The Workforce Investment Act, enacted in 1998, recognizes that success for job seekers requires a workforce development system that places a high priority on responding to employer needs. Employer Use of the Publicly Funded Workforce Development System examines employer perceptions of what’s working and what’s not since the enactment of WIA, and it makes recommendations for improvement. For this report, the partners in Workforce Innovation Networks—WINs—collected information from employers, their associations, low-wage workers, and other stakeholders in the public system.

Career Ladders, part of the WINs series on engaging employers in workforce development, provides information on planning, developing, operating, and expanding the role of intermediaries in advancement. Prepared by Heath Prince and Jack Mills of JFF, the guide draws upon lessons learned from innovative work across the country.

Section I of Career Ladders details the value and characteristics of career ladders and outlines alternatives for leadership in their development. Section II explains the stages in the process of developing and implementing career ladders: self-assessment and planning; partnership building and program development; and program operation, improvement, and expansion. Section III profiles successful programs. In addition, some 35 resources provide additional information and highlight key areas for further research.

The Boston Workforce Development Initiative, the largest public/private investment in workforce development in the city's history, has announced grants totaling over $5 million over the next three to five years. The initiative is an innovative, multi-year effort to move entry-level workers up the skills ladder, give employers the trained staff they need, and offer family-supporting wages to thousands of low-income workers.

The initiative brings together an unprecedented range of stakeholders and investors—including national and local funders, state and city officials, organized labor, employers, low-income workers, academic institutions, and community advocates—in an active partnership to develop effective job training and job promotion opportunities in Greater Boston. Over $10 million has been raised toward a goal of $14.3 million for the five-year project, which received the 2003 Trailblazer Award for public/private partnership from the National Network of Sector Partners.

As a consultant to the initiative, JFF guides its design, coordinates the operations of the initiative's various components, facilitates planning and oversight for the Funders Group, and leads the policy advocacy effort.

Click here to read about the Boston Workforce Development Initiative.

Workforce Intermediaries: Generating Benefits for Employers and Workers summarizes the collective work of the Partnership for Employer-Employee Responsive Systems (PEERS), funded by the Ford Foundation. This unique partnership promotes dialogue and joint research among grantees, including Jobs for the Future, of the foundation’s Private Sector Training Related Investments in Low-Wage Workers Initiative.

PEERS developed a broad research question: "What works and does not work with regard to private-sector employers' ability to access intermediaries to provide education, training, and other employment supports to low-wage workers?" A two-year research effort suggests that both workers and employers benefit when employers use workforce intermediaries to improve or link jobs or to locate or provide skills training and employment supports. However, when employers use workforce intermediaries only for placement or job matching, workers' wage prospects can be hindered, and it is unclear whether any benefit accrues to employers.

Click here to download Workforce Intermediaries.

Policymakers and practitioners need evidence to guide decision making on improving high school student achievement. The Center for Education Research & Policy (CERP) at MassINC, the Center for Collaborative Education, and Jobs for the Future partnered to explore this critical issue and generate discussion around possible strategies for leveraging best practices used in Massachusetts urban high schools. In Head of the Class, CERP identified nine urban schools that get impressive academic results with the student populations education reform is meant to serve. Creating Schools That Work, from the Center for Collaborative Education and Jobs for the Future, uses those findings to present recommendations for state and district policies that would lead a far greater number of urban high schools to prepare their diverse student bodies to succeed in college and beyond.

Click here for more information and to download Creating Schools That Work

For a transcript of the forum, Head of the Class: Characteristics of Higher Performing Urban High Schools in Massachusetts, go to: http://www.massinc.org/events_forums/events/headof_theclass.html.

With funding from MetLife Foundation, JFF has explored the challenges new teachers face and their responses to those challenges, as well as how the challenges intertwine with relationships among students, teachers, and parents. Stretch, Bend, Flex, by Anne Newton of JFF, Eileen Shakespear of Fenway High School, and Linda Beardsley of Tufts University, documents the experiences of first-year teachers who graduated from the Urban Teacher Training Collaborative’s Master of Arts in Teaching program at Tufts in 2002.

Tuft created the Collaborative in 1999 in conjunction with two pilot schools in Boston, the Boston Arts Academy and Fenway High School. It is a school-based program that reflects the commitment of the partners to developing effective, collegial, and reform-minded teachers for urban schools.

Click here to download Stretch, Bend, Flex

Workforce Intermediaries for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bob Giloth, has just been published by Temple University Press, in association with the American Assembly, Columbia University. This book takes stock of the world of workforce intermediaries: entrepreneurial partnerships that include businesses, unions, community colleges, and community organizations. Noted policymakers, scholars, and practitioners, including Marlene B. Seltzer, Richard Kazis, and Jerry Rubin of JFF, examine intermediaries' development and effectiveness. http://www.americanassembly.org/topics.dir/index.php? this_
topic=workforce

Incumbent Worker Training for Low-Wage Workers, new from Welfare Information Network Issue Notes, provides guidance to states and localities on funding incumbent worker training, improving access to training, working with employers, and designing investments in this type of training. http://www.financeprojectinfo.org/Publications/incumbentworker
trainingIN.htm

High Schools on a Human Scale, from Beacon Press, is a vivid, up-close look at the power of small schools to transform the nation's secondary school system. Thomas Toch goes inside four very different schools that have all rejected the bureaucratic vastness of the traditional comprehensive high school to become much smaller, more personal places. This book is sponsored in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's nationwide effort to support small schools. http://www.beacon.org/education

Improving Services and Outcomes for Highly Disadvantaged Youth is the subject of a series of papers commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The series includes "Connected By 25: Improving The Life Chances of the Country's Most Vulnerable Youth," "A Portrait of Well-Being in Early Adulthood," and "Serving High-Risk Youth: Lessons from Research and Programming," among many others.
http://www.hewlett.org/Archives

Woman's "True" Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching, by JFF Vice President Nancy Hoffman, offers a rich and fascinating portrait of educational life in America. The just-released second edition of this classic history of women and the teaching profession greatly expands on and revises the first edition's central focus, drawing upon several decades of feminist research and analysis. http://gseweb.harvard.edu/%7Ehepg/womanstrueprofession.html