Changing Lives. Building Communities. Advancing the Nation. Sounds ambitious, but as we at Jobs for the Future begin our 20th year, it aptly sums up the mission that inspires us.

Yet we greet JFF’s anniversary less with pride in past accomplishments and more with a sense of the urgent challenge for the future: to close the persisting income, education, and skills gaps that burden our nation. For the next decade, we have set two concrete goals for our efforts. On the youth side, our goal is to “double the numbers” of young people from low-income and minority families who attain postsecondary credentials. On the adult side, our frame is “a nation that works,” focused on helping communities build skilled workforces and ensuring that all adults earn family-supporting wages. Day after day, our goal is to change the lives of real people and build healthy communities, inspired by a vision of a United States that promises opportunity to all.

Click here to read more

Ideally, between the ages of 16 to 24 young people become confident, competent learners as they solidify academic, interpersonal, and social skills, explore future options, and develop a realistic sense of what it will take to make such options a reality. But the so-called “pipeline to college” is leaking badly, particularly for minority and low-income youth. JFF’s Lili Allen, Cheryl Almeida, and Adria Steinberg examine learning environments that appear to hold particular promise for vulnerable and potentially disconnected youth. They conclude with a discussion of policy opportunities for creating multiple avenues for young people to achieve to higher standards.

Download From the Prison Track to the College Track

Bridge to Postsecondary Success, by JFF’s Joel Vargas and Hilary Pennington, suggests strategies for increasing dramatically the number of students completing education beyond high school. Prepared for the Ohio State Board of Education Task Force on Quality High Schools for a Lifetime of Opportunities, the report uses a framework that could inform similar efforts in other states. Vargas and Pennington suggest that Ohio concentrate on: improving the level of high school preparation so that more youth graduate “college ready”; improving transitions between secondary and postsecondary education; reconnecting dropouts to pathways toward postsecondary credentials; and building a systemic context that promotes communication and interaction across the secondary and postsecondary sectors.

Download Bridge to Postsecondary Success

Writing in EdWeek, JFF’s Richard Kazis and Hilary Pennington and Kristin Conklin of the National Governors Association ask how states can make good on commitments to ensure that every high school graduate is ready to succeed in college or a good job. The answer, they say in “Shoring Up the Academic Pipeline: How States Can Help Promote Excellence, Equity, and Efficiency in Their Secondary and Postsecondary Systems,” lies in a policy agenda that can simultaneously improve student achievement and increase the efficiency of public secondary and postsecondary sectors.

Click here to read “Shoring Up the Academic Pipeline”

On average, ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom experience higher unemployment, lower pay, and fewer opportunities for advancement than whites. At the same time, half of the growth in the U.K.’s working-age population over the next five years will come from ethnic minority groups even though they make up only 8 percent of the population. Thus, failure to address the employment barriers that ethnic minorities face will have severe economic and social costs. Through the Fair Cities initiative, the National Employment Panel, which provides advice on the design, delivery, and performance of the U.K. government’s labor market policies and programs, is exploring ways to engage employers in addressing this challenge.

To inform Fair Cities, JFF undertook an international study of employer-led initiatives that take full account of the recruitment and skill needs of employers while helping ethnic minority job seekers to overcome specific barriers, such as language skills and discrimination. Fair Cities: Employer-led Efforts that Produce Results for Ethnic Minorities identifies key issues for policymakers who wish to promote promising local initiatives. The report includes case studies of a range of initiatives from the UK, the United States, Canada, The Netherlands, and Germany.

Click here to download Fair Cities

JFF is undertaking a multi-year effort to accelerate the development and expansion of workforce strategies that advance lower-skilled individuals into better jobs, while also meeting the needs of employers. With support from the U.S. Department of Labor, JFF launched the 2003 Career Advancement Strategy Competition as part of our efforts to identify such organizations and help them refine and expand their successful approaches.

That competition yielded Programs that Advance Low-Wage, Low-Skill Workers, drawing on a new database of about 275 advancement programs across the United States. This directory, which we are using to build knowledge about employer-driven advancement practices, provides basic information about the competition applicants in order to acknowledge their commitment to advancement and to enable organizations in the advancement field to reach one another.

Download Programs that Advance Low-Wage, Low-Skill Workers

As Ron Wolk writes in Teacher Magazine, “One of the original (and unmet) objectives of Goals 2000, first put forth by the nation’s governors during an education summit in 1989, was to reduce the national dropout rate from about 30 percent to 10 percent by the turn of the century. How is it then that almost nobody seems to notice or care about the college dropout problem, which is twice as bad as the high school one?” This is Wolk’s context for discussing the goal proposed at last year’s “Double the Numbers” convening: to “double the numbers” of young people who earn postsecondary credentials, particularly among groups traditionally underserved by higher education. According to Wolk, “Doubling the numbers won’t be easy, but it may well be attainable if we really tackle the tough educational, financial, and political problems confronting us, and if we work at all levels simultaneously—in schools, in colleges, and in public policy arenas.”

To read “Double or Nothing,” go to: http://www.teachermagazine.org/tmstory.cfm?slug=05Persp.h15.