School for School Counselors Podcast

GRADED: The ASCA National Model

• School for School Counselors • Episode 157

Share episode

In this first episode of the Graded series, we put the ASCA National Model to the test.

What was promised? What’s actually happening? And what grade does it really deserve?

If you’ve ever felt like the model was built for someone else’s school, you are NOT alone!

For over two decades, the ASCA Model has served as the gold standard in school counseling. But for most counselors, the support to make it work just isn’t there.

Not in staffing.

Not in scheduling.

Not in the endless stream of “other duties as assigned.”

You don’t need another pep talk.

You need someone to tell the truth about why the model still isn’t protecting your time- and help you reclaim your confidence in the process.


*********************************


Episode References:

Mullen, P. R., Blount, A. J., Lambie, G. W., & Chae, N. (2017). School counselors’ perceived stress, burnout, and job satisfaction. Professional School Counseling, 21(1), 2156759X18782468.

Shillingford, M. A., & Lambie, G. W. (2018). Contribution of Professional School Counselors’ Values and Leadership Practices to Their Programmatic Service Delivery. Professional School Counseling, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2156759X1001300401 (Original work published 2010)

Wilkerson, K., Pérusse, R., & Hughes, A. (2018). Comprehensive School Counseling Programs and Student Achievement                    Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of RAMP versus Non-RAMP Schools. Professional School Counseling, 16(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2156759X1701600302 (Original work published 2013)


*********************************

⭐️ Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us! ⭐️

**********************************


Our goal at School for School Counselors is to help school counselors stay on fire, make huge impacts for students, and catalyze change for our roles through grassroots advocacy and collaboration. Listen to get to know more about us and our mission, feel empowered and inspired, and set yourself up for success in the wonderful world of school counseling.

Speaker 1:

Hey, school counselor. What if the gold standard for school counseling is actually fool's gold? Ever thought about that? I'm so glad you're here because today I'm introducing a new series on the podcast called Graded. We're going to take one idea or approach that you probably hear about all the time and we're going to dissect it piece by piece. Is it hype, is it helpful? Is it holding you back from doing what you really should be doing on campus? And we're going to give each one a report card grade. So if you are ready for some straight talk, some clarity on your work and a little bit of rebellion, you're going to be in the right place. This is the School for School Counselors podcast. So tell me if this has ever happened to you in your school counseling work.

Speaker 1:

You walk into a school counselor's office for your first day at a campus. The walls are bare, maybe the computer is still logged into the last person's account, there may be a stack of behavior charts somewhere, maybe some outdated referral forms, and you don't have any student lists, no handbooks, no welcomes. But in all of this running through your mind, you're thinking build a comprehensive program. It's like Field of Dreams. Right, if you build it, they will come. If you build a comprehensive program, it's all going to be okay. So you start working on it. You're making spreadsheets and scopes and sequences and schedules and you start getting classrooms online for lessons and you feel like you are on fire. But by the time you get to the end of the first or second week of the school year, you're tapped out. You've already been asked to cover classes. You've been running 504 meetings, you've been supervising hallways and lunch duties and you start thinking this is not what I signed up for and is it supposed to be like this. And then, if you're like most school counselors that I've worked with, there's a little piece of you that starts to wonder and blame yourself. Have you not done all the right things? Have you not been clearly consistent in advocating for your role, all this baloney that gets crammed down your throat about school counseling? Well, the good news is you are not the problem.

Speaker 1:

And today we're going to give the ASCA National Model a letter grade For this first episode in this graded series. I'm coming out with both barrels For this first episode in this graded series. I'm coming out with both barrels. I'm going to say the things that you've been thinking and feeling out loud about what happens when we give school counselors a model to follow that has absolutely no infrastructure, no protection and no national advocacy muscle to make it work. Let's get started All right. So to have a decent conversation about this, we're going to hop in the time machine and go back to your grad school days, where I'm sure the ASCA national model was probably quoted as religion in a lot of your grad school classes.

Speaker 1:

That model was first introduced in 2003 by the American School Counselor Association and the goal really was to bring some clarity and structure and consistency to our profession. School counseling was kind of all over the map and you had people doing all kinds of different things, and so ASCA really wanted to dial everything in and get everybody on the same page in aligning school counseling programs with some broader educational goals on campuses, make sure that school counselors had some measure of accountability because up until then it was kind of like the Wild West and then promote access and equity for all students, and I think those were great ideas. I think that the thought was in the right place. Since 2003, the model has gone through multiple iterations, and every time they come out with a new version they kind of refine the core elements of what it is.

Speaker 1:

Our most current version emphasizes four different components, and I bet that you're very familiar with those Define, manage, deliver and assess. You've probably seen that graphic that looks like a modified diamond right it has all the little arrows pointing to the next one Defining what school counselors do manage through tools like annual agreements and use of time, assessments, delivering direct and indirect services and assessing program results and counselor performance. And this national model has also popularized a benchmark that again is repeated like gospel everywhere you go in the school counseling world, and that is that 80% of your time should be spent in direct or indirect service to students. And then that led to some extras, like the RAMAMP recognition program to highlight exemplary program implementation. I have a lot of thoughts on that. You can expect a graded episode on that one as well.

Speaker 1:

But really the point is the ASCA model tries to paint a picture of what school counseling looks like when it's done quote, unquote, right. Looks like when it's done quote, unquote right, and really revolves around that 80% of your time in direct or indirect services. Things like monthly data reviews, advisory councils, master schedules of core curriculum, targeted small groups, annual outcome reports that are tied to program goals. And if you're not doing that, or if you're not able to do that, you're told to advocate, educate your administrator, print the use of time data and prove your case, push for your role. And all of that sounds okay in theory, but here's what a lot of school counselors don't realize as they're drinking this Kool-Aid.

Speaker 1:

And I promise you, I was one of those people too. When I graduated with my master's degree and went in to start my school counseling work, I was the same way. I spent the whole summer making curriculum maps by grade and cross-referencing grades to the next grade, and how was I going to make this all flow and work, and how many small groups was I going to conduct, and what were the topics going to be, and how was I going to do a needs assessment, and on and on and on and on and on. I bought into it too, but there are some other things going on with this that we don't see or we don't realize. Case in point the 80% of your time benchmark was not always part of the ASCA model. Did you know that?

Speaker 1:

It was introduced in the third edition in 2012. And it was introduced as kind of a measurable target. Its intention, I think was to really encourage school counselors to focus on student services over administrative duties kind of that shift from the guidance counselor idea to the school counselor idea, from guidance counselor idea to the school counselor idea. And since they introduced that 80% idea, they have released tons of resources which all reinforce this 80% ideal. They're putting out webinars and toolkits and award criterias and visuals and data report templates. But while all this messaging has focused so heavily on 80%, there has been almost no public effort from ASCA to help counselors actually achieve that.

Speaker 1:

The support for creating the actual conditions that would be required to meet that number is almost non-existent. So when we're talking about things like manageable caseloads, asca recommends 1 to 250. I work with hundreds of school counselors in any given week and I will tell you most typical ratios are running 1 to 500 and up. Other conditions that are needed that are not being addressed Protected counselor time, relief from non-counseling duties. There are admonishments that those should not be happening, but there's no teeth behind them and when things start to go sideways or we start to feel like we're falling short, no one steps up and says, hey, let us lead an initiative to inform educational stakeholders on this, let's make a difference. No, they push the burden back on you and they say well, you just need to advocate.

Speaker 1:

So you try to advocate, right, you schedule the meeting, you bring your use of time data, you explain the asker recommendations and you have all this clarity and optimism and you're hoping that your administrator is going to see what you're trying to build. And then what do you get in return from that? If you're lucky, you get a nod in return from that. If you're lucky, you get a nod, maybe a vague promise that they'll support you or we'll revisit this later. That's typically best case scenario. More likely what happens is you fracture your relationship with your administrator. There's a little bit of distrust that grows from that conversation, or the administrator now has a chip on their shoulder anytime anything about your day-to-day work comes up in conversation and again, I know this because I work with so many school counselors week in and week out and then, after all that, regardless of which direction that conversation went, typically nothing changes.

Speaker 1:

You're still a testing coordinator, you're still covering lunch duty, you're still serving as a behavior interventionist instead of a school counselor, because in too many school districts advocacy quote, unquote doesn't lead to change. What it actually leads to is professional gaslighting, where you're told you're empowered to make these statements and to try to catalyze change on students' behalf. But really you have no bargaining chips other than the professional clout that you may have built on that campus. That's it. You have no control over your budget, your staffing, your time or your autonomy In your school counseling world. Among your colleagues you might get praised for your passion, but directly with your administrators on your campus you get penalized for your boundaries.

Speaker 1:

In the school counseling world at large, you're told things like the national model is flexible, but then on your campus you try to flex and suddenly you're labeled difficult and then you get gaslit. We're all a school family here. We need everybody to pitch in. It's not that bad. You're only doing a few hours of lunch duty a week. Maybe you're just not managing your time well.

Speaker 1:

And it takes this systemic failure of this unsupported model and conceptualizes it as your personal flaw. And if you've been there you know that over time that wears you down Because, as this is going on, the rhetoric machine is still running full force in the background. Everyone should follow the national model. It's what's best for kids, it's the standard for school counseling. Everybody should want to ramp. You should be able to hit 80-20.

Speaker 1:

What's wrong with you if you can't do that? You're not advocating hard enough and you start to question your own competence. You start to feel like you have to apologize to ask for support, and then you start to question your own competence. You start to feel like you have to apologize to ask for support, and then you start wondering am I really cut out to do this kind of work? And if you've ever felt any of those things, I promise you you are not the only one. So when you're told to advocate for your role and your reality doesn't shift as a result of that, I want you to know that is not your failure. You were given a script, but you weren't given any backup, and it is my opinion that all school counselors deserve better than that. That's what happens when this theory of this national model meets real life, which brings me to what this actually looks like day to day, when school counselors are trying to serve students in a system that doesn't support the model that it promotes.

Speaker 1:

You show up on campus wanting to meet that standard, but instead you're tasked out to do everything but what's in that model? Your caseload is 600, 700, 800 students for just you. You've got 30 minutes to prep your next SEL lesson, but you're sent down the hallway to cover a class or fish a kid out from under a desk. You're trying to get some small groups off the ground, like you've been told to do, but you have 18 teacher referrals for behavior and none of those kids has any baseline behavior data. You want to plan intentionally and work thoughtfully, but you are stuck being constantly reactive in a flood of crises that you didn't cause and you can't prevent. And still, through all of that, you keep getting told that if you were just doing it right, your calendar would be 80% direct and indirect services, and so you keep pushing harder.

Speaker 1:

You keep putting out more dumpster fires, you keep trying to maximize your productivity, block your time in a way that's going to allow you to do the work they're telling you you should be doing, and then it leads to feeling like you can't say no and you can already hear it coming. That's when burnout hits. That's when we have school counselors walking away from the profession altogether. So let's be clear about a couple of things, and the first is that you belong in schools. How can I be so confident in saying that no one spends the amount of money that we spend getting our school counseling credentials if they don't care about this job. We all know, walking into this, that we're not going to become millionaires in this line of work. We know this and we push on anyway and we spend tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of walking onto a campus and serving as that school's school counselor. That is a big deal. And then you've pushed through all of the baloney that I've just talked about, day after day after day. So you 1,000% have earned your seat at the table.

Speaker 1:

The problem is the model that you have been told to follow and perhaps expected to follow, only works under perfect conditions. It's like you trained to be a race car driver and you show up for the race and there's no racetrack, there's a gravel road, and you look around for the cars and instead of getting your race car, you get handed a unicycle and they just keep saying go faster, just go faster, you'll keep up. You can do it. We believe you can do it if you just want it badly enough, and you fall off that unicycle. No one rethinks it and says, hey, maybe that was the problem. They just say, well, if you really were passionate about this, you would find a way to make it work. Bless it, friends. You know I'm right about this. This is happening in more places than I can count. It is not about your passion for your work or even your professionalism even your professionalism. This is about a structural mismatch.

Speaker 1:

So let's back this up with some evidence, because this should not just be anecdotal or my opinion right. If we're going to grade the ASCA national model, we better be bringing receipts. So in 2019, dodson found that only 39% of school counselors reported implementing the ASCA national model with any fidelity. Take note of that word any fidelity. If we flip that stat on its head, that means that 61% of school counselors were not implementing any aspect of the ASCA national model at all. Strangely, that feels validating, doesn't it To know that if you haven't been able to meet these standards, man, you are not the only one. Over half of our colleagues are in the same boat.

Speaker 1:

Mullen and Crowe 2017 showed that being overloaded with non-counseling duties directly correlates with burnout. Schillingford and Lambie 2010 confirmed that role confusion from administrators undermines service quality. Meaning, if you don't even really understand what it is that your job is supposed to be, or you don't understand why you've been pulled so far off center from what school counselors should be doing on campus. It's going to undermine your ability to be effective, and Wilkerson and team 2013 showed that, even among schools pursuing RAMP, only those who had strong administrative support were able to succeed.

Speaker 1:

When we translate that phrase strong administrative support that doesn't mean their administrators believing in them or their principal saying yes, I think we should do this. This is best for all kids. Administrative support is here. You can have the autonomy to make your own decisions in your school counseling program. Here we're going to fund the things that you need to meet these benchmarks. Hey, here we're going to take away all the extra stuff that we were expecting you to do so you can focus on ramp. And here we're going to hire enough people that you're running a realistic ratio to enable us to meet this ramp goal. How many schools do you know that are in a position to do that? How many districts are you aware of or have you worked in that have been in a position to do that?

Speaker 1:

The conclusion from that is clear. This national model assumes a level of support that the majority of school counselors simply do not have. But here's the thing. It's not even a question about whether the national model is good for us or not. It's a question of just is it possible? And for most of us the answer is no. But yet ASCA's messaging hasn't changed. The burden is still being placed on you to make it work, you to explain the use of time data, you to have the tough conversations, you to push that model up the hill over and over and over again.

Speaker 1:

I personally believe that if we could see large-scale implementation of the Ask a National model, it would be great for students, for schools, for school counselors. It would be phenomenal. I have no beef with the components of the national model, other than they're just not realistic. But that's where the really tough part comes in, because while we're being told to advocate for our roles, our national organization, they have just totally stepped out. We get told use the national model. The more people that implement it, the more normalized it'll become. It'll start to catch on. People will finally understand what school counselors should be doing.

Speaker 1:

But, my friend, that is not advocacy, that is magical thinking. And in this magical thinking, asca loves to publish articles and podcasts and position statements about what they think should be happening. But what are they not doing. They're not lobbying for protected counselor time in any laws, anywhere, any state. They're not helping their state organizations do that. They're not pushing back against non-counseling duties, even in a mode of educating the public. Have you ever seen a picture of an ASCA representative speaking to a consortium of school board leaders? Have you ever seen them on national television talking about National School Counseling Week? Have you ever seen footage of them testifying before any committees in any legislative anything anywhere? No, they're not even showing up in public to provide meaningful commentary when school counseling goes sideways. The legislative session in Texas just wrapped up. I'm going to tell you it was a disaster for school counseling and not one word from our national organization. We are told time and time and time again to advocate, but where's the advocacy for us? Why are we consistently the ones being made to absorb the pressure of making that model work, no matter the context, where now school counselors are blaming themselves when it doesn't work?

Speaker 1:

Again, I will say this is not an anti-national model rant. It may feel like it a little bit, but I promise you it's not. I think that the national model has been well thought out. I think it has some very fundamental components for our work. I think it still needs a little bit of tweaking. It's not perfect, for sure, but it's getting there.

Speaker 1:

The problem really isn't with what is in the national model itself. The problem is, what do we do with it? We can hang an ideal on the wall all day long. I make fun of places all the time for hanging these mission and vision statements up on the walls. Maybe you work in a place like that too. You have to have all these aspirational things posted everywhere. Maybe you have to have them in your email signatures and stuff like that. And then you look around in your day-to-day work and you go is anybody really buying this? Anybody around here really invested in this, or is this just an image game?

Speaker 1:

That's kind of what this national model feels like, though my problem is with the implementation of it, with the gaslighting of my colleagues and friends who show up to my mastermind support and consultation chats each and every week saying why can't I be good enough, while they're running a caseload of 750 students wondering why they can't get to everything. While they're being made to carry a walkie-talkie around campus to be the emergency behavior response on their campus, instead of doing the things they know could move the needle if they were just given the latitude to do those things. But meanwhile we have an organization that purports to advocate for school counselors. But take a look at their social feeds sometime. See how much advocacy is actually happening, because their form of advocacy is self-aggrandizing.

Speaker 1:

Let's throw a banquet, let's have an awards ceremony, let's dress up, let's talk about how amazing our school counseling friends are, and I'm here to tell you there is so much to that backstory. There's a reason why you don't see me represented in any of those things. Throwing galas, throwing award ceremonies and banquets and all those kinds of things. And even for National School Counseling Week, which should be the biggest PR event in the school counseling world, our national organization focuses on their school counselor of the year award ceremony and leaves all of the promotion and social media to school counselors themselves. Here are some prompts Print out this sign, take your picture, post what it means to me to be a school counselor. Post all your thoughts all week long. Post them on our feed. Do our work for us, which is a lot like how we're being told to advocate for our work. So I got fired up there.

Speaker 1:

Let's assign a grade to the ASCA national model. So, intentions, I'm going to give this one an A+. Like I said, I think if school counselors were all able to meet this national model standard, if they truly had people advocating on their behalf and pushing this to reality, I think it would be great. So, intentions get an A+. Equity and access that's a D. We have some places that are able to meet this standard. We have some states that are actively legislating to meet this standard and my hat's off to them but there aren't enough of them. So, with some school counselors being able to work in programs that would facilitate the model, I'm gonna give it a D, even though my heart says it's probably an F, because there's fewer than 20% of schools, I would wager, that are in this situation. But we'll give it a D Practicality for the average campus.

Speaker 1:

We have some states that have legislated some pieces to aligning school counselors with this national model. I think that's a step in the right direction. I don't think we have nearly enough and, knowing what I know about the way that our state school counseling organizations are supported, I feel confident in saying that they're not getting enough support to be able to make this happen. That being said, we also have to think about school district budgets, staffings again, ratios, extra counseling duties, this wild idea that we should be serving on campuses as behavior interventionists 24-7, all of these things going in. There are some schools that are managing to implement some components not nearly as many as you would be made to believe. Ramp designation, at my last calculation, was less than four-tenths of one percent, so less than one percent of schools are able to attain that designation. So for that reason I'm going to give it a D. All right, and I feel like that's being generous, but I'm going to give it a D. And then, in the category of the psychological burden on school counselors, that's going to get a big fat F. Just for the gaslighting aspect alone. I got a mailer in the mail the other day from ASCA telling me that they were advocating for me and when I went on their advocacy page it was disheartening that's the nicest word I can think of for that. So I'm going to give the psychological burden an F. So we have an A plus we have a D and we have an F. So that is not a pass, my friends.

Speaker 1:

The ASCII national model does not pass. We need some change. We need tiered expectations for school counseling programs, not just a one-size-fits-all model, because we are not all one size. We have different levels of staffing, funding, autonomy all the things we've all talked about. Plus, we have varying community expectations of what a school counseling program needs to be. Those are not being recognized either, and that's a whole other conversation. We need adjusted benchmarks for campuses so that we know if we're making the grade. If you have 800 students you're responsible for, you certainly cannot be expected to achieve the same things that someone with 400 kids is making happen. You see what I mean. So we need to have tiered expectations and adjusted benchmarks for those situations and we need our professional organizations to start leading the fight, not just cheerleading the model and patting themselves on the back for having built it. They need to step up and say, okay, now let's figure out how to really make this happen. Okay, now let's figure out how to really make this happen. Okay.

Speaker 1:

So if you are a school counselor who is not able to hit that 80% mark, who is not hitting all four delivery components of the ASCII National Model or RAMP status, or you don't have a comprehensive curriculum or whatever it is, I want you to know. You are still a great school counselor. I want you to know you are still a great school counselor If you are adapting your clinical expertise to the messy realities of your students' lives and you are keeping students at the center of things, even when the system is really trying to push them out. If you are holding boundaries, if you are doing the best you can with what you've got and you still choose to show up tomorrow. You are doing the best you can with what you've got and you still choose to show up tomorrow. You are amazing and in this push through these model components and the expectations that we have set, even for ourselves, don't lose sight of that. Don't lose sight of how amazing it makes you to continually walk onto campus, day after day, and raise your hand and say what's the worst you got? Give me that it takes a very special person to volunteer for the kind of work that you do each and every day, and I am so thankful for you. Just as I know your students and your families, even if they don't always communicate it. They're thankful for you, just as I know your students and your families, even if they don't always communicate it, they're thankful for you too, all right. So I hope you enjoyed that breakdown.

Speaker 1:

The ASCA national model gets a D and next, in this graded podcast series, we are going to look at the idea of short-term counseling on school campuses. I am introducing something this month that is called the Smart Capacity Model. Remember when I was talking about tiered expectations and adjusted benchmarks? Well, we're done waiting for anybody to come to their senses and roll those out, so we're going to do it ourselves, and the Smart Cap capacity model is being revealed in our School for School Counselors Mastermind this July 2025. It is designed to be applicable in the real world and adjust your use of time expectations based on your actual caseload, not an arbitrary standard that you know your district is never going to meet.

Speaker 1:

The smart capacity model is built to take away a lot of the shame or embarrassment or feelings of not good enough that you may be getting from your program because your schedule just doesn't have enough hours in the day, and it helps you shift in doable ways when the numbers aren't working in your favor because you're not in control, if you have 500 or 700 or even 900 students Y'all. I've been there. I've done that work. Current caseload is 700, but I've been up as far as nine. I know this world, and you don't need more pressure on top of all those students needing your assistance. You need permission to pivot, and that is what this smart capacity model is going to give you.

Speaker 1:

I don't think that you should continually beat your head against the wall, trying to earn respect, playing a game that was never designed for you to win, and I am going to change the rules of that game for you and give you a way to lead on your campus in a way that is sustainable and doesn't make you question your career path every Friday afternoon as you walk out the door. So if you want to be part of that, you need to look at our School for School Counselors Mastermind. We are first deploying that to our Mastermind members to get some feedback, to solidify some of the concepts in there and make sure it's really good before it goes prime time. But the other thing is, if you're not quite ready to join the Mastermind, we have also opened up registration for our Best Year Ever event. This is going to be four nights of real talk, real solutions, real world resources for school counselors for the upcoming school year. It is 1000% free. It is not a sales pitch, designed as a workshop You've probably been in a few of those in your career. This is not that we are going to be throwing stuff at you like nobody's business. It's the same resources that we provide for our Mastermind members, and we're doing it 100% free of charge Because we believe that school counseling professional development needs to level up.

Speaker 1:

It is time to have some really down and dirty conversations about what makes school counseling actually work. You can find out more about that, as well as the mastermind, on our website, schoolforschoolcounselorscom. All right, I hope this got you riled up, just like it got me riled up, but more than that, I hope it helped you to understand that you are not the only one having trouble meeting these benchmarks and that maybe, just maybe, you are not the problem. If you need that real-world support and consultation to know if you're aiming at the right targets, my mastermind's got you covered. Go find out about it at schoolforschoolcounselorscom, and I will be back soon with our next episode of graded short-term school counseling version. Have a great week, take care.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Steph Johnson

Host