Texas Shows What Coherent College and Career Advising Looks Like

For many of America’s schools, advising means a single overworked counselor, a stack of course catalogs, and a handful of rushed conversations in junior and senior year. Students are left to piece together how their classes, their interests, and their post-graduation options actually connect.

Texas has spent the past five years testing a different model. The early results are worth the attention of state and local K-12 leaders.

Working with the nonprofit TNTP, the Texas Education Agency built the Effective Advising Framework, or EAF. The idea is simple to state and hard to execute. Instead of treating postsecondary planning as an event that happens near graduation, make sure it happens across a student's entire K-12 experience.

The first part of this approach involved TNTP and the state agency mapping grade-level expectations from kindergarten through 12th grade across four areas: career development, academic development, financial literacy and aid, and personal and social development. Districts then adapted those expectations to their students and communities, giving every campus a common vision of what advising should look like at every age, leaving room for local judgment about how to deliver it.

The second part of the model is less visible but may matter more. This involves building adult capacity to do this work well. TNTP-trained EAF coaches, based at regional Education Service Centers, work directly with district and campus teams to strengthen advising systems, plan aligned activities across grade levels, and use diagnostic data to sharpen career exploration and financial aid awareness. This is the part of school reform efforts often skipped, which involves training people to carry it out.

The results, while still early, point in the right direction. In a spring 2026 survey of more than 300 district and campus staff, 94 percent reported satisfaction with their EAF coaching experience, citing dedicated support, practical tools, and protected time as the difference-makers.

Students noticed too. Over three school years, from 2023-24 through 2025-26, student perceptions of their advising improved by three to seven percentage points across every measured category, including access to counselors and awareness of pathway options.

The most concrete evidence comes from Texas's College, Career, and Military Readiness indicators, which measure whether students meet benchmarks such as earning an industry-recognized certification or completing dual-credit coursework, which feed directly into each district's state accountability rating.

The first cohort of EAF districts gained an average of 11 points over two years. A second cohort gained 7 points in its first year alone. Both cohorts started above the state average and still grew at or above the statewide pace, suggesting the framework adds value even where advising was already relatively strong. The clearest gains came in industry-based certifications and in meeting college-readiness testing benchmarks in both reading and math.

What makes the Texas case instructive is not any single tactic but the sequencing behind it. State leaders did not simply announce a new expectation and leave districts to invent their own response. They defined what good advising should look like at every grade, then built the regional infrastructure to help schools actually deliver it, and only then let the data show whether it was working.

That order, coherence first, capacity second, evidence third, is a template other states can borrow without needing Texas's scale or its accountability apparatus. It also offers a useful corrective to reform efforts that mistake a framework document for the work itself. EAF's gains came from the coaching relationships built on top of the framework, not the framework alone.

Here are five suggestions that K-12 leaders should take from this work.

·         Define grade-level advising expectations, not just a senior-year checklist. Map what career exploration, academic planning, financial literacy, and personal development should look like at every grade, then let districts adapt the specifics to local labor markets and student needs.

·         Fund coaching capacity, not just frameworks. A model changes little without people trained to help counselors and teachers use it. Regional coaching structures, like Texas's Education Service Centers, are a scalable way to build that capacity without hiring an army of new counselors.

·         Track student-reported experience alongside outcome data. Survey students directly on whether they understand their pathway options and feel supported. Perception data caught problems and progress earlier than accountability scores alone would have.

·         Connect advising metrics to existing accountability systems. Texas's approach works partly because CCMR indicators already carry real weight in district ratings. Embedding advising outcomes into systems leaders already track increases the odds the work sticks.

·         Give the effort time. Two full years elapsed before the first cohort's largest gains showed up. This is a reminder that advising reform, like most durable school improvement, rewards patience over a quick pilot-and-declare-victory cycle.

Texas offers no shortcut. It does offer a sequence. Define what advising should look like at every grade, build the coaching capacity to deliver it, and only then let the data confirm what’s working.

State and local leaders elsewhere don’t need Texas's scale to borrow that order. What they do need is the discipline to fund coaching as seriously as they fund frameworks and the patience to give the work time to show results.

Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy. You can reach him on LinkedIn.