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Get Me to the Gray, presented by COJA Services Inc., is a podcast about the conversations we’re told we shouldn’t have. Hosted by journalist and author Paula Lehman-Ewing, the show brings people with fundamentally different ways of seeing the world into honest dialogue—where we name what divides us and keep talking anyway.
COJA Services Inc. works with mission-driven organizations and brands that are clear on their values but struggle to translate that clarity into public-facing language. We help teams align internal narratives, reduce confusion before it becomes mistrust, and translate complexity into public understanding without relying on scripts, rhetoric, or generic AI language that strips voice and judgment.
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GMGS2E2-KatyAnthes-Mixdown
Speaker: [00:00:00] This week on Get Me to the Gray.
Kathy Anthes: Even though some people say, you know, "Well, you can just look everything up on AI now," if you don't have a foundation of knowledge and you haven't trained your brain to learn and struggle and look things up and decipher between what is real and what is not, then you're not going to be, um, that sort of functional human part of society now.
Speaker: COJA Services presents Get Me to the Gray. If you find value in this conversation, subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. And if you can, leave a rating or share it with someone. Visit COJAervices.com to learn more[00:01:00]
Jason Masino: Welcome to Get Me to the Gray, a podcast from Koja Services, where we explore complicated questions without assuming we'll arrive at a clean answer. I'm Jason Masino, COJA's Director of Strategic Partnerships, hosting this special series: What's College For Now? The question of what college should provide doesn't begin when someone arrives on campus.
It starts much earlier, with what students hear about success, what schools prepare them for, and which possibilities feel available to them Colorado's House Bill 261317 has prompted a planning process around closer alignment of higher education and workforce development oversight. Today, we're stepping back to consider the K through 12 side of that larger conversation.
I'm joined by Katie Anthes, Colorado's former Commissioner of Education, who now works with the [00:02:00] Public Education and Business Coalition, or PEBC. Her experience spans statewide education leadership and work supporting educators. Katie, thanks for being here.
Kathy Anthes: Great. Yeah, thanks, Jason. I appreciate being here.
This is a really important topic, and before we dive into that topic, I'll just tell you a little bit about what I do at PEBC. Similar to what COJA's doing with Get Me To The Gray, understanding that we have lots of different issues in, in education, and we're in this space where there's a lot of political polarization.
And so I work now at PEBC to support educators, education leaders, school board members in how do we have those important conversations without devolving into sort of demonization and toxic conflict. And so I am the director of an initiative called Forward From Polarization to [00:03:00] Progress, and work with education leaders across the country to help increase productive dialogue, very similar to what COJA does.
Jason Masino: Yes, I'm all about that alignment. So when you hear What's College For Now, what comes to mind for you when it comes to the K through 12 side, but just in general?
Kathy Anthes: Yeah. I mean, this is such a interesting question. I mean, the, the first thing that comes to mind is extreme rapid change. So we're in this moment in time right now where technological advances, AI, kind of a lot of questions about humanity, jobs, the workforce, are coming increasingly into sharp focus.
And so when we think about what college is for and what the K through 12 system is preparing students to go to, my very first thing is rapid [00:04:00] change. And, and the K through 12 system as well as the higher ed system needs to be incredibly flexible. I think in the past, we have not been super nimble and able to change, so I think about how both the K through 12 system, mostly secondary schools, can adapt to change and the needs of, of our current society, um, as well as the college education system.
Jason Masino: Has your viewpoint on this changed between your time as commissioner and then post-commissioner work?
Kathy Anthes: Um, I don't know if it falls down lines of commissioner versus post-commissioner, but my views have evolved over time. So when I started in education probably 30 years ago, the real push then was college for all.
Make sure everybody is going to college. That's the goal. We were trying to rectify past wrongs [00:05:00] of either inadvertently or advertently tracking students into, you know, these types of students go to college and these types of students don't, and we were trying to rectify that. And so we were trying to say, "We wanna make sure every student is prepared for college, and every student has the opportunity to go to college, and we should encourage every student to go to college."
And then the pendulum started to shift, and it started to say, "Well, we need to widen that aperture a little bit, and maybe there are other pathways that we should be considering." And that, you know, went hand in hand with the workforce needs of our society in that we weren't, um, preparing enough folks for all of the different types of workforce needs.
And it also went hand in hand with sort of I don't know, it-- crisis is too hard of a word, but like the knowledge that we weren't engaging high [00:06:00] school students that well. There was this feeling of, you know, what is this all worth? Like we're not, we're not making the relevance for students, you know, at the forefront.
So, so the aperture started to get wider to say there are lots of other career paths, there are lots of other opportunities besides just college. But my stance has always been firmly, we must prepare students to the highest level so that they have all the choices. You know, so we're not tracking students into like, you, you wanna go into a, you know, career path right away, or you wanna go to college right away.
Um, but that every student is prepared to make whichever choice, fully informed choice, that's a really important point, a fully informed choice with where they wanna go given their current circumstance, needs, and desires. Like we, we've moved so far away from [00:07:00] college that we're, we might be getting even back into doing a little bit of tracking, not calling it that, but that's my worry about this whole thing- Okay
is that as we've moved into this pathways for all, you can go directly into career, you can think about more hands-on career paths. You know, I just wanna be sure we don't lose that idea that college is still very, very useful and important, and it actually still shows a high return on investment. You know, despite all of the questions that are being asked in the media, when you look at the data, students who go to college make more, um, substantially over their lifetime than students who don't.
So- Hmm ... you know, we need to think about that equity issue.
Jason Masino: We see a lot of studies come out about how the, the brain isn't really fully developed until kind of the mid, mid-20s for people, but then [00:08:00] we expect, you know, essentially kids to make these long-term decisions very early on. And I think that this ties into the next question I was gonna ask, which was about these messages that students read, receive about success.
So what do you think students hear from schools, families, wider culture about college work and what counts as success?
Kathy Anthes: Yeah. I think students are getting more messages of multiple pathways, like you can explore different hands-on careers, you can go into technical college, voca- you know, all of these different types of paths, and you can go to college.
So I-- so there's a good thing about like all these different pathways. I do agree with you in that I feel like the messages they're getting are like, "Choose a path right now, early," and I don't really subscribe to that. I still think it's important for them to try things, do [00:09:00] externships, do apprenticeships, because that's all fodder for their learning, right?
Right. And it's all going to help them as their growth does develop, as their brains do develop into formulating what, what they do want to do. But I don't think we should send messages around like, you know, "You're picking this path now, and that's the path you're always gonna be on." I see it more as exploration.
Sure. And we wanna put lots of different things in front of students so that they can explore and have the relevance of knowing which types of careers are out there. Um, so as with everything, it's kind of making sure we're not on one extreme or the other. We're offering opportunities for students to explore, but we're not just pigeonholing them- Mm-hmm
into one particular choice that they make when they're in high school.
Jason Masino: Okay. So it-- this makes me think about the House bill and some of the conversations I've [00:10:00] had about the workforce side and a lot of, of people having that fear that the, the focus is workforce, workforce, prepare people to get into the workforce.
And, you know, there's, there's always those people who say, "Oh, well, in K through 12, we should be teaching people about economics and how to, to manage money." On the workforce side, a lot of people are thinking about, well, in addition to preparing people for the workforce, we should focus on these durable skills or these kind of- Mm-hmm
soft skills. So in, in thinking about that, it seems like schools might start to kind of face pressure from maybe employers to- Mm-hmm ... start preparing students with these skills. So do you think that educators will need to respond by, by incorporating teaching some of these maybe durable skills, democratic life skills- Mm-hmm
in the classroom [00:11:00] into their, to their plans?
Kathy Anthes: Yeah. Again, with, with everything I think about, it's a both/and. Like, we, we both need to prepare our students for the workforce and careers, and we need to prepare them and build skills, like durable skills, soft skills, uh, collaboration skills. You know, actually a, a lot of folks are writing more about, like, what is education for in this age of AI, and it's going to have to be really, really focused on the human part of, of learning and knowledge and application.
We can't leave behind the building knowledge piece because even though some people say, you know, "Well, you can just look everything up on AI now," if you don't have a foundation of knowledge and you haven't trained your brain to learn and struggle and look things up and decipher between what is real and what is [00:12:00] not, then you're not going to be that sort of functional h- human part of society now.
And this goes back to my opening comments about things are changing so rapidly, like we don't even know what our workforce is gonna look like in three months- Yeah ... much less a year. And so I think it's kind of a, it's a nerve-wracking time around what educators' roles are and what, you know, K through 12 teachers' roles are.
But I think we still need to be helping build our humanity as well as building knowledge and, and learning how to learn.
Jason Masino: So as someone who's led the state's education system, how do you see all these different players navigating these competing expectations? And how should everyone be working together to make sure we get things right from the learner's perspective, the workforce perspective, the higher ed intentions, et cetera?
Kathy Anthes: Yeah, it's, it's a good question and [00:13:00] it's always hard when you're bringing together different sort of state level bureaucracies that had kind of maybe not unique missions, but different aspects of the mission, which is to support students, support the workforce, and prepare folks for the future. Everybody has that aspect of it, whether you're the Department of Higher Ed, the Department of K through 12 Ed, Workforce and Labor Department.
So it is not easy. Like collaboration is not easy. I think what's going to be necessary is some sort of deep conversations around everyone's role and around what like the vision is for the system. And, and then thinking about where the different unique skill sets and knowledges can like fill, you know, can contribute to that vision in the system.
I think the goal of the bill is more alignment, more seamlessness, more from the [00:14:00] user perspective, which might be the student, more connection to all of these different systems and maybe more resources because of that, more access to resources. But it will be hard to put the puzzle together in a way that makes sense because we've all had our own roles for so long.
So it, it's not going to be just a easy put them all in one building and we'll figure it out. It's like th- there's gonna be a lot of work to try to figure out what does that overall vision look like and then how do we build it and, and kind of rebuild it? How do we use this unique opportunity to build it in a way that we want?
We do need to prepare folks for the workforce. We also need to prepare well-rounded citizens that have the ability to grow and learn and explore. And so how do we marry those things?
Jason Masino: Yeah. So yesterday I had a conversation about the intention of the [00:15:00] bill and how, for lack of a better phrase, it's, it's kind of gonna create this one-stop shop and will also force one person to kind of be an executive director of all of these different currently siloed units.
And like you said, they'll need to have a shared vision for this, essentially what is just a really long pipeline. Mm-hmm. And in my experience working in higher ed, hearing all different angles from this conversation, I feel like the focus is always that pipeline from higher ed post-secondary education to workforce.
And I feel like K through 12 gets left out. So I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on that from either your former work or current work or both.
Kathy Anthes: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think-- So in the K through 12 sort of system, we've done a [00:16:00] lot of talking in the last, I don't know, 10 to 15 years about redesigning high schools.
That's where I think the connection is, and I think there should be a tighter connection because we do lose a lot of students From on the gap from when they graduate high school, hopefully, or sometimes even don't graduate high school- Mm-hmm ... to jumping to the next, you know, whether that's community college, apprenticeships, career, a four-year college, two-year college, you know, whatever the opportunities are.
So I do like the idea of there being a tighter connection- Mm-hmm ... between high school and what comes next. I will say we have talked a lot about high school redesign, and in my experience over the past 15 years, we haven't really gotten there yet. Um, part of it is because of expectations of the public.
Like when principals or superintendents actually start making some real changes at high [00:17:00] school, just the inertia of what parents expect and what communities expect can push back against that. And so there's some of that. But I, I have always been super interested in the models in high school where maybe toward the 11th and 12th grade, um, students are spending half of their time doing exploration in career or workforce, nonprofits, all sorts of opportunities, and half the time still in classes applying that knowledge because that increases the relevancy because we have lots of data that suggests that students are getting disengaged in high school 'cause they don't see the relevancy.
Mm-hmm. They feel like they're just sitting in classes, and they're not, they're not seeing how it applies. So we're always trying to increase the relevancy of high school. And I do think in those last two years we could do much more to have kind of a wide range of experiences and connect it to the learning and connect it [00:18:00] more directly to where they can go next, whatever that looks like for them.
And then I, I will say, you know, I, I worked with Career Wise when I was commissioner and some commissions that we did on the, these topics, and the Switzerland model really is kind of appealing in that rather than a pathway, a linear pathway for students, it's more of a matrix. Hmm. So you don't get-- as a student in Switzerland, you don't get tracked.
If you decide to go to a technical college or do some hands-on work like manufacturing or something like that right out of high school, that does not track you out of a four-year college. That work applies to if you wanna move into a four-year academic track. Hmm. And so the tracks are more of a matrix, and you can bounce all around between them, and all of the experience and credits and classes are leading you towards [00:19:00] just more and more aligned credentials in the end.
Jason Masino: Yeah. I'm not super familiar with that model, but I really like this idea of all your experience is relevant and it's counted. This is definitely a little bit different, but I, after I finished my four-year institution, I kind of bounced around different graduate school programs- Mm-hmm ... and they were a little unrelated, and I would always wish that I could kind of, like, bring some of those credits- Yeah
and classes to the program that I eventually did finish. But I was thinking like, "Well, I learned some good stuff in these classes-" Yeah "... and I still apply it to this day." Yeah. Right. Why is it just, like- Exactly ... this random school I went to that no one even asks for a transcript for, so.
Kathy Anthes: Right. Right. And in some cases, it makes sense for students to go into the workforce right away.
You know, maybe there's some life circumstances that need that, need that to happen, [00:20:00] or they're not quite ready to know what they wanna study or whether they wanna, you know, take out loans for school or something. But at least my understanding in the Switzerland model is that that's more seamless. You can go do that, and then you can apply that to applying into a four-year college, and the, the pathways are permeable and movable all the time, and there's the expectation of that.
So, you don't feel like you've made a bad choice by going to work for a year before you apply to a, a college or something like that. I just always caution ag- against the pendulum shifts of, like, going all the way to only workforce matters, going all the way to only kind of the liberal education model of just gathering all this information.
Like, there's probably something in the middle.
Jason Masino: Mm-hmm. Okay. So before we close, I want to bring it back to the larger question about what is [00:21:00] college for, and then something that you brought up at the very beginning of our conversation, and that was the rapidly changing state of things. We all know things are just constantly changing, expectations of what success looks like, technology, et cetera.
And so I'm curious if you were speaking to a learner and they were nearing maybe the end of K through 12, nearing the end of post-secondary, what kind of advice would you give someone just trying to navigate these very uncertain, inconsistent, all over the place times that we're in?
Kathy Anthes: Yeah. Yeah, I wish I had some really great gems of advice because-- but I think we're all in this uncertain time, so we don't really know.
We're not sure about anything, I think, no matter what age we're at. But because of that, my advice would be, like, building resilience and exploring a lot of different things. If you [00:22:00] can, do some apprenticeships or do some internships. If you can, go to a college, engage with groups and people. I think we need to lean back into the human engagement piece of it.
Mm-hmm. So I would recommend that folks are engaging with real people and real ideas and exploring a lot of different things, especially as they're young, so that they're kind of building that, that broader knowledge base so they can pivot to wherever the world is taking us. And the things that we know will be important no matter what.
So building resiliency, building flexibility, and trying and exploring a lot of different things in a lot of different ways would be my advice.
Jason Masino: Yes. A common theme that's popping up is this idea of preserving the humanness of things and not losing that. Yeah. So thank you for that.
Speaker: Yeah. [00:23:00]
Jason Masino: Before we wrap up, where would you point someone who wants to learn more about your work or explore these questions further?
Kathy Anthes: Yeah. Well, if you're interested in, in exploring work on how to manage and decrease political polarization in education, you can go to the PEBC website, the Public Education and Business Coalition website, and click on policy, and then you'll see the Forward Initiative there, and you'll see what I'm doing there.
Jason Masino: Great. And we'll be sure to include those in the show notes. So- Yeah ... thank you for that. And Katie, thank you so much for taking the time to think this through out loud- Yeah ... with me. This is a very- Absolutely ... not so clean conversation, so I'm glad that there is a series devoted to having this conversation.
I'm so glad- Yeah ... that you carved out time to speak about this and lend your knowledge and expertise. And again, thank you so much for being on Get Me to the Prairie.
Kathy Anthes: Yeah. [00:24:00] Thank you. Thanks for hosting. This is a really important conversation. I appreciate it
Speaker: This podcast was made by humans, including its producer, me, James Ewing. Programs and partnerships by Jason Messino. Music by Chris Principe. Get Me to the Gray is an example of Kojo's narrative work, designing authentic narratives and translating complex ideas for public understanding. Learn more at [00:25:00] cojaservices.com.