Our Plan, Your Support

West Virginia is struggling, and lacks a plan

Among the states, West Virginia is 50th in the number of people with bachelor's degrees and 49th in standardized math scores, both of which no doubt contributes to the state being 48th in poverty and 50th in median household income. As for improving its education and workforce, West Virginia state government has no statewide plan with any scale -- addressing the issues above would require tens of thousands of students and adults gaining more advanced skills every year.

This is an issue for both high school students and for adults -- if the solution lay solely in schools and ignored adults, it would take decades to improve WV's workforce, and would abandon the hundreds of thousands of adults who received a substandard education over the last 40 years.

This is not just an issue of funding, and its not just West Virginia. Neither the federal government nor other states have a plan, either. For example, the major education reforms of the last 20 years (like Common Core and No Child Child Left Behind) had minimal positive effects.

Excel Together West Virginia has a plan

Our plan has two parts:

• The CSM Course, which is a new type of educational technology that makes students into better learners with more self-confidence, providing even struggling students with college math credit and a certificate of employability skills
• Excel Together West Virginia, which is a community-wide initiative to scale CSM simultaneously across schools, colleges, adult education, workforce development and the workplaces. We believe that Excel Together WV can reach over 10,000 youth and adults a year, using mainly existing funding.

CSM Course

Not only do 45% of students graduate WV high schools with "Below Basic" skills, roughly at the elementary grade level, but they are burdened by self-doubt about their educational potential -- when faced with challenging material, they often don't even try to learn it.

The CSM Course is designed around the idea that students need first to learn how to learn, to build attention to detail and persistence, and most importantly, to believe in themselves. The CSM Course's personalized education maintains students at a level where they can be successful. In the CSM Course:

• the student must learn all the material on their own, to develop their learning "muscles".
• the only passing grade in CSM is 100% on mainly fill-in-the-blank problems, so that students learn persistence and that they're capable of A+-level work.
• as a student learns each skill, they're informed that only 35% of 4-year graduates or 15% of all adults (different percentages for every skill) could do what the student just did -- for most students, hearing this repeatedly is a life-changing experience and increases their belief that they could succeed in college.

With CSM's next-generation learning, almost every student can be successful on CSM -- even those who are years behind. And as they build their learning skills and confidence, and have basic math deeply in their grasp, their learning speed and enjoyment multiplies so that college level material is attainable in a surprisingly short time.

In a national evaluation against the top programs from respected publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson, CSM had the largest math gains and the highest student engagement. In a program for high school dropouts (see page 63 of this report), 30% signed up for college degree programs and nearly 80% have persisted for multiple semesters of have earned college degrees, both percentages being multiple-fold higher than national averages.

Excel Together West Virginia

Getting tens of thousands of people to take a course like CSM is an enormous challenge, to which Excel Together WV is bringing the power of community. Excel Together WV has worked with a variety of partners to place incentives into the CSM Certificate to drive use:

• The state Office of Adult Education provides the CSM Course for free to all adults, with a personal coach.
• Excel Together WV is working on agreements with colleges so that it earns college math credit.
• WorkForce West Virginia, the state department of labor and employment, is encouraging unemployment claimants to take CSM, and is using CSM with low-income parents and other workforce development clients.
• The WV Manufacturers Association, the WV Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Council, the WV Hospital Association, and other business associations encourage their members to provide hiring preferences for those who have earned a CSM Certificate.
• We are working now to make CSM a high school math course so that students of all abilities can earn college math credit, and change their belief in their college opportunities

Excel Together WV provides a wealth of free services to the state ranging from from training and support of CSM coaches, implementation support for education and training programs (schools, adult ed, nonprofits, employers), community outreach and presentations, maintenance and expansion of this website, and more.