps, you know, AI can play a role, because there can be some more exploration. So I want to just dig into that. We talked about it earlier here, but when you talk to educators now, how is AI changing their thinking about career preparation? And then the follow-up would be how students could use it to benefit themselves?

Daylene Long

You know, what's interesting about the AI conundrum is that young people, and we're talking, like, anywhere from high school students–even middle schoolers–up through graduate school and early career, they… aren't super keen on AI. They, for a variety of different reasons, and I hear this from the educators I talk to, I hear this from the business people I talk to, I work with a woman who's a university professor at the University of Oregon, and she teaches specifically AI in communications, and her name is Dr. Lisa Peyton, and she tells me all the time that most of the time when her students come in, and it's a senior-level course that she's teaching, that they're not super keen on AI, and they don't want to be viewed as cheaters, and they don't want to be… they don’t want to take shortcuts, and those kinds of things. And so, she slows down and teaches them, one, how AI works, and two, how to use it as a tool rather than… There's a term in video games: the cheat code, how to not use it as a cheat code, a shortcut, to get from “here” to “here,” which is what they do in video games.

So, how AI fits in: I think we're in this weird space where it's moving super quickly, and young people view it differently than people who've been in industry for a while. I think that AI itself works best at the teacher level in helping teachers to save time, and customize things on an individual basis. So, it's the teacher level that I think carries the weight right now. Students are still figuring out where that's going to be. Administrators are still putting governance around it and don't have good governance structures yet. And so, it's this kind of wonky world right now in terms of where things go, because students and teachers move pretty quickly, but administrators have to step back and think about the whole picture, and it takes a little bit more time. So, it's an interesting place.

I can look at it from another perspective, if you want to. So, my first job in marketing and education was at the early-childhood level. I worked for a company that did training videos in early-childhood education. And so, I've studied early childhood for a few different years in there. I think… When you're talking about elementary and middle school, I think the best use is for them to learn how AI works as opposed to using it to solve their problems, because their brain development is still growing very much. It, you know, it still is up until you're 25, but in those younger years, when your brain is literally making connections between how something feels and what nature does, and when I drop this, it does this, and those types of things, AI can't teach them that. We have to teach them how AI works, but in the younger years–and this is controversial; not all the education companies are on the same team with me on this–I don't think that kids should be using AI to produce something; I think they should be using AI to learn how AI works. That make sense?

Rich Portelance

It does. Yes, it does. You know, I don't know if you know this, but I actually run a company that leverages an AI solution, and we always talk about amplified human intelligence. It's not using the AI to do all the work or to replace the humans–it's to do better work, because you know how to prompt it, you know the right questions to ask in order to increase productivity. And if we look at it from that perspective, it can be an incredibly powerful tool that can help us. But if people just say, "Oh, let it do the work for me," then you know, you're kind of writing your own script. So, I'll just leave it there.

Daylene Long

It– And AI is a great tool for you, Rich, because you have a history of experiences behind you, and that means that you have developed judgment. And our young people don't have as much of that yet. My best friend and I joke that when we were in our late teens, early 20s, that it is an amazing thing that we made it out alive, because we just didn't have the same judgment skills that we do now. And I think that educators are taking that into consideration when they're trying to figure out how students best use AI.

Rich Portelance

Yeah, that's funny that you said that, because as you were talking before and you were talking about the gaps, I was thinking, “Geez, I don't think my brain grew between, you know, 15 and 20. You know, it probably just stopped altogether, because you have that period of time where too much else is going on. 

Daylene Long

Yeah. It’s true.

Rich Portelance

But, you know, building good judgment, again these durable skills, is part of our conversation. We're going to explore these conversations on our executive forum on December 10th. Daylene will be there with our other guests, Rita Ferrandino and Jane Swift. 

A couple of other questions I wanted to ask you, Daylene: we talk about the barriers that keep students from accessing CTE pathways. You know, your son had an opportunity; you talked about that. We want to provide more of those opportunities to more students. And which of those barriers that are there can curriculum and technology providers realistically help remove?

Daylene Long

That's a really good question. If I were looking five years out, and I had on my visionary glasses, I think one of the barriers that needs to be removed is a strict divide between academic and CTE development. Right now, there are separate silos; they're funded separately, they have different sets of standards, and the curriculum is often written to one or the other. I think the opportunity–and I'm helping some of my clients with this–I think that the opportunity is for there to be crossover. 

I think that if you've got a… Oh, if you've got a science department that's working with the health science CTE pathway, and you can cross those things over, I think that's where we start to remove the barriers, because what happens, and I don't love this, is that kids who are high academic achievers, who get all the A's on the test, that do really well on the SATs and all of the testing, and that kind of stuff, they get trapped into, like, the advanced placement, or the IB, or the… that kind of a track. And when kids don't really kind of fit that, they push them into CTE, and they'll tell that kid that wants to be a welder, “Well, you should go into the CTE pathway. You should check it out. We have this nice health science track for you.” The kid wants to be a welder. That's not where they need to be going. 

So it's… the barriers, I think, exist in terms of how the curriculum is structured. I think if there could be a bridge, that that would be helpful, and I think if there could be a bridge where the funding, or the internships, and the work experience and stuff somehow helped cross that, I think that that's an opportunity. I think those are some of the big opportunities that are out there for the companies who serve educators.

Rich Portelance

Okay. So, let's pretend that we have a million educators and executives listening, and if they could take one action in the next 90 days to help support better CTE educators and students, what would that action be?

Daylene Long

I think the first action is to have somebody from your business in your area find a CTE advisory board at the school level and participate in it. And they are always looking for industries to participate. That person who sits on that advisory council will learn more than anything else. 

I think also having questions that you put out there that can be answered by current day teachers, because teaching in the classroom today is not what it was two weeks ago, and it's certainly not what it was 10 years ago. So, reaching out to educators to get what's working well, where is the need, those kinds of things. I'm… I always tell my clients that if you want directional input, you needed to talk– you need to talk to or use someone like me to connect you to about 30 educators who get those questions down. That gives you like a 75% confidence interval. If you want it higher, if you want like a 95% confidence interval–which is more than directional, it's really pretty strong–you need to be talking to at least 100 teachers. And if you're trying to validate something that you're going to put millions behind, you need a sample size of at least between 350 and 400. It gets into all the statistics, but the core of that is connecting to educators who are in the classroom today, and not relying on… It's great when companies hire people who used to be educators, but if they were an educator three years ago, they're not an educator today. And if they were an educator five, 10, 30 years ago, they're much more disconnected from what's actually happening in the classroom today. So, the short version of that, Rich, is they need to be talking to people who are in the classroom solving these problems today.

Closing Thoughts

Rich Portelance

Okay. Thank you. You know, this is one of those conversations I wish could last forever, because I think we're exploring some important and interesting territory. Unfortunately, we can't do that. So, I'm going to ask you a last question, Daylene, and then we'll wrap this up, and then we get a chance to do this all over again on the executive forum on December 10th.

Daylene Long

It'll be fun to see how our perspectives differ, too.

Rich Portelance

Yeah, I agree. And kind of in preparation for that, if you had one question that you want leaders to bring into that executive forum, the question we need to wrestle with if we're serious about preparing students for what comes next, what question are they bringing?

Daylene Long

That is good. I'm trying to put myself in my business shoes from the perspective of what would I– what question would I want to bring to this group, and… I think it would be something along the lines of: how do we listen to educators, local businesses, and students? How do we best listen to them? And I mean really listen to them. Teachers will often tell you that companies don't listen to them. They do. I've been on the board side of things where we've taken in all of this data and listening, and made decisions, and there's a whole bunch of factors that go in. But it's how to listen to them. How to listen to them from a reasoning standpoint, that, “Here's all the data we're dealing with,” but how to listen to them from an emotional impact standpoint, as well. There's really the art and the science of listening to people and asking the right questions and knowing what districts need. So, that would be the question, is how can we best listen to educators, to districts, and to students about what is needed for CTE.

Rich Portelance

I like it. I think that's a very thoughtful answer to my question, and I really appreciate your time today, Daylene. This was fantastic.

Daylene Long

Thank you.

Rich Portelance

I look forward to the 10th, and, you know, we'll keep the line of communications open. So, thanks for your time today.

Daylene Long

Thank you for having me and thank you for letting me talk about a subject I love! 

Rich Portelance

Absolutely. Our pleasure.