David Adams: Aligning K-12 Education with Industry Needs

David Adams, CEO of The Urban Assembly, discusses why building the bridge between K-12 education and employment must start much earlier than post-secondary education, emphasizing that foundational human skills like self-management and social awareness require years of intentional practice. Drawing on his experience leading a network of 22 career-themed public schools serving over 9,000 students in New York City, Adams explains Urban Assembly's strategic evolution from building schools to developing scalable, relationship-based technology solutions that address systemic pain points in education. The conversation explores how Urban Assembly's tools automate information delivery while preserving human judgment and relationships at the heart of learning, achieving a 92.4% graduation rate across their network. Adams emphasizes the importance of posing real-world community problems to K-12 students to simultaneously foster citizenship and career readiness, offering practical strategies for educational leaders to incorporate social-emotional learning and data-informed career navigation to drive economic mobility.

David Adams, CEO of The Urban Assembly, discusses why building the bridge between K-12 education and employment must start much earlier than post-secondary education, emphasizing that foundational human skills like self-management and social awareness require years of intentional practice. Drawing on his experience leading a network of 22 career-themed public schools serving over 9,000 students in New York City, Adams explains Urban Assembly's strategic evolution from building schools to developing scalable, relationship-based technology solutions that address systemic pain points in education. The conversation explores how Urban Assembly's tools automate information delivery while preserving human judgment and relationships at the heart of learning, achieving a 92.4% graduation rate across their network. Adams emphasizes the importance of posing real-world community problems to K-12 students to simultaneously foster citizenship and career readiness, offering practical strategies for educational leaders to incorporate social-emotional learning and data-informed career navigation to drive economic mobility.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I’m Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I’m Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country.

We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let’s dive in.

Julian Alssid: A central theme of this podcast is the need to align our education systems with industry demand. And Kaitlin, you know, we’ve looked at this quite a bit through the lens of higher ed or workforce training, and lately, the conversation seems to keep shifting upstream.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It really does. We are hearing more and more that if we wait until post-secondary education to build these bridges, we’re probably starting too late. There’s a growing consensus that we need to be doing this work of connecting education to potential careers much earlier in a learner’s journey.

Julian Alssid: Exactly. And when the discussion turns to K-12, it takes on a very specific tenor. It’s not just about early technical training; it’s about foundational human skills—social-emotional learning, resilience, problem-solving—skills that employers tell us are critical for long-term success and take many years of practice to develop.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That’s right, Julian. And to really understand how to do that effectively, we need to look to organizations that have been doing this work on the ground for some time, which brings us to today’s guest. We are speaking with David Adams, a leader who sits at the intersection of social-emotional learning and career readiness, creating public schools that actually bridge that gap.

Julian Alssid: David is the Chief Executive Officer of the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization that creates and supports a network of 22 career-themed public schools in New York City. These schools serve over 9,000 students. The Urban Assembly is dedicated to advancing the social and economic mobility of students by improving public education.

Kaitlin LeMoine: A nationally recognized leader in social-emotional learning, David previously served as the Senior Director of Social-Emotional Learning at the Urban Assembly, where he created the Resilient Scholars Program. David serves on the board of directors for EL, EAP, and formerly for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. He also serves on numerous advisory boards, including Teach For America’s Social Emotional Learning Advisory Board.

Recognized for his leadership and impact, David has received many honors and awards, including being named one of Crain's 40 Under 40 and receiving a citation from the Mayor of New York City. He is also the author of numerous scientific articles and book chapters on social-emotional learning. In addition to his contributions to education and research, David serves as a civil affairs officer in the Army Reserve and holds an M.Ed. in educational psychology from Fordham University. David, welcome to the Work Forces podcast. We are so thrilled you could join us today.

David Adams: I’m so happy to be here today with you, Kaitlin and Julian, to talk about workforce, social-emotional learning, and AI.

Julian Alssid: And we are so looking forward to this conversation, David. To kick us off, please tell us a bit about your background in your own words and what led you to your role at Urban Assembly.

David Adams: Well, Julian, I’ve been married for about 15 years to my wife, Tamika. I’ve got two kids, Elijah and Isaiah, they’re 12 and 13. And I’m actually from New Jersey but have spent most of my time here in New York City. My focus has been on social-emotional learning because I’ve been really interested in this notion of what underlies academic and life success. And there are a set of skills that we call competencies—things like self-management or perspective-taking, social awareness—like the ability to understand your emotions—that actually end up predicting a lot of what we want young people to be able to thrive with when they graduate our schools here in New York, but also nationwide.

So I came in and started working in special education in New York City as their Director of Social Emotional Learning in District 75. Prior to that, I was at Yale University doing some research in England thinking about implementation around emotional intelligence. Then I came to the Urban Assembly in 2017 as their Director of Social Emotional Learning, and I’ve been here ever since, thinking about how we can work with our schools to scale solutions that support student access and thriving across the country.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. So, I guess as we dig deeper into the Urban Assembly, can you tell us the origin story of the organization and how the organization’s work has evolved over the years? It sounds like you’ve been there for many years, so I’m sure you have a very detailed perspective.

David Adams: Well, the Urban Assembly was started in 1997 through our founder, Richard Kahan. And the Urban Assembly was founded in order to think about how intermediaries and public-private partnerships can support academic outcomes in New York City. So what had happened was that there was a prison being built in the Bronx, and some local community partners came together and said, "We don’t want more prisons in our neighborhoods, we want more schools." And so Richard worked with a young Meisha Porter and hired a young David Banks at the time to build a school to support young people’s development.

And then, when the comprehensive high schools were being broken down in New York City and small schools were being built in their place, Urban Assembly built 22 of those schools, eight of them being career and technical education schools. Then by like 2017-18, where there was less of a focus on building schools, we started developing—moving from, as I say, "schools to tools." We started developing tools within our schools that could scale to solve challenges in instructional quality, post-secondary readiness and access, and of course, social-emotional learning and development. And those tools—the Resilient Scholars Program, Project Café, the Classroom Automated Feedback Environment, and Counselor GPT—are tools that are designed to support all students coming from the area of social-emotional learning, post-secondary readiness, and instructional quality.

Julian Alssid: So you have a pretty rich body of work there, David. Tell us a bit about the successes that the Urban Assembly has experienced as an organization, and particularly as you think about the K-12 alignment to industry needs, and also the success rates in the past taken by Urban Assembly graduates.

David Adams: Well, our graduation rate across our schools this year is about 92.4%, which we’re very proud of. We had one of our schools, the Urban Assembly Institute for Math and Science for Young Women, posting a 100% of their graduates last year—so 100% of their students graduated, we're very excited about that. And our students go on to success in the post-secondary context.

Our job is not just to graduate our kids, but to think about how to ensure that they have that economic and social mobility that you mentioned. So, we’re actually building a new tool out and it’s called Counselor GPT. And this tool helps our students understand what the labor market is looking like in their local area, helps our students identify what credentials are related to economic and social mobility vis-à-vis getting that credential and being successful, and what the ROI or return on investment is on that credential. We see a lot of students who are pursuing post-secondary paths that don’t necessarily align to economic mobility. And so what we’re doing with Counselor GPT is we’re actually moving students from guessing to guidance. We're helping them think about what credential is necessary to get to the economic or social pathway they want to achieve vis-à-vis two-year degrees, four-year degrees, and certificates.

One good example of this is a student—we were just looking at some of the output from this tool—and a student was like, "I didn’t realize how long it would take me to repay my college degree if I chose this major." And so we’re seeing students now really being a little bit more intentional about the decisions that they’re making. And it’s not to say that if you go to a difficult ROI degree, maybe something like art history, that you shouldn’t take it, but you should do it with an informed understanding of what it costs to pursue that degree and what the ROI is when you leave post-secondary institutions like college and beyond. So we're very excited about that tool. We're working with our schools now to pilot that. And the tool has actually been accepted as one of the 10 AI tools that are being piloted in New York City through the Chancellor's AI pilot initiative.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Wow. That's awesome. Congratulations.

David Adams: Thank you, Kaitlin.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah. So, would love to talk a little bit more about that tool and others. You mentioned this shift, right, from—I liked that concept—of "schools to tools" that can be used across schools and beyond these 22 schools. And I’m wondering, would love to hear a little bit more about some of the other tools that you’ve found great success with over time? And then also, how do you walk that line of what tools can be implemented asynchronously or with tech-based tools, and when do you need that human one-on-one connection? And how do you think about that?

David Adams: So all of our tools are relationship-based. So the Counselor GPT tool, while it is a chat-based interface, it also is accompanied by a curriculum that a student could use in their classroom with their counselor or their advisory teacher so that they have the opportunity to not just talk to the bot, but talk to each other about what they’re learning about the post-secondary landscape. So we believe that learning happens through interactions, and we want to make sure that those interactions are with a wide variety of formats—whether that’s online with your chatbot friend, or whether that’s with your counselor thinking about how this conversation has informed what you want to do in a post-secondary context, or whether it’s your real-life friend like Julian or Kaitlin. And we just want to say, "Hey, did you know that X-ray technicians are an 18-month degree, but come out making 75 to 80,000 pretty quickly?" And that’s a conversation that we’re looking to have.

Now, to your other question, we’re really excited about our other tool called the Classroom Automated Feedback Environment, or CAFE. And this tool is designed to reduce the cost for teacher feedback. So essentially we have a camera and a microphone, and a teacher videotapes themselves. And within one day, automatically get insights into things like: How many questions did they ask? How often did they ask questions? We have little video-based 10-second clips which show them their redirections, it shows them their summaries, it shows them their previews. And what we’re doing is building judgment and high-quality insights so that teachers can do what real athletes do every day, which is watch themselves play the game, reflect on what went well, and then tune the next play—or the next lesson plan—so that they’re more successful over time. And so we believe that by reducing the cost, we can increase the access, and that’s how we think about scaling from our schools to all schools.

Now, the last thing you asked, Kaitlin, is: how do we make decisions? So, we have a strategic priority and it's called "Find Out What Works." And essentially what we do is we look at what we call generalizable problems in our schools. We say, what is a pain point? What's a time problem set? What's a resource problem set? What's an incentive problem set? Or what's a knowledge problem set in our schools that we're seeing that's constraining our school's ability to deliver the highest quality education to our students? Once we identify that problem set, we think about—is this a problem that our schools are facing, or is it a problem that all schools are facing? And we do that through research, conversation, and other ways of pursuing that.

And once we identify that it's a problem for more than just our schools, then we start to think about, well, how might we solve this problem? So for Project CAFE, we recognized that getting teachers feedback is a problem set. Teachers need more feedback, more frequently. What's stopping teachers from getting that feedback? Well, it's time, but it's really, at the systems level, a resource—because time is expressed through money, right? You just don't have enough people giving that feedback. Once we realized this wasn't an Urban Assembly problem, we developed a solution against that, which is automating the observation techniques. And then we got that out to market and now it's being used in over nine states by 500 classrooms at the end of this year.

Julian Alssid: David, one of the challenges that we hear about in schools is teachers are just so busy trying to get through the day with their core work. And interested to hear from you a bit about the sort of staff and professional development required to implement the tools. Like, what have you known? And also I'd say that a lot of our listeners are organizations that are, you know, EdTech types that are inventing tools that they're bringing out to try to save the world. You've been doing this for years. How do you make it work and work within the context of a teacher who is so burdened and under-resourced in so many ways?

David Adams: So I think what makes Urban Assembly special is that we sit adjacent to our schools. We work with our principals, work with our teachers and our educators to really move from "what" problem sets to "how" problem sets. I think we have really deep expertise in how schools work, how schedules work, how high schools deliver on the promise of a high-quality public education. And so when we develop our tools, they’re developed by, with, and through our educators. And very sensitive to what it means to be a first-year teacher in New York City or somewhere else, or even a 15-year teacher.

So the tools are—I'd like to think—are intuitive in a space that we are making a decision around how much analysis should be done by people and how much analysis should be done by technology. And my focus is really on leaving judgment to people, but automating information. In the case of Counselor GPT: what labor market trends are available in your area vis-à-vis credentials? Now your decision is how to use that information to make post-secondary decisions. That’s on the teacher, that’s on the student, that’s on the family, right?

For CAFE, we’re actually not judging teaching; we are observing teaching and allowing the teacher to judge what they want to from those observations. So we don’t say "this is a good question" or "bad question." We say "this is an open-ended question" or "it's not an open-ended question." We don’t say "this is an effective redirection" or not. We say "this is a redirection," and you can decide how effective that was by watching your videotape and seeing how the students respond. So I think the professional development here is about teaching folks how to derive insights and judgments from the information that we’re providing, which is our goal. Our goal is not to get teachers to act like robots. Our goal is not to get students to always choose the most lucrative career. Our goal is to inform, to create judgment, so that we can improve outcomes for our schools across the country.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and it strikes me too—it’s a two-part model where some of what you’re trying to do for learners, you’re also looking to do for everyone. Like, we’re all humans, right? We’re all trying to figure out what technology can do and what humans can uniquely do. And so to have that experience for both learners and staff and figure out what that teaching and learning looks like across systems, I think is really fascinating and critical, right? Because it feels like teachers are then kind of in that position of being of continuously learning, and then applying that learning to how they're teaching their learners.

David Adams: Absolutely. I use the example of student-teacher talk time, right? The goal of CAFE is not to increase teacher talk. The goal of that metric is to have teachers reflect on how they’re giving space to students to have discourse in their classroom to drive their learning. So the goal is not to beat the metric. The goal is to use the metric to inform your decision-making in your classroom. Same thing with Counselor GPT, right? The goal is not to all choose the career that is the highest ROI. The goal really is to reduce the mismatch between what is needed in the industry sector and what students are pursuing vis-à-vis their degree. And how employers indicate what is needed is through salary. And so if students don’t have an insight into what salaries are doing what in the labor market, then they may not be informed in their decision around what they pursue in their post-secondary landscape.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So we’ve heard so much about—I mean, it's been awesome to hear about—these various tools that you’re scaling and how you’re going about doing it. I’m curious to hear as you’ve gone about trying different models, approaches, developing different tools, what are some of the challenges that you’ve faced? And how have you gone about navigating those challenges recognizing that it sounds like a big part of what you're looking to do is, like, scale these initiatives and make sure they reach more and more teachers and learners? Just curious to hear some of your lessons learned.

David Adams: Yeah, I mean, I think there are sometimes fears that we’re trying to replace, for example, college counselors or guidance counselors. The ratio of students to guidance counselors is usually about 1 to 400, which translates to about 19 minutes of college counseling for students across their entire high school career, right? So it’s not really a conversation here about moving that from 0 to 400; that doesn't really solve the problem. The question is how do we get information to students about their post-secondary decisions given the ratio of 1 to 400? And so I think shifting our mindset a little bit around how we work through these constraints—we’re not replacing people, we’re enhancing what folks can do when they have those 19 minutes so that it’s not like, "Kaitlin, all right, let’s see, your GPA is X, Y, and Z"—you’re not having the first conversation.

So built into Counselor GPT, for example, is a guidance portal where post-secondary counselors, guidance counselors, college counselors can get a sense of trends around what is it that students are talking about? What are their concerns about post-secondary landscapes? What are the places that they're over-matched or under-matched in terms of applying? There are flags that go to counselors that say, "Hey, Julian has applied to nine schools that he's probably under-matched in—we can actually push his ambition a little higher." So let's think about knowledge as a constraint, and let's think about blowing that constraint up in the age of AI and moving to the delivery of information in a way that's sustainable for the teaching profession.

Same thing I think in Project CAFE—teachers are concerned sometimes that being on camera will hold them liable to things that happen in the classroom. But in our design, we’re really looking at what teachers are doing well, capturing what teachers are doing well, feeding back to teachers what they’re doing well in order to increase the efficacy and increase the likelihood that they do these effective things, right? So, here's my redirection, let's see how that worked, let's get more redirections on CAFE, look at those redirections and see how we make that work more effectively.

So I think trust is important. Design philosophies that emphasize transparency are important. I'll give you one last example in Project CAFE: there’s not a single metric that doesn’t have a corresponding display of that metric in terms of the evidence. So if I say my student-teacher talk time is X, you can actually click right into that metric and look at what the conversations were that made that metric up. If I say I had a really good—I had 22 previews—you can actually click on each of those individual previews and see a teacher say "this is what we're going to be doing in the lesson." So that builds this trust with our constituents that everything that we display has an evidence behind it that you can see upfront in terms of how we developed that metric and how we developed those dashboards.

Julian Alssid: As you expand or bring the tools to new districts and new schools, both in New York and around the country, how does that process work? And do you typically have to find champions to make that happen? Just a bit about how that process works, I'd love to hear.

David Adams: I hope we can spread the word! Our job is to improve public education and our job is to help students achieve that economic and social mobility that we talked about in our mission. So the more schools we get to, the better we are meeting our mission. And we also have a real deep focus on access. My job is to get the most access to the most people so that they can use these resources to solve problems. And so it’s things like podcasts, things like presentations, things like media, and it’s things just like having conversations with folks who want to solve problems and reach out to the Urban Assembly to help us do that.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I guess as we start to wind down our conversation, David, we’re wondering: what are some of the best practices that K-12 or high school leaders can incorporate into their work to further align education to emerging industry needs and become forces in this work? Feel free to also take this from the perspective of AI.

David Adams: Yeah, it’s a great question, Kaitlin. I think what we need to be able to do is create applicability to the things that we’re learning into the real world. And this is from the social-emotional perspective—how are our learning formats like collaboration, project-based learning, how are we using formats that reflect the way that we do things in a real world, which is working in teams? And then also applying learning to real-world problems. Inspire our young people not to just prepare for society, but to take part in society in the K-12 space. We don’t have to solve all the problems of the world once we graduate; our young people can be part of those solutions as well.

So I would offer that we should pose the same problems that we work on in the real world to those young people. I mean, most of us didn’t need four years of college and two years of Masters to get after some of the problem sets that our country is facing and our communities are facing. I think we can do that day one. And I think we honor our young people when we give them tasks that are relevant to our communities. And that’s going to prepare them to be the citizens that we want in our country today. So that’s how I would create forces out of the folks immediately.

Julian Alssid: And so David, how can those forces—or wannabe forces—learn more about your work and continue to follow you, of course in addition to listening to this conversation?

David Adams: Well, you can definitely look up the Urban Assembly at www.urbanassembly.org. We have some sign-up forms if you’re interested in participating in any of our solutions around social and emotional learning, instructional quality, or post-secondary readiness. You can follow me on Twitter at @DAdams_SEL, look me up on LinkedIn, and you can just search "David Adams Urban Assembly" and I should be the first one to pop up.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much, and lots of options there. It’s been so great talking with you today, David. Really appreciate your time.

David Adams: It’s been a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for joining us.

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