Making It: What Today's Kids Need for Tomorrow's World

By Stephanie Malia Krauss

Discover how to help young people "make it" in a rapidly changing world

Author Stephanie Malia Krauss gets it. Every day she works with leaders across the country as they upgrade learning experiences to better equip young people for a changing world. A mother, former teacher and school leader, Stephanie knows firsthand how hard it is to balance school and program requirements with young people's needs. In Making It: What Today's Kids Need for Tomorrow's World, she lays out what adults can do to get young people ready for the future. What you learn may surprise you.

With so much changing so fast—accelerated by the impacts of COVID-19—the most in-demand jobs and skills of today may be obsolete by the time our youngest become adults. For kids to be ready for this new reality, they must acquire four critical "currencies" that will serve them well, whatever their future holds: credentials, competencies, connections, and cash. This book focuses on how to prioritize these four key outcomes whenever and wherever learning happens. The author shares research and experience to help you understand and apply a human-centered and future-focused lens directly to your classroom, school, program, or at home.

• Learn about how the world and workforce is changing, and what that means for the education and preparation young people need
• Understand how these changes are impacting young people, reshaping their childhoods and transitions into adulthood
• Glean practical information and ideas you can use to help young people—at every age and stage—to gain readiness "currencies" in the form of credentials, competencies, connections, and cash
• Challenge your beliefs about what knowledge, experiences and resources are most important for kids to have, and what a college- and career-ready education really requires
• Discover community-wide strategies that prioritize equity, learning and readiness for the future

This book will benefit teachers, counselors, youth workers, parents, school board members, and state education leaders alike. Whether you work in K-12, youth development, or you just want to know how to best support the kids in your life, you will find a timely and useful resource putting young people first and modernizing their learning experiences for the better.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781119577072

Book preview

Making It

What Today's Kids Need for Tomorrow's World

Stephanie Malia Krauss

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Copyright © 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Krauss, Stephanie Malia, 1985- author.

Title: Making it : what today’s kids need for tomorrow’s world / Stephanie Malia Krauss.

Description: Hoboken, NJ : Jossey-Bass, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020047586 (print) | LCCN 2020047587 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119577034 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119577010 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119577072 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Life skills—Study and teaching (Secondary) | School-to-work transition. | Career education. | Education—Aims and objectives.

Classification: LCC LC1037 .K73 2021 (print) | LCC LC1037 (ebook) | DDC 370.113—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047586

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047587

COVER ART: © TANYA ST / ISTOCKPHOTO

COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY

To the currency-builders who helped me make it, especially Mrs. Lewis and Jim.

To my kids—Justice, Harrison, Chloe, and Brian—may you have everything you need to thrive and make it in tomorrow's world.

To my husband, Evan. I am so glad you are the person I get to experience adulthood with. I love you very much.

PREFACE

All authors want to write an evergreen book, and I am no exception. In Making It, I wanted to present enduring ideas with as much relevance for today's kids as tomorrow's. And writing wrapped up just as COVID-19 pummeled the planet into the worst public health and economic crises we have seen in our lifetimes; my final edits were made soon after the high-profile anti-Black murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery—along with innumerable other acts of racial profiling and violence. These led to unrest and uprisings as well as a growing number of acknowledgments of racism by many in the white community. Many made a first-time commitment to work toward being antiracist.

The year 2020 magnifies what happens when a centuries-old pandemic—America's brand of racism and anti-Blackness—collides with an altogether new pandemic, COVID-19.

As I write this, we are in the midst of pandemic schooling, and no public health official, politician, pediatrician, or principal really knows what will happen. COVID-19 cases continue to rise, prompting fear from many and denial from others. As a mother of school-aged children, I am forced to accept that this is the world and time my children will grow up in.

In the following pages, you'll find stories of what it takes and the struggles that many children face as they try to make it in America. And in that struggle, I cannot help but see my own privilege and my children's good fortune. I am able to make choices for them right now that are only possible because of our whiteness and wealth. I can choose to have them learning at home with digital supports at our fingertips. I can take them on trips, wherever and whenever we want, without fear, because we are white. Yet, I wrestle with the choices I am making and how they might contribute to worsening segregation and the deep racial and class divides that exist in our nation.

This book reflects these tensions, because it tackles what any young person in America needs to make it into and through adulthood. I wrote it because I have heard from young people, educators, and parents who want a better roadmap to navigate the world as it is, in a country that is still unfair and unjust—a country with an origin story of European settlers taking land that belonged to others, and declaring it their own.

To really be about the business of helping young people make it in the world, we must operate on two planes: the one we are living in and the one we are building. We must help young people get what they need to survive in a place that does not live up to its promise of equal opportunity for all. This requires—among other things—a genuine commitment to antiracism, which takes constant reflection and action, and a willingness to be wrong and make it right. It also requires that those of us who are white take a posture of listening and learning, something I continue to try to get better at.

Today's kids need adults who will stand up and call out bigotry and oppressive action toward young people of color, those who are disabled, the LGBTQIA community, and other marginalized groups. We must seek to understand who is hardest hit and most held back, figuring out what more they need to make it. But doing this alone is not sufficient. We must also work with those young people to co-create new rules of living and being, rooted in equity and justice. These young people are already taking the lead, and they need adults to help them carry out their visions for the future. This is individual and collective work, and it is at once introspective, expressive, and constructive.

In this year of immense loss and struggle, I think about our children and about how this reality is all they know. While there is so much we don't have control over, there is so much we do. We can find beauty in the brokenness, because there is still hope and space to reimagine.

If we get this right, then maybe one day our children can write the book Made It—a history book about how they had what they needed—not just to get by, but to build a better tomorrow.

Stephanie Malia Krauss

November 2020

FOREWORD BY KAREN PITTMAN

Stephanie Krauss is a force of nature. A colleague introduced Stephanie to me at a conference I was keynoting in St. Louis some years ago. It took only a few minutes for me to experience the depth of her passion and intellect. It took less than an hour for me to commit to helping her figure out how to bring the incredible lessons she had learned—in life and by running a charter school for undercredited, overage students—to the national stage. That commitment resulted in a quickly negotiated fellowship with the Forum that served as the springboard for friendship and colleagueship that gets richer with every opportunity we tackle together—formal or informal.

Our first colleagueship project remains, by far, the most ambitious. It started with an audacious challenge: create a universal list of competencies youth need to succeed that speaks clearly to young people, resonates with leaders across multiple systems (from education to juvenile justice), and is grounded in everything we know about learning and development. This was something the Forum staff and I had dreamed of for years, but never tackled. An hour into her first staff meeting, however, we knew Stephanie was up to the task.

Stephanie shared with our team that in an effort to make high school graduation requirements relevant and reachable for students—many of whom were, on traditional measures, four or more years behind—Stephanie and her staff had broken down the Missouri graduation requirements into 21 accessible competencies that students needed to master before their 21st birthdays. They called it 21 by 21. Brilliant idea. Accessible results. It was an unbalanced list, however, because too many competencies focused on specific academic skills. When asked about the imbalance, Stephanie answered that she had to start with the academic skills to meet accountability requirements. She squeezed broader life skills in where she could.

Ready by Design: The Science (and Art) of Youth Readiness was the down payment on a gift we hoped to deliver to practitioners and administrators who work with young people in all of the settings where learning and development can, should, and usually does happen. The gift stayed in layaway for lack of funding. But the ideas, and our passion for making them accessible across fields and systems, remained. Our strategy, even as we went our separate ways, has been to encourage decision-makers to put young people and their drive to beat the odds at the center of every discussion and decision. Our secret goal, of course, was to find a way to complete the down payment and deliver the gift.

Stephanie has delivered. And the gift is needed now more than ever. 2020 will go down as the year in which almost every assumption about why some young people make it and others don't is tested; about the relative importance of the assets families, schools, community organizations and the larger community, as well as social, physical, and economic contexts play in a young person's success; and, about the underlying reasons behind the huge disparities in assets. 2020 will go down as the year in which educators—in classrooms, clubhouses, courthouses, camps, and community centers—openly acknowledge that the tools and plans they have are not sufficient for the massive design-build job at hand.

This book starts with the question, What does it take to ensure young people are ready? This is the right place to start. This is not because we don't need to improve our schools (the starting place for many books). It is because schools are a means to an end, and when the end is defined narrowly as an academic credential, the opportunity to explore all of the pathways to success and understand all of the barriers is truncated. COVID has moved us into what will likely be a new wave of school reimagining efforts.

This book, and others like it, can help those charged with directly supporting young people's development with the confidence and narratives they need to actively balance the requirements of the education system—which focuses on academic competence and academic credentials—with a broader awareness of the whole ecosystem young people are in, forging connections and building broader competencies, which is hampered or buoyed by their ability to access cash and credit.

Making It is not a review of curricula or exemplary programs. It is a big-picture overview of the forces that influence young people's ability to focus, learn, grow, and succeed. In the following pages, Stephanie masterfully:

Breaks down the science of how learning and development happen—giving accessible, useful references and examples not only of how our minds process and make meaning, but of how stress and information overload interfere with learning, how demands and opportunities that youth face will make it even harder for them to manage their learning journeys (formal and informal), and what adults—from families to educators—can do to protect and guide.

Makes sense out of what has often become a cacophony of acronyms and skill lists, building directly on the work we started in Ready by Design. Even if you consider yourself SEL-literate, this section is worth a careful read.

Makes it clear that credentials and competencies are different and that neither are sufficient to ensure success.

Gives us five clear, important things we can do to be currency-builders that link directly to the research and translate easily into action.

When we hit the road to popularize the ideas in Ready by Design, we coined the phrase readiness is a right. I had this phrase in mind as I read the manuscript. Readiness is defined as both the capacity and the motivation to tackle challenges and opportunities that come your way.

As we think about what it takes to make readiness a right, we have to reflect on the fact that many of this country's young people are engaged in a much more basic fight to make humanity a right. Black Lives Matter does matter.

This book lays out a powerful argument for why we need to broaden our understanding of what it takes to make it as a young person today, and what it will take for the next generation, who could live to be 100. It offers stark examples of the privileges that come with wealth in this country and, in contrast, the challenges that poverty compounds. It acknowledges but does not lead with the fact that there are Black and brown young people in this country, and particularly Black young men, who are struggling and suffering and standing together because their right to live free in their communities is challenged every day.

Stephanie's light touch approach is intentional, and the ideas in this book are meant to be a starting place. I know because I asked. The fact that I contributed this foreword shows that Stephanie understands and continues to grapple with these realities, as reflected in her preface.

Competencies, credentials, connections, and cash are the currencies needed to make it in this country. They are all you need if you are white. If you are Black, indigenous, or a person of color, however, making the commitment to build these currencies has to be coupled with a critical analysis of why they have been denied historically, and why the systems charged with your success are still operating under rules that were designed for your failure.

As a Black woman with children and grandchildren, I will call out the need to acknowledge a fifth quality to accompany the currencies, one that enables young people of color to not only make it but to thrive: collective identity. I look forward to hearing more about this in Stephanie's next book.

Karen J. Pittman

Co-Founder, President & CEO

The Forum for Youth Investment

FOREWORD BY MARIA FLYNN

How do we connect current and future workers to high-paying, in-demand jobs? I've devoted my professional life to answering that question. In truth, it's always been more than a career to me.

Stephanie and I are both Jersey Girls. I grew up outside of Trenton, New Jersey, immersed in issues of workforce development. My father was a leader at the New Jersey Department of Labor, and my mother was the office manager at our local career and technical education high school. Discussions of the intersection of school and work—from state policy considerations to the plight of students struggling to find their way—were constants at our dinner table.

Now, decades later, Stephanie and I both have the privilege of being moms. She has two boys, and I have two girls. Like all moms, I want my daughters to have the tools they need to thrive in the workforce. Today, that's not a simple task. The formula I was taught—go to college, get a job, advance my career, and eventually (hopefully!) retire—is outdated. It won't work for my daughters—or Stephanie's sons. Nor will it work for their peers. The world today, marked by constant technological innovation, moves too quickly. And for too many individuals across the country currently in the labor force, that traditional formula already isn't working. This is particularly true for Black and brown Americans, one in five of whom is living in poverty at the time of this writing.

Our education and workforce systems are failing these individuals from a young age, preventing them from reaching their potentials and succeeding in the workforce. In a society in which postsecondary degrees are directly correlated with higher earnings, Black students receive only 14 percent of all associate's degrees and just 11 percent of all bachelor's degrees conferred today.¹ This not only reflects the deep inequities and unjust outcomes that