Our Approach
Transforming individuals and communities across West Virginia
Excel Together West Virginia is an education and workforce development initiative for community transformation affecting people of all ages, educational backgrounds, and career trajectories. The goal is to develop individuals with better resilience and opportunity, provide employers with a high performance workforce, and rally communities in shared purpose, commitment, effort and accomplishment.
This page details the theory and practice of the initiative, and how it connects to the larger vision. Please contact us if you'd like to learn more or participate.
West Virginia faces many education and workforce challenges
West Virginia grapples with a large range of issues:
- low high school graduation rates
- low rates of postsecondary matriculation and graduation
- too many young "opportunity youth" who are discouraged and disconnected from education and the workforce
- a current workforce with skills that don't meet current and future needs
- many adults who are stuck in low-pay futures, without the skills to take advantage of further, advanced training
These problems affect hundreds of thousands of West Virginians, and can have crushing personal consequences, burden employers with an inadequate workforce, and hobble communities' economic development efforts to retain existing employers and attract new ones.
Even the larger cities in West Virginia may only have small, targeted programs addressing some of these challenges, and rural West Virginia is largely left behind. And this isn't just a school problem - any solution that starts in the schools leaves out adults already in the workforce and will take decades to have an effect on the larger community.
West Virginia has attempted to solve these problems with many separate programs across the state with different funding, strategies, and curriculum.
One underlying problem
Instead, like six blind men and an elephant, Excel Together West Virginia views all of these challenges as facets of the same fundamental problem: that many West Virginians lack a key set of High Performance skills. These skills include:
- quantitative reasoning and associated document literacy
- problem-solving strategies and mindsets
- learning agility
- the intention to excel supported by persistence and attention to detail
- and most importantly, self-efficacy, a person’s belief in their ability to succeed at what they put their mind to.
This deficit of High Performance skills manifests itself across many different areas - school success, college matriculation, workforce & economic development, and more. Given the deficit's common elements, this opens the potential for Excel Together West Virginia to use one approach across many education and workforce issues, leading to new partnership opportunities and economies of scale in delivery.
Excel Together brings CSM to West Virginia
CSM is a self-paced, online course that develops High Performance competencies. It is the world's first and only next-generation learning technology that not only personalizes instruction in the student's academic skills, but also simultaneously in how they learn, how they act and how they feel. In a work context, these High Performance competencies function as transferable "employability skills" that are useful in every sector and job, valued by employers.
The same CSM Course is taken by high school dropouts as well as corporate managers with college degrees, which highlights the broad value of the High Performance competencies. CSM is used in schools, colleges, adult education, workforce development, and employee upskilling. To our knowledge, CSM has the broadest range of use of any single course.
The CSM Course provides a way to build skills in scale, and the CSM Certificate, earned on completion of the course, provides indications of these skills. However, the CSM Certificate is of little use if no colleges or employers recognize it -- few people would take CSM.
Truly addressing West Virginia's challenges involves unprecedented scale -- it involves changing the skills and life trajectories of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. Furthermore, with stretched funding sources, any progress must be done on thin budgets.
Excel Together West Virginia has a plan
Excel Together West Virginia is working to embed value in the CSM Certificate so that there are concrete benefits to having earned it. This value comes from college math credit and from recognition by employers, which makes school, adult education, workforce programs and employers much more likely to offer the CSM Course, and for individuals to take it. For example:
- CSM earns key college math credit at most 2- and 4-year colleges, including WVU. This provides an exceptional new pathway for both high school students and adults to enter and successfully complete college.
- Through the Office of Adult Education in the WV Department of Education, CSM is available to all adults in the state, with a personal coach, and at no cost.
- Through Workforce West Virginia, the state department of labor and employment, unemployment claimants are able to satisfy their weekly job search requirements by taking CSM, low-income parents can take CSM through the SPOKES program, and other uses of CSM are being rolled out for workforce development participants.
- Many key industry associations and business organizations are encouraging their members to recognize CSM in their hiring practicies, including the WV Manufacturers Association, the WV Hospital Association, WV Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Council, the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia, and others.
- We are currently working to get CSM utilized as a high school math course, which would gain both college math credit and employer hiring preferences.
Excel Together West Virginia has a plan to ensure that colleges and employers recognize the value of the High Performance competencies certified by the CSM Certificate, and that West Virginians have free, accessible, equitable opportunities to obtain a CSM Certificate. CSM is already becoming a pathway to postsecondary education and better work opportunities for people of all ages and educational backgrounds.
A streamlined pathway to college
Few make it thorugh the conventional path
Before Excel Together West Virginia, the road to a college degree was daunting for many West Virginians without a high school diploma, and the 45% of high school graduates that score Below Basic on tests -- both of these groups have roughly elementary grade math skills. Looking at the diagram, to fulfill the college degree requirement, a high school dropout with remedial math skills would need to:
- take a GED (high school equivalency) course, and then take the GED test -- most will fail the first time and have to take the course multiple times
- then take the ACCUPLACER or ACT college placement test -- most will place into developmental education
- then take multiple semesters of developmental education
- then take the required college math course - about half would fail, and need to retake the course
Only after all of this would they be ready to take the healthcare or IT courses that they came to college for! Just a few percent of students ever will complete these hurdles.
CSM's streamlined path eliminates these hurdles
With Excel Together West Virginia, anyone can fulfill their college math requirement at many colleges simply by taking CSM! Most 2- and 4-year colleges in West Virginia accept the CSM Certificate as key college math credit. CSM is designed with built-in deep remediation and is extraordinarily supportive. This transforms college access and completion for both students and adults across the state.
And while dual credit is a powerful means of opening college for high school students, it is unavailable where schools/parents can't afford the cost for college credits, where there is no instructor who is college-qualified instructor, or where the students haven't placed into college-level work. CSM circumvents these issues, opening to more high schools and adult education and workforce programs the opportunity of offering a college math course.
Community model
Excel Together West Virginia is a single initiative that rallies the community in shared purpose, commitment, effort and accomplishment.
Whether you're a local non-profit, a school district, a 4-year college, a city or county government, an employer, or other, there are ways to participate, with benefits for the organization, for its employees or the people that it serves, and for its community.
- High schools can incorporate CSM into their curriculum so their students graduate with college math credit that will vastly increase their chances of college success (and save hundreds of dollars) and a certificate that excites employers.
- Employers can recognize the value of the CSM Certificate in hiring to gain access to a higher quality workforce, or as a workforce development strategy in partnership with schools, adult education, or local nonprofits. Additionally, the the CSM Course can be used internally for employee upskilling, as preparation for rigorous training programs, for promotion transitions, or as part of tuition assistance programs.
- Colleges can articulate CSM for college math credit, opening a pathway from adult education and schools. Colleges can also use CSM as a pre-college bridge course, as a regular math course/curriculum, as a course for students on probation, as a college stop-out recovery program, and more.
- Community organizations can use CSM for postsecondary transition, HiSET preparation, as a bridge to rigorous workforce training programs (including technical apprenticeships), as an employability skills workforce course, as a skills program for formerly incarcerated, as part of a drug rehabilitation program, as an afterschool or summer youth college and career readiness program, etc.
- City / county governments can use CSM as a combined workforce and economic development program, as a summer youth program, as a community uplift program, and to locally coordinate all of the activities in this section.
Let's talk!
If you'd like to explore participation in Excel Together West Virginia, we'd love to hear from you! Please contact us to start a conversation.
