How Do You Know if Your High School Pathways Work for Your Students?

Across the country, districts have invested significant time, dollars, and capacity into reimagining high school pathways. The goal is clear: to give students access to multiple postsecondary options, whether that’s Advanced Placement or Honors courses, dual enrollment, Career and Technical Education (CTE), work-based learning, or internships. These pathways are designed to let students explore interests, build real-world skills, and make more informed choices before committing to a specific postsecondary direction.

But as these redesigned pathways become the norm, a critical question remains: Are they actually working for students?

The Challenge of Measuring Impact

Since many of these models have only been implemented for a few years, the long-term impact is not yet clear. Over the last 15 years, there has been promising research showing that pathway participation can increase engagement, graduation rates and post-secondary success, but understanding the full picture for current students, especially for a school or district early in implementation, requires connecting data across multiple systems.

For school and district leaders, this is where things get complex. Pathway effectiveness can’t be captured in a single dataset. You need to look at:

• Course completion across multiple pathways,

• Student progress over time,

• Achievement outcomes, and

• Qualitative data from student surveys and interviews.

Unfortunately, these data rarely live in the same place. Add to that the challenge of disaggregating results by subgroup or combining with attendance data to understand root causes and even the most data-savvy leaders can find themselves stuck with fragmented insights.

This is where SchoolOpsAI can make a real difference. By integrating data from across systems, course enrollment, performance, attendance, and student voice, SchoolOpsAI helps leaders answer the key question: Are our pathways delivering what our current students need? Let’s not wait six years to see if students were prepared for their career. 

With SchoolOpsAI, district and school teams can:

• Monitor pathway participation and progress in real time.

• Disaggregate by subgroup to ensure equity and identify opportunity gaps early.

• Triangulate multiple data sources (like attendance, grades, and student feedback) to uncover the “why” behind trends.

• Intervene early, before students fall off track or disengage.

High school pathways hold enormous potential to personalize learning and connect education to opportunity. But realizing that potential requires more than program design. It requires visibility into how these experiences are working for real students, in real time.

With tools like SchoolOpsAI, leaders can move beyond anecdote and intuition to evidence-driven action, ensuring that every student’s pathway truly leads to success.

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