Why public schools’ objectives have expanded well beyond test scores

For decades, America’s public schools have been rated and ranked based on tangibles like graduation rates, standardized test scores, student-teacher ratios, among other metrics. Yet today, K-12 schools see other, intangible factors as also being crucial for students’ success now and in the future, as members of the workforce and their communities.

In 2025, public schools are embracing a bigger (and earlier) emphasis on career pathways; equipping students with soft skills, self-awareness, and mental resilience; using technology to both educate and protect students; and incorporating digital citizenship and critical thinking as a core part of the curriculum. Read on for examples of new programs in schools around the country, and the research and data driving this new way of thinking about education.

Preparing for the Future Workforce
Career and Technical Education is more popular than ever with students, parents, business leaders, and policymakers. CTE programs are expanding and evolving in response to critical workforce shortages and growing demand among students. Recent data shows that about two-thirds of young adults wish they had more career exploration in their schools, and 83% of students surveyed in 2023 said CTE was an “excellent” or “good” use of their time in school.

Career readiness is also starting earlier in many districts, with a growing number of middle school programs introducing students to a wide range of career pathways. This helps students identify their innate aptitudes and interests from a future-workforce perspective. Helping lead this earlier focus on CTE are organizations like the University of Virginia Youth-Nex with its Remaking Middle School initiative, Jobs for the Future, and Education Open Doors.

Beyond the economic benefits of high school graduates being more prepared for the workforce, research indicates that an earlier focus on career development in schools results in improved development, retention, completion, and academic outcomes. 

Teaching Soft Skills, Self-Awareness, and Mental Resilience
Schools that invest more in career readiness reap many other benefits, too. Such programs equip students with those invaluable soft skills demanded in today’s workforce and prepare them for the unknown developments in tomorrow’s. 

A review of 20 years of data conducted by American Institutes for Research illustrates why CTE programs are crucial for students to develop real-world workplace skills and learn about different career fields. Doing so can help students discover how their passions and innate aptitudes match up with jobs that are in demand now or expected to grow more so in the future. Additionally, K-12 career readiness programs significantly boost students’ confidence, interest, and engagement in what they are learning, according to a growing body of research.

Today’s students also want agency. Programs like UVA’s Youth-Nex and Education Open Doors ensure that high-schoolers have the resources to make better informed choices about their future. 

Hand-in-hand with these programs are the mental resilience and overall wellness that result from teen-agers seeing their future possibilities — and having the tools and resources to work toward them. A New Hampshire study of 10,000 students statewide found that those enrolled in CTE pathways were significantly more likely to be better engaged in learning and more likely to report feeling hopeful about their futures. They also were less likely to report persistent feelings of sadness or anxiety.

Technology Used to Advance and Protect Students
Since the pandemic’s onset, schools have flooded their classrooms with new technology. With ESSER funding now expired, the edtech spending spree is over, and most schools are honing in on their ideal edtech stack. 

This likely comes as good news to most educators, with 2024 data showing that a majority of teachers would prefer more training on the apps they already use, rather than more school spending on the latest and greatest classroom technology. 

Tech that helps keep students safe has also found its footing in public schools, covering a wide range of functions: From apps like SmartPass to monitor halls and campus visitors; and apps like WellCheq for checking on student wellness and identifying trouble in time for intervention to be successful; to tools like classroom.cloud for spotting harmful or dangerous online behaviours so schools can ensure students are safe from internet bullying and predatory sites, for example.

Empowering Students for Online Safety and Digital Literacy, Now and in Adulthood
Cyber attacks are rising in frequency and severity every year, and cybersecurity research shows that 90% of cyber threats start with an email or other form of social engineering. Phishing scams increasingly target young people: A 2023-24 study from CybSafe found that 21% of 12- to 27-year-olds have fallen victim to such schemes. 

The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has published extensive guidance for K-12 IT personnel as well as toolkits for educators to help them teach students about the dangers of bad actors on the internet. With the average public school experiencing one cyber threat incident per day, CISA urges schools to make sure students understand how to determine whether a website or email is safe or legitimate, and how much information is too much to share on websites and social media.

Another crucial element to keeping students safe on the internet, according to Common Sense Education and other advocacy groups, is teaching them — at a young age — about their digital footprint and that whatever they share online will forever stay online. Activities like EverydaySpeech’s Digital Footprint Detective for younger students or this lesson plan from Code.org are a great place to start. 

Finally, K-12 schools are urged by edtech experts to incorporate “digital citizenship” — sometimes called “digital media literacy” — into every subject and classroom, so students can readily tell fact from fiction and how to recognize misinformation and disinformation on both micro and macro levels. Teaching fledgling writers about primary and secondary sources for their research papers is no longer enough to produce graduates whose online consumption automatically includes critical thinking. Students today need specific lessons on media literacy, such as this teaching guide from The New York Times, and they need daily reminders to view content through a critical lens.

These four modern objectives for public schools are not easily measured — it might take a while for the programs that rank schools to integrate these new concepts in their scoring systems. Similarly, it may be years before we see workforce trends reflect the modern mindset that public education now requires significant attention to students’ future career pathways and to their adaptability and readiness for jobs that do not yet exist. 

In the meantime, educators will undoubtedly keep striving to help students thrive now and prepare them to thrive in the future.