On October 1, Marlene B. Seltzer became CEO of Jobs for the Future, a research and advocacy organization that promotes educational and economic opportunity. Hilary Pennington, who co-founded the Boston-based organization in 1983, remains as vice-chair of the Board of Directors, having served as CEO and leading JFF to national prominence.

“This transition reflects JFF’s maturity as an organization and our growing scope of activities as we expand beyond our founders to a new generation of leadership,” explained Jane Donaldson, Chairman of the JFF Board. “I am delighted that Marlene Seltzer will add the role of CEO to her current position as president of JFF. Her experience, including nine years with JFF, make Ms. Seltzer the perfect choice for this dual role.”

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This partnership is an early product of SkillWorks, an ambitious effort on the part of philanthropy, government, community organizations, and employers to change how workforce development is done in Boston.

In Reinventing Workforce Development, Jerry Rubin and Geri Scott of JFF describe the initiative’s start-up lessons for workforce development reforms throughout the nation. JFF helped design SkillWorks and now oversees the implementation of this five-year project as a consultant to the Funders Group of eight foundations, the City of Boston, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Download Reinventing Workforce Development

For more information on SkillWorks, go to: http://www.skill-works.org

The Workforce Solutions Group, which leads the public policy activities of SkillWorks, is raising the visibility of workforce development as a contributor to the economic well-being of workers, employers, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Two new reports from the Workforce Solutions Group highlight some disturbing trends in family income.

A Commonwealth Growing Apart examines two decades of change in the levels and growth rates of real median family incomes in different parts of Massachusetts.

Treading Water in Quicksand analyzes the income inadequacy challenges facing a wide array of families at the end of the 1990s.

Around the country, innovative community colleges are playing a larger role in helping low-skilled adults gain the valuable skills and credentials that are the gateway to family-supporting careers. Breaking Through looks at whether--and how--these institutions can significantly improve the odds that low-income, low-skilled adults earn the college-level occupational and technical credentials that remain elusive for many Americans.

The study focuses on low-skill, low-literacy adults and how they can move to college and get what they need to succeed in good jobs. It defines “success” to include both educational and economic advancement. And it identifies a set of powerful, transferable strategies rather than describing several effective schools/programs whose complete program design may not seem replicable.

Download Breaking Through

Developed by JFF, Pathways to Advancement exemplifies a growing field of practice in career ladders and low-skilled worker advancement models. The Pathways model presents a framework for providing publicly funded employment and training services that meet the needs of employers, job seekers, and incumbent workers—particularly those in low-wage, low-skill jobs. Through its initial demonstration in Seattle, Pathways to Advancement proved to be an effective strategy for fundamentally changing the way the public workforce development system operates.

Jobs for the Future prepared Creating Pathways to Advancement as a guide for Workforce Development Councils and Workforce Investment Boards interested in replicating Seattle’s Pathways to Advancement strategy.

Download Creating Pathways to Advancement

The number of high school age students who do not complete high school is a serious challenge facing the nation’s educational and workforce systems. The Office of Youth Services of the U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration has laid out a new strategic vision to serve the neediest youth in a demand-driven workforce system. In ETA’s vision, WIA-funded youth programs will serve as a catalyst for connecting out-of-school youth with quality secondary and postsecondary educational opportunities and high-growth and other employment opportunities. Prepared by JFF for regional forums sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Labor, Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services, this Summary and Selected Profiles illustrate the feasibility and desirability of the directions set out by ETA.

College teachers: consider ordering Double the Numbers for your spring classes. Edited by Richard Kazis, Joel Vargas, and Nancy Hoffman of JFF, and with a foreword by Tom Vander Ark of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Double the Numbers highlights emerging strategies—at the state, district, and school levels—for improving postsecondary outcomes. It looks at how to motivate older adolescents in school settings; how to overcome the rigidities of high school schedules and routines; how to prepare students for smooth transitions to postsecondary learning and success; and more.

Double the Numbers was recently hailed by TCRecord.org, from the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, calling it: “a fine compilation of provocative policy proposals that will prove valuable for policy makers. . . . It is also an exemplary work that demonstrates how higher education theories and research can be effectively translated into actionable knowledge.”

To order Double the Numbers, go to: http://gseweb.harvard.edu/%7Ehepg/doublethenumbers.html

Clark University and the Main South Community Development Corporation were honored with the 2004 Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Award for Campus-Community Collaboration. Among its achievements, the partnership is responsible for University Park Campus School, located in one of the most economically disadvantaged sections in Worcester, Mass. University Park sends a powerful message of possibility to urban schools across the nation: academic achievement for all students is within reach. To start the school and run it for its first six years, the Partnership brought in Donna Rodrigues, who now works at JFF, helping Early College High School partners and others benefit from the experience of this pioneering partnership between the Worcester Public Schools and Clark University.

For more information on the Carter Award to Clark University Park Partnership, go to: http://www.mccormack.umb.edu/carteraward/2004Winner.jsp

Those words sum up a mission that has inspired JFF for 20 years. We envision a society that refuses to accept persistent income, education, and skills gaps—a society that addresses such inequities with dynamic approaches to education and workforce development.

When JFF was founded, the outlines of what it would take to achieve this vision were already evident. We knew that success would depend on developing the human capital that is essential to maintaining the competitiveness of American employers. Over the years, that approach has continued to evolve. In the 21st century, we strive not only to develop innovative models that respond to our mission but to institutionalize them and bring them to scale through a combination of practice and policy. We have set to work repairing the pipeline of opportunities that extends from high school through postsecondary study and into the workplace.

Download JFF’s 2004 Annual Report, celebrating our 20th anniversary

BY THE NUMBERS
Of the 46 Early College High Schools opened to date:
* 63 percent are public schools
* 30 percent are charter schools
* 4 percent are contract schools
* 2 percent are magnet schools

The Early College High School Initiative ”At a Glance,” a two-page fact sheet, provides an up-to-date profile of the initiative, with a map of schools, data on the number of schools and students, and other key information.
http://www.earlycolleges.org/Library.html#ataglance

EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL INITIATIVE: CORE PRINCIPLES
Early College High Schools are small schools where students earn both a high school diploma and two years of college credit toward a Bachelor’s degree. They are places for learning, designed to help young people progress toward the education and experience they need to succeed in life and family-supporting careers. Updated in October 2004, Core Principles defines these new institutions and outlines the principles that the partner organizations and their grantees are using to plan for, implement, and assess over 150 pioneering schools.
http://www.earlycolleges.org/Library.html#CorePrinciples

CALCULATING THE COST OF CREATING AN EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL
On behalf of the Finance Working Group of the Early College High School Initiative, JFF’s Michael Webb undertook to determine the costs of planning and implementing these new institutions spanning high school and college. Dr. Webb looked at actual budgets developed for several types of current and planned early college high schools.

The pilot study suggests that costs for early college high schools appear to be on par with those of regular public high schools, within significant limitations to comparing such different institutions and the variety of school designs emerging in the initiative.

ECHS PARTNERS WIN MCGRAW EDUCATION AWARD
In a ceremony at the New York Public Library, this year’s winners of the prestigious Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education were announced. They included Dr. Cecilia Cunningham, founder of the Middle College National Consortium, a network of 26 Middle College High Schools, and Dr. Janet Lieberman, designer of Middle College High School, an alternative high school established in 1974 to reverse the high dropout rate in New York City’s public high schools. The Middle College National Consortium is a partner in the Early College High School Initiative, and the Middle College concept led directly into the idea of Early College High School, which goes a step further, blending high school education and the first years of college. The annual prize recognizes outstanding individuals who have dedicated themselves to improving education in this country and whose accomplishments are making a difference today.

THREE FROM THE ANNIE E. CASEY FOUNDATION:

Good Jobs and Careers is a “brochure wheel” outlining 10 steps that communities need to do in order to implement a large-scale workforce initiative that advances low-income, low-skilled people into good jobs and careers.
http://www.aecf.org/initiatives/jobsinitiative/goodjobs.htm

Working Hard; Falling Short, a new report, finds that too many jobs pay poor wages and provide no benefits, and that American workers are poorly prepared and supported to move into better paying jobs.
http://www.aecf.org/initiatives/jobsinitiative/

Strengthen Families, Strengthening Schools is a tool kit to help schools partner with families and communities to strengthen families, strengthen schools, and help children do better.
http://www.aecf.org/initiatives/mc/sf/

AN ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK FOR THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Students attend community colleges for a variety of reasons, yet at the heart of each reason is the desire to improve skills, increase knowledge, or change attitudes. This white paper drafted by a team of community college practitioners and assessment industry experts establishes an assessment framework to address these desires.
http://www.league.org/publication/abstracts/learning/lelabs0410.html