Lazaro Lopez is working to ensure his students avoid the uncertainty he felt upon graduating high school—unsure of what came next.
As the associate superintendent for teaching and learning in Township High School District 214 outside Chicago, Lopez has dedicated his career to creating a system where students can explore potential careers, earn college credits early, and gain valuable work-based learning experiences.
“I spent the next decade sort of lost,” Lopez said. “That is what drives my work and the work that I’ve done now for over a decade.”
In an interview with Education Week, Lopez, a 2025 EdWeek Leaders To Learn From honoree, discussed the “career-long” process to build a system that prepares students for life after high school. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get the whole district on board with your vision?
I talked about how the essence of the work had to do with student engagement, and getting to [that] through relevance, making sure the experience the student has while they’re with us was a relevant one to them and their future. The way you personalize that experience is through this lever of career pathways. Each student has their own lever of engagement in school, but fully developing pathways helps meet the needs of a lot of students that perhaps weren’t being met.
The way I got buy-in was really around this concept for the entire community, that our school should be a relevant, pertinent step in the pathway to your future, that it’s not just about this high school diploma. It is really about creating the context for economic mobility and aspiration.
Was it difficult to get that buy-in, especially from core-subject teachers?
It has been a career-long process. Whenever you’re introducing something new, particularly if it’s not within sort of this traditional landscape, people are fearful that it means that you’re no longer focused on the area that they may have prioritized.
The reality is that we still prioritize core academic subjects, but what we were doing was really leveraging the value of our electives to drive them with a purpose. They saw that it wasn’t about something we were taking away. We were adding, actually, a real-world context to the work that the students were doing, where they could see their connections, because they’re looking at school differently from a different lens. They’re looking at it from a lens of their interest in criminal justice, or their interest in business, or their interest in health care. They’re viewing your subject through that lens.
What work goes into creating and implementing a career pathways program?
It takes somewhere from three to five years to fully implement a pathway.
The first thing in developing these pathways [is figuring out]: Is there [a] consensus that we should be doing this? Does the community [want it]? Are there higher-ed partners? Are there employer partners? Are there faculty and school leaders that actually think we should be doing this? Should we be laying out a path, and what [would] it look like? Do a backward design: If we want students to be ready to engage in business, what does that look like today? What does college coursework look like? What are the entry-level opportunities?
What challenges have you heard from career-pathway teachers?
One of the challenges is the teachers have to be credentialed to teach college-level coursework within that pathway. The other challenge is staying current and relevant. Just because you’ve developed the pathway doesn’t mean you’re done. We recently redid the business pathway that we had done originally a decade earlier, because business has changed. That does produce some anxiety with teachers.
What has been the biggest challenge in putting this together?
The biggest challenge has been work-based learning and transportation. Every student would benefit from a work-based learning experience. It is just a significant challenge to provide transportation to all the students that need it in order to access, what I think is, an essential part of a career pathway. But transportation is just really expensive. It’s difficult to facilitate thousands of work-based learning experiences, recognizing that we really can’t afford to provide transportation for every student. We have contracted with taxi companies, bus services, and strategically selected sites that are within walking distance or near public transportation.
How can other districts do what you’re doing?
Begin in your area of strength. Depending on your community, you start where you have a strong employer base. Look at your courses and ask yourself: Is this relevant for students and their future? How can I sequence this in a way so that it leads beyond high school? Set your North Star to where students are going to be six years after high school graduation. What is that going to look like, and how can you set them up for the most likelihood of success?
Then you build one pathway at a time. It really does take a lot of resources and a lot of collaboration with all the partners to develop a pathway. Once you go through that process once or twice, you become somewhat more efficient at it.
But I will tell you even as we were deep into the work, we probably were never working on more than one or two pathways at a time. Recognize that where we’re at is a decade in the making.
