Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: Of rodeo royalty and pig farms

01: Postcards

Sydnee Dickson has headed Utah’s education efforts since 2016 as state superintendent of public instruction — but long before that, she was a grade-school student in a rural two-room schoolhouse. 

“My grandmother was my teacher, and there were a hundred people in the community. Ours was the largest class, with seven students,” she told me. 

Her lifetime work has coincided with a dramatic shift in education across America. Particularly in recent years, as a century of credit-focused curriculums has started to shift toward alternative methods of tracking student success. 

++ Already know the answers? New San Jacinto College program lets students skip familiar lessons (via our partner Houston Landing)

Dickson hasn’t just witnessed that shift. She has actively ushered it in for Utah’s nearly 668,000 students, including playing a major role in creating Utah’s a framework for preparing students “with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to succeed in life, work, and citizenship.”

Dickson plans to step down from her role in June. She reflected on her major initiatives and how rural Utah communities are reshaping education … and how rodeo royalty and a pig farm unexpectedly transformed one town’s approach to learning. (Her responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Q: Under your watch, how has Utah shifted its education strategy?

When I first got into my role I could see that we, as a state agency, did not have a strategic plan. We decided to focus on four pillars: early learning, effective teachers and leaders, safe and healthy schools, and personalized learning.

In that last category, we saw competency-based education as part of personalized learning. If we were going to create an education system where, regardless of demographics or geography, you would leave our system with possibilities for success in your future — well, we then needed to define what that success looked like. And that was the genesis of our Utah Portrait of a Graduate. 

Q: How did you work to better define that portrait?

We brought hundreds of educators together, we went out into communities, we looked at our data, we held focus groups. We sent out surveys to say, 'What is it that you think that our students need to be able to do and know when they leave our system?' 

And so we came up with a roadmap. And since education has a gazillion acronyms, MAP is another one. It stands for “Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose.” 

++ The inspiration for California’s ‘grand experiment’ at community colleges? Wisconsin (via our partner CalMatters)

++ California wants to give degrees based on skills — not grades. It’s dividing this college (via our partner CalMatters)

Q: How did rural communities respond to that plan?

Rural America really is the heartland of America. It's what makes us such a vibrant country. All the people that are working hard on farms and ranches, and they love the land, and they love America. At the same time, sometimes rural Americans have a hard time embracing progression, precisely because they love this country and like things the way they are. 

Our intent was not to do this and say, “OK, everybody has to adopt it.” That never works. But we did say, “Here's a model. Go into your communities. You can use this as a basis. If you think this is the right way for your community, then go ahead and adopt it or adapt it. But do the hard work in your community, so that you bring all the stakeholders together to say what students should know and be able to do, whether they are graduating from rural Beaver, Utah, or Cash County, or Washington County, in the southern end of the state.

It’s a concept that has helped our system get very clear about the possibilities for our kids.

Q: What were some notable examples where this approach helped?

Beaver County, Utah. It’s about halfway down our state. There’s this town in their district called Milford. Famous for its rodeo cowboys, a whole family of them that have won all these championships.

Anyway, that family started a whole literacy campaign because, as they left school and talked to their teachers, they said one thing that really helped them in their rodeo careers was being able to communicate, read, and talk about their love for sports. The ability to interpret the data on their animals they draw, and to analyze their times and performances. In this rural community, they really attributed their success on the rodeo circuit to their education. 

Fast forward years later, and a new pig farm came into the community. This foreign company owned it, and it brought with it a lot of Hispanic/Latino workers. Its arrival brought up real questions about how to promote literacy, and also just the question of: “What do careers look like for our kids as they leave a rural K-12 system?” 

As they started putting together this portrait of a graduate, people came in with their boots and overalls, and they talked about how this new pig farm was changing their economy. They wanted better for their kids: farmers, students, educators, grandmas and grandpas all at the table in this room with the school board — all talking about the kinds of skills they think their kids need to success in this rural community.

The pig farm changed the nature of the community for a number of years. The process of assessing graduates and applying the portrait to what a competency-based education system could look like, it brought in a renewed emphasis on literacy, and they rallied together as a community to really bring everyone's literacy rates up. They went from being below the state average for literacy to being above it in many metrics. 

Q: How do you assess skills that have traditionally been seen as less-measurable, durable skills like communication or empathy?

Well, that's the question of the day, for sure. We develop rubrics and competencies to say: “'Here's the competency that you're trying to achieve, and here’s what it looks like.” Because we do have standards in our state that are developed in a very lengthy and thorough process, and they need to be reached.

We started by developing rubrics. So rather than saying, “Here's a test,” we would take something like, communication, and develop frameworks for what it looks like to have developed the skill, from “emerging” or “approaching” competence to “competent” and “extending.” 

Q. The Utah state legislature is also looking at legislation for a “First Credential” initiative?

Yes, i's an extension of a program that we had in pilot form. But we're trying to create a statewide system whereby students leave high school with a first credential in industry. That would mean they could graduate and go right into the workforce, and build upon that with stackable credentials, or get an associate's degree and be on their way to post-secondary.

We have a lot of really good data in our state around career and technical education. It shows that if kids [complete] a credential, or take a concentration, they are more likely to graduate from high school. They're more likely to complete either a two-year degree or a certificate program, or other post-secondary pathways. So we just see that when kids leave our system that way, they're more set up for success."

It’s kind of like the scene from “Ghostbusters.” All the streams are converging, all coming together, and the synergy is there. Durable skills, that first credential, stream into a career, and it’s the result of us redesigning our education systems and thinking about them in very different ways, getting away from the assumptions that have run our systems for so long. 

Q: What are some new workforce opportunities emerging for rural Utahns?

We're definitely interested in technology. You may have heard of the Silicon Slopes, south of Salt Lake City. So we have a lot of technology startups. We want our kids to come out of our schools being digital literate. And that means creators, not just consumers. So we're trying to make sure that every student, especially our rural students, have access to learning how to code.

Health care is an important industry for us. Engineering, technology, certainly. We're leaning into artificial intelligence. We have a specialist in our office who focuses on artificial intelligence. We're doing a lot with that in education, too. Those are the sectors that we're very focused on that, because the data tells us that's where the job market is. 

We also don't want to discount all of the things that our rural communities offer, including in minerals and mining and agriculture. But what does that look like in the future? Again, we’re wanting our kids to be problem solvers and creators. We’re thinking about how some of those family farms can not only survive, but thrive, and maybe look different in the future, so families can continue to hand them down generation after generation.

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