How can states help working adults bolster pre-collegiate skills that restrain them from taking full advantage of career and technical programs at the college credit level? Better Together, by JFF’s Gloria Cross Mwase, offers examples of how to meet this challenge through aligning two distinct systems for strengthening pre-collegiate skills: adult education and developmental education.

Better Together is part of a series of state policy reports from Breaking Through, a multiyear initiative of Jobs for the Future and the National Council for Workforce Education. Breaking Through is helping community colleges identify and develop institutional strategies that can enable low-skilled adult students to enter into and succeed in occupational and technical degree programs.

Read more about Breaking Through

Click to Download Better Together

In a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Labor, JFF’s Heath Prince and Victoria Choitz take a close look at emerging trends that offer adult learners better access to postsecondary courses and help to accelerate their progress through credential programs. The authors examine programs at community colleges and detail strategies for addressing barriers that institutions face in developing and implementing programs better suited to adult learners. 

Click to Download Flexible Learning Options for Adult Students

Learning and Working: Year One of the Jobs to Careers Initiative
JFF’s O. Steven Quimby and Rebecca Starr highlight the challenges Jobs to Careers grantees have faced and their accomplishments over the first year of the initiative. Jobs to Careers, a national initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in collaboration with the Hitachi Foundation and the U.S. Department of Labor, seeks to advance and reward the skill and career development of the low-wage incumbent workers who provide care and services on the front lines of our health and health care systems.

Working for Health: The Newsletter for Jobs to Careers
The fall issue of Working for Health addresses remediation, a topic that is crucial to frontline health care workers. Highlights include an interview with a frontline worker who has benefited from Jobs to Careers and a look at how two projects creatively combat the lack of basic literacy skills among frontline workers.

Video Highlights Jobs to Careers and Health Care Workers
This short video shows the impact of Jobs to Careers on the lives of workers on the front lines of health and health care, where work can sometimes be like the front lines in war: emotionally challenging and even physically dangerous.

National Workforce Development Effort Announces Local Grants
In November, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, a $30 million initiative to address the nation’s workforce shortages, announced $5 million in grants to 11 regional collaboratives. NFWS also announced a new partner investor in its national effort to move low-wage workers into higher-paying jobs while providing employers with skilled workers. The Prudential Foundation has awarded $1 million to NFWS over the next three years.

The new grantees are the Front Range Funding Collaborative (Colorado), the Workforce Solutions Collaborative of Metro Hartford, Central Iowa Works, the Workforce Alliance of South Central Kansas, the Omaha Workforce Funding Collaborative, the Greater Cincinnati Workforce Network, the Job Opportunity Investment Network (Pennsylvania), the Dan River Funding Collaborative (Virginia), the Funding Collaborative of Greater Seattle, Partners for Workforce Innovation in South Wood County (Wisconsin), and the Milwaukee Area Workforce Funding Alliance. Jobs for the Future is a national partner with the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

NFWS: Principles and Policy Implications
To inform anticipated reforms of the U.S. workforce development system, a new brief from the National Fund for Workforce Solutions describes its principles for effective efforts to make the system better for workers, employers, and regions.

NFWS: Experience and Evidence
This NFWS brief summarizes the strong evidence that workforce partnerships or intermediaries and sectoral approaches are effective.

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In the October 2008 issue of Achieving Success, two state policy leaders discuss what Massachusetts and Virginia have done to build consensus for sustainable reforms in transfer and articulation policy, as well as how the reforms are improving student success. Achieving Success is published by JFF for Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative to help more community college students succeed.

Click to view Achieving Success

At a time of historic economic uncertainty, this report prepared by JFF for the Nellie Mae Education Foundation finds that, in order for New Englanders to prosper in a rapidly changing economy and society, there will need to be a dramatic change in the way the region’s citizens are educated. For New Englanders, twenty-first century success will depend on more people developing skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and the use of modern technologies. The report emphasizes the importance of overcoming educational opportunity gaps that exist for many fast-growing segments of the population and suggests ways for public and private leaders to spur and support significant change agendas.

Click to view What It Takes to Succeed in the 21st Century

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Two emerging federal policy developments have the potential to promote education pathways--including early college high schools--that target underserved students.

In reauthorizing the Higher Education Act this year, Congress included notable policy changes. First, the act now encourages state recipients of Gear Up grants to create early college-like pathways, and it permits state and local Gear Up grantees to support “dual enrollment programs.” Further, the reauthorization makes clear that colleges serving dual enrollees are defined as higher education institutions under the act.

The Fast Track to College Act, introduced in 2008 by Representative Dale E. Kildee (D-MI), Representative Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), and Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), would authorize $100 million to support local district-college partnerships to start or support existing early college high schools and dual enrollment programs that provide comprehensive student support.

On Ramp to College: A State Policymaker’s Guide to Dual Enrollment, published earlier this year by JFF, discusses many of the issues reflected in these legislative developments.

Click here for more information on the Fast Track to College Act.

“It is time that the simmering concern about the fate of those who never complete high school comes to a boil,” write JFF’s Cheryl Almeida and Adria Steinberg in a commentary for EdWeek. “It is also time that policies to prevent students from leaving school and to reduce dropout rates be made as high a priority as policies designed to raise overall academic performance to a college-ready standard.”

The commentary draws on JFF’s partnership with Achieve, Inc., to study how states might best support efforts to raise standards and graduation rates. Raising Graduation Rates in an Era of High Standards, by Almeida and Steinberg, calls on state policymakers to follow the lead of their most innovative peers and commit to a set of critical outcomes for their districts, schools, and students.

Read the Education Week commentary.

Download Raising Graduation Rates in an Era of High Standards.

As overall institutional costs rise, crucial funds needed for educational services are not being channeled in the proper directions. Writing in the November/December 2008 issue of Change, Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability, notes that colleges can’t solve the college cost problem on their own. “We need to have parallel attention to costs and productivity at the policy level,” Wellman notes. The work of states to meet this challenge is gaining assistance from Making Opportunity Affordable, a national initiative of Lumina Foundation for Education. Both the Delta Project and JFF are partners in this effort.

Information on ordering Change Magazine.

JFF has prepared a ten-point plan for the Obama Administration and the 111th Congress to promote more efficient and cost-effective investments in human capital, particularly for low-skill and low-income youth and adults. The proposals are grouped according to three areas where the education and skill development pipeline has serious leaks that threaten the future prosperity of our nation’s cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

• Helping more struggling students graduate high school prepared for college and careers;

• Helping more high school graduates complete a postsecondary credential; and

• Helping more workers succeed in the labor market and advance in their careers.

“Mining and cultivating the human capital that exists in all our communities is more than an issue of equity; it’s a matter of economic competitiveness for the country," says JFF president and CEO Marlene B. Seltzer. “We believe the Obama Administration and members of Congress will find the education and skill development recommendations useful as they advance plans and programs to restore America’s economic standing."

Click to download An Agenda for the Obama Administration and the 111th Congress.

Recover, Renew, Rebuild: Workforce Policies for a Strong and Fair Economy
This CLASP report makes recommendations for actions Congress and the Obama Administration can take to address the immediate economic crisis and to make a down payment on the longer-term agenda of building a stronger and more equitable economy.

Workforce Development as an Antipoverty Strategy
This Urban Institute report by Harry Holzer centers on the basic paradox of workforce development policy: in an era in which skills are more important than ever as determinants of labor market earnings, the federal government spends fewer and fewer public dollars on workforce development.

Strategies for Success in Career Development: The Career Coach Curriculum Guide
This guide from Women Employed gives colleges, community organizations, and workforce agencies tools to guide adult learners or first-time college students at different levels of experience and education through in-depth career exploration and planning.

Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism
This book by David Whitman examines the reasons underlying the success of six highly effective inner-city secondary schools. One of the six, University Park Campus School, partners with JFF and Clark University in the Institute for Student Success, using the school as a “learning laboratory” to train school developers, leaders, and teachers to implement the proven practices that have made UPCS a national model.

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Lisa Chapnick, JFF’s new Chief Operating Officer, brings 25 years in managerial and institutional development experience. Ms. Chapnick works alongside JFF President and CEO Marlene Seltzer, with a focus on guiding the development of JFF’s organizational structure as it continues to grow and managing both staff and national initiatives to increase educational and economic opportunity across the nation.

Ms. Chapnick’s career spans government, health care, and higher education. The common thread is a deep desire to improve community services through strategic management and growth. Prior to arriving at JFF, Ms. Chapnick served as senior vice president for administration and planning at Simmons College in Boston. She has also served as executive director of the Mattapan Community Health Center and the Boston Public Facilities Department and as Undersecretary of Economic Affairs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Click to view Lisa Chapnick's bio.