Illinois Students on PaCE to Thrive

The session focused on telling the story of how PaCE came to be developed and highlighted critical implementation supports from our partners, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC) and Illinois Education and Career Success Network, which are driving quality implementation statewide. What makes PaCE special?

1. Emergence from local practice

While the PaCE Framework was adopted by state agencies as a result of the 2016 Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness (PWR) Act, both the PWR Act overall and PaCE framework particularly were informed by existing innovative local practice. Rather than create new expectations, PaCE focuses on documenting the universe of best practices in preparing students for college, career, and life. Local practices were captured through cross-stakeholder bodies like the former College and Career Readiness (CCR) Committee of the Illinois P-20 Council and the Illinois 60 by 25 Network (now the Success Network), reviewed in the working groups called for by HR477 (precursor to the PWR Act), and formalized through the interagency and stakeholder engagements processes to develop PaCE.

2. Alignment to existing expectations and frameworks

PaCE is intentionally aligned to a range of other policies and strategies pertaining to college and career readiness, including College and Career Pathways Endorsement (CCPE) and the College and Career Readiness Indicator (CCRI) in our ESSA School Quality Framework. This alignment reduces duplication of expectations of schools and students, improves clarity for students navigating these systems, and ensure implementation of those various policies are mutually reinforcing in support of student success.

3. Clear and comprehensive statewide guidance, but encouraging local adaptation

While the PaCE Middle School and High School Frameworks are comprehensive and dense, the core purpose of them is to provide a clear example that communities can adapt to meet their own needs and to reflect the work they are already doing. In adapting PaCE to their context, districts have the opportunity to bring together work they are already doing to support their students into one clear framework that students and families can better see and understand. Further, adopting a district-wide PaCE framework provides consistency and external validity – these are shared priorities and practices, not tied to any individual leader or advisor alone.

4. Starting with organic take-up, following up with a “nudge”

Under the PWR Act, districts opted into implementation of the PaCE Framework. Given extensive implementation support, this resulted in a great deal of organic scaling of local PaCE adaptations and implementation. Building on this success, the 2022 amendment to the PWR Act (HB3296; Public Act 102-0917) created a default expectation for districts serving any of grades 6–12 to implement a local adaptation of PaCE or opt out. Allowing for natural scaling to precede a “nudge” to implement meant that districts newer to PaCE can see a clear set of examples across the state and in various contexts for how to document their work. Further, the 2022 update to PaCE to draw down to the 6th grade level was informed by many communities having done so already, despite the original PaCE framework only going down to grade 8.

5. Robust implementation support and elevating local practice

ISAC sets the pace for Illinois in providing extensive support to partners statewide as they work to implement PaCE in their community. This includes providing templates, toolkits, direct development support, workshops, PaCE annual Symposia, and a repository of community PaCE framework examples. ISAC’s support has proved invaluable since the PWR Act was passed, and resulted in much of the natural scaling of PaCE frameworks statewide we saw in advance of the 2022 amendment. The Success Network provides another key avenue for district supports through conference sessions, webinars, and direct technical assistance to Leadership Communities. In both cases, highlighting examples of other community adaptations and implementation of PaCE empowers communities with valuable peer-to-peer learning opportunities that can make the abstract state framework more real. Thank you to Education Strategy Group for inviting us to participate in this session and to NCAN for allowing us to share with their state partners. Interested in further exploring how the PaCE model can be applied in your work? Use the connect form below to start a conversation.