JFF applauds the President’s goals of training and putting two million more skilled Americans to work to boost our economy. We also believe it can be done—if college is made affordable and accessible for all Americans. Therefore, we also support the President’s call for continued low interest rates on student loans and an extension of college-related tax credits, as well as the Administration’s efforts to increase Pell Grant awards.

Still, if we eliminate adults' financial barriers to education, an estimated 93 million Americans lack the basic skills necessary to succeed in postsecondary education and the workplace. And that number goes up as 1.3 million drop out of high school each year. For these individuals, JFF and others are developing and scaling up programs that help dropouts and low-skilled adults earn a GED and college-ready skills. There are also more than 230 early college high schools nationwide that help students traditionally underrepresented in higher education to stay engaged in school and even earn up to two years of free college credit along with their high school diploma. READ MORE.

Graduation rate accountability and multiple measures of success are two hot topics in the debate on the “No Child Left Behind” law. Both are essential to successful education reform, and both are at issue as 11 states have asked the U.S. Department of Education for exemptions from parts of NCLB.

In a recent blog, JFF’s Cassius Johnson and Kathryn Young commend the Department and states for their commitment to college and career readiness—but they also call for making graduation rate improvement a top priority.

Johnson and Young highlight three recommendations on how states should update their waiver applications to help increase students’ graduation and college readiness rates.

Tierre Welton and Jerry Graham used to hang out with bad crowds at school. Leilanni Basco and Rebecca York just felt unmotivated, lost in a sea of students. Now all four teenagers—and hundreds more—are on a clear path to college success thanks to the Excel Academy North and Excel Academy South in Philadelphia, alternative schools for over-age and undercredited youth. “Here, the teachers get to know you and stay after school to help you,” Basco told the city’s Northeast Times Star. Welton said she’ll graduate two years faster at Excel than she would have at her former charter school.

In just one year, more than two-thirds of Excel students advanced their English and/or math skills by two years or more, as JFF’s Cecilia Le and Lili Allen detailed in a recent report. The key to success—besides the students’ own motivation—is their schools’ use of JFF’s Common Instructional Framework, a set of classroom practices that other schools and districts nationwide are beginning to use. Both Excel schools are operated by Camelot, an education management organization focusing on students who have not succeeded in traditional classrooms.

January brought some good news on the job front, even if the nation has a long way to go before we can really celebrate. In his latest blog, John Dorrer asks a critical question: How can we reconnect the millions of Americans who are experiencing the hardship of job loss with the emerging opportunities?

Looking nationally, Dorrer counts down the six most in-demand skills and occupations and explains how “real-time” data on local labor markets can reveal what specific good jobs are available in a particular region or city. Dorrer leads Credentials that Work, an initiative that uses real-time labor tools to help community colleges determine what jobs are available in their region and adjust their program offerings to prepare students specifically for those jobs.

“Why didn’t early college catch fire?” Tom Vander Ark recently asked this question on his blog, Getting Smart. He is certainly the right person to ask, having been present at the birth of the early college idea in 2001. He comes out in strong support of early college but still wonders aloud, “Why aren’t there 2500 early colleges?”

Commenting on Vander Ark’s blog, JFF’s Joel Vargas and Nancy Hoffman said that early college has caught fire, especially when compared to other efforts to prepare minority and low-income students for college: the 230 early college schools started through the Early College High School Initiative since 2002 now serve 53,000 students nationally, and it has inspired the creation of at least 100 other schools.

Vargas and Hoffman also pointed out that the early college concept is still growing. “What JFF wanted to prove,” they wrote, “was that providing low-income, underprepared young people with a quotient of college-level courses in high school, strong academic and social supports, and connections to a postsecondary institution would boost college going and completion.”

Today, given the extraordinary success in proving that point, JFF is moving forward in two directions. One is our work on what we call “early college designs” for all students in a district. An example of how we are doing this, described below, is the Hidalgo Early College District Toolkit.

The second is based on Vargas’s conclusion: “Early college will only grow faster if policies reward it.” Toward that end, we offer What Gets Measures Gets Done, a brief that highlights how states can reward schools that do what early college schools do: raise the college readiness and success rates of low-income students as indicated by their completion of meaningful college courses that give them momentum toward a degree.

—Marlene B. Seltzer, President and CEO, Jobs for the Future

The Hidalgo Early College District Toolkit is a resource for practitioners seeking to prepare all students for postsecondary success. Nationally recognized for its innovative approaches and strong results, Hidalgo is a small, rural school district in South Texas where every student earns college credits before graduating from high school. After collaborating with Hidalgo for the past two years, JFF is sharing the district’s knowledge, in its own words, about what it takes to make “college for all” a reality.

Hidalgo is only one example of how JFF helps districts significantly increase the number of students who graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college. We have developed a portfolio of Early College Designs to help districts of varying sizes and demographics achieve what Hidalgo has.

For more information on how Early College Designs can help your district or state, please contact Dr. LaVonne Sheffield, lsheffield@jff.org, 617.728.4446.

States are laying the foundation for ensuring that more students start college prepared for college-level work. However, this is no guarantee that they will reach the finish line—a postsecondary degree or credential. What can states do to prime all students for postsecondary success—especially low-income, minority, and first-generation college students? What Gets Measured Gets Done proposes that including college-course completion as a measure of K-12 accountability is a robust strategy for driving such educational improvement.

Two articles in the fall 2011 American Educator, from the American Federation of Teachers, highlight what lies behind the success of early colleges. In “Hidalgo Sets Sail,” Thad R. Nodine looks at the district’s system of supports for all students. “The Early College Challenge,” by James E. Rosenbaum and Kelly Iwanaga Becker, describes research-based best practices for support. “States have enormous difficulties getting at-risk students to achieve grade-level standards, much less college-level standards,” they write. “Some reformers seek quick and easy solutions while blaming teachers or students; [early colleges] focus on devising organization procedures for giving teachers and students the support they need.”

Using new technologies that make it possible—for the first time—to collect up-to-date labor market information, JFF has launched Credentials that Work, an initiative with the potential to transform how postsecondary institutions and systems align occupational training programs with the economy’s needs. Ten colleges in the Credentials that Work network began using the new technology in September. The initiative is funded by the Joyce Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

“If colleges expect to attract more students and prepare them for sustainable careers, they must better align program offerings and course curricula to the needs of their local labor markets,” said JFF Program Director John Dorrer.

This brief by David Aldstadt examines the emerging role of real-time labor market data. It documents the work of colleges and states that are leading the way in using online job ads to gather real-time intelligence about occupation and skill demands. Their experiences demonstrate both the possibilities and pitfalls of utilizing this exciting new approach.

Health care employers and the college educators who collaborate with them have a new tool for advancing frontline employees. Jobs to Careers, a national initiative for educating frontline health care workers, has released an online toolkit that details steps toward creating a work-based learning program. This approach, a hallmark of Jobs to Careers, enables workers to earn college credits and credentials faster and more affordably by turning job tasks into learning opportunities.

On October 18 and a second date to be announced soon, JFF is offering a webinar to introduce the toolkit and explain the major elements of work-based learning. We invite employers in health care and other industry sectors to register, as well as educators, workforce development and human resource professionals, researchers, private funders, and government policymakers. CLICK HERE to register.

Jobs to Careers, managed by JFF, is a $15.8 million initiative sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in collaboration with The Hitachi Foundation and the U.S. Department of Labor.

JFF’s co-manager of Jobs to Careers is Randall Wilson, an expert on workforce development in health care and on career advancement for lower-skilled workers. Randy has 20+ years of experience researching and evaluating workforce development and urban community development projects—including work in housing, economic development, and community planning, as well as education and training. The common thread, he says, is that success in all these areas ultimately depends on people having access to good jobs. “My path has always circled back to work—not just the skills of the worker but the quality of the jobs.”

Randy began his career as an urban planner, then shifted to teaching and research, earning a doctorate in public policy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. But he maintained a constant connection to practice with consulting and teaching for community groups, trade unions, and workforce agencies—and JFF. In 2005, Randy joined our staff, “to join the national conversation about career advancement.”

Another theme in Randy’s life is music. As a disc jockey at a University of California, Santa Cruz, radio station, he hosted a popular program focused on classic rhythm and blues and other American roots music. He is quite pleased that his love of music has carried over to his 12-year-old son Micah, who plays electric guitar in the Angry Toddlers, a band of middle schoolers.

State policy in Florida sheds light on potential ways for states to improve the success of students who begin their college careers in developmental education. High Flyers analyzes features of the state’s policymaking environment that have enabled three high-performing colleges to implement solid developmental education strategies. Based on the aspects of the Florida policy environment that undergird strong performance, the report includes a questionnaire that state policymakers can use to consider their own policymaking environments. This brief was prepared for JFF by Lande Ajose, Ria Sengupta Bhatt, and Gagandeep Kaur of BTW Informing Change.

State governments and private foundations are pursuing the elusive goal of improving college completion rates. Driving these efforts is an awareness of the large proportion of students who come to college—especially community college—unprepared for college-level coursework. This challenge is one that the states and colleges involved in Achieving the Dream and its Developmental Education Initiative have been addressing for several years.

Now states are turning to a familiar tool—student assessment—to advance college-readiness efforts. Testing Ground, by Pamela Burdman, describes how Florida’s Division of Colleges worked with K-12 partners to design, plan, and launch an ambitious college-readiness agenda, with a new college placement test as its centerpiece.

In August, JFF’s Lara Couturier, Gretchen Schmidt, and Barbara Endel moderated “Turning Around Failure: System Triage for Severely Underprepared Adults in Higher Education,” an online “Jam” session on ways to better align adult basic education and developmental education. The Jam, an extended online forum in which participants come and go as they please, was co-hosted by the Education Commission for the States, Knowledge in the Public Interest, and JFF.

More than 140 people participated in the seven-hour event, discussing, for instance, what floor (if any) should be established for determining whether students get admitted into developmental or Adult Basic Education—and why so many practitioners advocate for a floor even when they dislike the idea of limiting some students’ options.

It’s more important than ever for adults to access college, quickly advance their skills, and earn credentials that lead to meaningful jobs where they live. This is the context for Accelerating Opportunity: A Breaking Through Initiative, a four-year project focused on jobs, the economy, and improving opportunities for adults. Accelerating Opportunity aims to substantially increase the number of adults who earn the credentials and skills they need to get and succeed in family-sustaining jobs—helping drive economic recovery for both individuals and their communities.

Eleven states—Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, and Wisconsin—have received $200,000 each to develop plans for redesigning their Adult Basic Education and postsecondary programs, integrating basic skills with practical, occupational training. Later this year, four to six of these states will receive grants of $1.6 million each over three years to implement their plans. By 2014, the initiative will engage nearly 40 community colleges and over 18,000 adult learners. In Building Integrated Pathways to Sustainable Careers, JFF’s Rachel Pleasants describes the initiative’s structures, partners, and action steps.

A strategic collaboration of diverse philanthropies funds Accelerating Opportunity. It includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations. For program and implementation expertise, JFF has engaged three partners: the National Council on Workforce Education; the National College Transition Network; and the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. I’m very excited for JFF and our grantee states to help millions of Americans obtain essential credentials. Thanks to all of our partners and funders who share in our belief that revamping ABE is a crucial investment in our workforce, our economy, and our communities.

—Marlene B. Seltzer, President and CEO, Jobs for the Future

Leading the Accelerating Opportunity team at JFF is Barbara Endel. While she is a recent addition to JFF’s staff, Barbara is a longtime advocate and developer of career pathways for low-skilled adults. In fact, she recently served as a policy consultant for JFF on the Developmental Education Initiative, a six-state project of Achieving the Dream.

A first-generation college goer herself, Barbara has always been thankful to her parents for pushing her to continue her education, and she has dedicated her career to helping others do the same. “I’m very excited about Accelerating Opportunity; it really aligns Adult Basic Ed with community colleges,” she says. “Up until now, adults haven’t had a clear path to college after ABE. I think we’re going to change that for a lot of people.”
Previously, as a senior program officer at KnowledgeWorks Foundation, Dr. Endel helped Ohio create career pathways for low-income workers in health care, manufacturing, and other industry sectors. She also helped create career pathways for more than 3,000 low-income workers in the Cincinnati area, using grants from the National Fund for Workforce Solutions. As a consultant to the Louisiana Community & Technical College System, she helped the state introduce career pathways as a way to help rebuild its economy following Hurricane Katrina.

Outside of JFF, Barbara manages to save some energy for her other passions. She’s a certified scuba diver and an avid kayaker. She’s also training for her next half-marathon, the annual Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati next May.

Green jobs—those that contribute to meeting the goal of achieving environmental sustainability—encompass a broad range of occupations and skill sets, from building, retrofitting, and conservation, to support roles in sales, customer service, and accounting. Most green jobs require at least some postsecondary education—seemingly locking out six million low-income youth who have disengaged from school. But the nation’s Service and Conservation Corps networks and other youth recovery programs are giving these young people a second chance to restart their education, learn a trade, and become valuable assets for emerging green industries.

In A Green Career Pathways Framework, published by the Corps Network, JFF’s Terry Grobe and her co-writers Kate O’Sullivan, Sally T. Prouty, and Sarah White show how these programs work. Drawing on early results from efforts supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored “Postsecondary Success Initiative,” they delineate a “college connected” design to dramatically improve the outlook for disconnected youth.

JFF is leveraging our expertise in green-sector training to expand opportunities for workers in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, DC. This new project—The GreenWays Initiative—focuses on skills training for green jobs in construction, auto technology, manufacturing, and utilities.

“This initiative is a terrific example of how we can equip workers with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in today’s job market,” said Marlene B. Seltzer, president and CEO of JFF. “These programs help create family-supporting careers and grow our economy.”

The GreenWays Initiative is funded by an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor through the Green Jobs Innovation Fund. In partnership with Wider Opportunities for Women, a leading national nonprofit promoting individuals’ economic independence, JFF will provide peer learning forums and technical assistance that help the local initiatives implement their programs.

In July, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions awarded a $450,000, three-year grant to the Greater Newark Workforce Funders Collaborative in New Jersey. The group becomes the 31st member of the National Fund network, which provides innovative job training and career advancement for workers while helping businesses grow. Since 2007, the National Fund has raised nearly $24 million to support workforce development efforts in 31 communities. Local funders have contributed an additional $104 million to sustain these efforts.

While many employers offer tuition reimbursement, few lower-income employees can afford to pay that cost up front and wait to get the money back. Also, most reimbursement programs cover only study toward a Bachelor’s degree or higher, again leaving out lower-income workers who typically seek out a certificate program to gain more rapid advancement.

The “tuition advancement” program at Children’s Hospital Boston is different: it prepays college tuition for low-income, entry-level workers seeking credentials within a defined set of high-growth, high-demand jobs. Employer-paid Tuition Advancement, a brief from the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, explains how the program advances frontline workers and helps the hospital develop a smarter, more stable workforce. The program is part of the hospital’s participation in SkillWorks, the Boston-area regional funding collaborative supported by the National Fund.

The National Fund for Workforce Solutions shares a goal with local United Ways across the United States: to bring family-sustaining employment opportunities to more lower-income working families. A new report documents how these local groups got involved with the National Fund’s regional collaboratives. In particular, the report, prepared by the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce with a grant from United Way Worldwide, looks at the role of United Ways in the development and implementation of local National Fund projects.

In the June School Administrator, JFF’s Joel Vargas and Marc S. Miller discuss how JFF is scaling up early college designs, building on the success of the 230 early colleges nationwide that prepare traditionally underserved youth for college. Early college high schools enable students to simultaneously earn a substantial number of college credits, tuition-free along, with a high school diploma. Young people spend fewer years and less money achieving a college degree because they have a head start on college and are more prepared to succeed when they get there. And the basic design principles of these schools can be tailored and expanded to whole districts (as in the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District in Texas) or statewide (as in North Carolina, which has created 71 early colleges statewide).

Leading JFF’s efforts to use early college designs to help school districts raise the graduation and college-readiness rates of underserved and struggling students is LaVonne M. Sheffield, our new associate vice president for early college expansion. With over 35 years’ experience as a teacher and administrator, Dr. Sheffield is a longtime proponent of education reforms that are critical to achieving these goals of early college. Before joining JFF, Dr. Sheffield was superintendent of Rockford Public Schools, the third-largest school system in Illinois and a leader in reform, including instituting standards-based curricula, differentiated instruction, and performance-based teacher evaluations.

Growing up in Detroit, Dr. Sheffield learned from her parents that education is the key to achieving individual success, community prosperity, and racial equity. Both her mother—a school nurse and school board member—and her father—a respected leader of organized labor—were active in the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout her own career, Dr. Sheffield has been dedicated to the proposition that all children can learn and that all children deserve a high-quality education.

Dr. Sheffield has also held district leadership roles in Detroit (where she began her career as a teacher), Philadelphia, and Baton Rouge.

If you would like more information on how early college designs can help your district or state, please contact Dr. Sheffield, lsheffield@jff.org, 617.728.4446.

JFF's Nancy Hoffman responded to New York Times' columnist David Brooks, who urged 2011 graduates not to “find themselves” out in the world but rather to lose themselves in life-fulfilling tasks (“A Generation Faces the Road Ahead,” June 5). Those whom Brooks writes to only "represent a minority of the youth population, those who have the means to get a college degree," Hoffman writes. "The majority of young people have had too little structure, supervision, and sound advice about the future, not too much" and need "a system that structures the transition to the labor market through a mix of school and work [that] engages employers in education."

Hoffman has also pointed out that some countries have surpassed the United States in terms of gainfully employing its young people. Youth unemployment is in single digits in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; in the United States, it has soared to nearly 20 percent.

Wayne Early Middle College High School, which opened in 2007, was one of six finalists to have President Barack Obama speak at its first graduation ceremony. Wayne is one of 71 early colleges in North Carolina. In the national Early College High School Initiative, 230 schools are giving more than 50,000 students a year the opportunity to earn up to two years of college credit—tuition free.

Less than 5 percent of GED holders ever earn a postsecondary degree. In response, innovative GED programs have begun creating clear, effective pathways to postsecondary education, preparing their students for college and careers. John Garvey and JFF’s Terry Grobe share lessons from “best in class" GED to College programs that show early, positive results in preparing youth for college and helping them persist once there. It also explores key issues connected to the growth of this programming within the field and lays out a framework for transforming short-term GED programs into more intensive, college-connected designs.

Since opening in 1997, the University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts, has had a near-zero dropout rate, and 95 percent of its students enroll in college—nearly all of whom are from minority or low-income families. To help more of those students advance in college, UPCS has redesigned its senior year to more closely resemble a college freshman year, with semester-long, college-level courses and college-style syllabi, and assessments. As UPCS founder Donna Rodrigues and JFF’s Cecilia Le detail in the April issue of Educational Leadership, 93 percent of UPCS graduates who experienced the redesigned senior year are on pace to earn a college credential within six years, suggesting that the redesign can help address the broader education system’s college retention issue.

Students are more likely to fail developmental math than any other course in higher education. Cecilia Le, Kimberly R. Rogers, and Janet Santos look at three community colleges that have invested in and improved student outcomes in this area.

The emerging and expanding green economy has the potential to create not just jobs but career opportunities. Kimberly R. Rogers and Rachel Pleasants highlight community colleges that are “greening” their curricula and their own operations—and simultaneously addressing employment and environmental needs in the communities they serve.

Community colleges are well positioned to strengthen the workforce in one of America’s most critical sectors: health care. Radha Roy Biswas and Jeremy Kelley highlight how community colleges are preparing frontline health care workers and low-income individuals for family-sustaining careers in health care.

Community colleges must fundamentally change the way they deliver Adult Basic Education in order to help all students earn credentials that hold value in today’s economy. In Achieving Ambitious Goals, Barbara Endel, Nate Anderson, and Jeremy Kelley highlight what five Breaking Through colleges are doing to not only advance adults’ skills and career prospects but also to scale up successful programs across campuses and state systems. Breaking Through, a partnership of JFF and the National Council for Workforce Education, is helping adults enter and succeed in college.

Two years ago, Rachel Pleasants came to JFF through the Education Pioneers program and then stayed on, becoming a vital partner in our efforts to help adults succeed in community colleges. She now conducts research, creates tools, and maintains relationships with the 41 colleges and 22 states in the Breaking Through network.

Enabling lower-skilled Americans to navigate the education pipeline—the goal of Breaking Though—has long been a commitment of Rachel’s. Before coming to JFF, she was an administrator and after-school instructor in K-12 programs. She also has worked on career development efforts for high school students, including the Met School in Providence, Rhode Island, and Just-A-Start in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Outside the office, Rachel is an avid biker, rock climber, potter, and nationally competitive crossword puzzler. And Rachel’s own education reflects her diverse interests: a Master’s in education policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and two Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Iowa—one in Spanish, the other in painting.

On Tuesday, Savannah Early College senior Nicole Poole and Principal Gertrude Robinson were interviewed on the Bill Edwards Morning Show (WTKS 1290 AM). A Georgia flag also flew over the State Capitol this week in honor of Savannah Early College and in recognition of Early College High School Week. In addition, Governor Nathan Deal and University System of Georgia Chancellor Erroll Davis, Jr., proclaimed this to be “Georgia Early College Week.” Georgia is home to 12 early colleges in the Early College High School Initiative.

On Wednesday, 11 students from four Central Texas early college high schools celebrated Early College High School Week at the Texas Capitol. The Texas legislature recognized the innovation and success of early college high schools, as well as the hard work and dedication of ECHS students across the state by proclaiming March 20-26 as Early College High School Week in Texas. State Rep. Rob Eissler (R-Woodlands) and State Sen. Royce West (D-Dallas) formalized the honor by reading the proclamation. The students also had the honor to meet their local elected officials and have their pictures taken. Texas is home to 44 early colleges and 5 T-STEM (Texas Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) schools.

Cross Creek Early College High School invited leaders from Cumberland County Schools, Fayetteville State University, and other area high schools to see firsthand how rigorous, effective instruction is delivered at the school. The visit is part of the Learning Laboratory Initiative, an effort funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to showcase and spread effective classroom practices. North Carolina has a nation-leading 71 early colleges.

On Thursday, the North Carolina New Schools Project hosted a packed-house conference to promote preparing everyone for college, raise awareness of STEM and other school transformation efforts, and equip participants with tools to implement innovations in their communities. Keynote speeches were given by Governor Beverly Perdue, nationally recognized education innovator Uri Treisman, and White House STEM advisor and CEO of Change the Equation Linda Rosen.

The United States uses vocational education mainly as a means of motivating uninterested students. In contrast, vocational education and training programs in countries with low dropout rates serve large numbers of students. These programs lead to jobs or further education and result in certificates that are trusted by employers and unions. JFF’s Nancy Hoffman examines the many uses and benefits of vocational education in the January issue of Phi Delta Kappan.

Also in the January Phi Delta Kappan, JFF’s Adria Steinberg and Lili Allen discuss Back on
Track designs for students who have disengaged from school or dropped out altogether.
The authors profile two schools that combine Back on Track designs with features of
the early college design, giving students more transparent on ramps to postsecondary
education and career credentials.

Improving Access and Quality: The Role of Frontline Staff at Behavioral and Mental Health Centers and Attracting and Retaining Talent: Frontline Workers in Long-Term Care are the latest in a series of briefs highlighting the experience of Jobs to Careers partners in training, certifying, and advancing frontline workers in specific subsectors of health care. This training, which combines traditional classroom instruction and work-based learning, meets the needs of low-skilled adults who are balancing work with their family lives, often on a tight budget.

The subsector series also includes briefs on hospitals and community health centers. Jobs to Careers is a $15.8 million initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, with The Hitachi Foundation and the U.S. Department of Labor. JFF is the National Program Office.

A new study from the Aspen Institute’s Workforce Strategies Initiative examines the
training model and its value to employees and the employer of the Jobs to Careers project conducted at Temple University Hospital-Episcopal Campus in Philadelphia. The project, which provided training to mental health workers, was designed and delivered by the District 1199C Training & Upgrading Fund in partnership with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

This report from The Boston Foundation details how its Allied Health Initiative helps entry-level and low-income hospital employees develop their skills, academic readiness, and certifications and to advance into critically needed allied health positions. This employer-led effort responds to a serious need expressed by leaders of Boston hospitals about current and anticipated shortages of allied health professionals. Designed and implemented with assistance from a number of partners, including JFF, the Allied Health Initiative provided assessment, counseling, and training services to more than 1,250 entry-level and low-income hospital employees in its the first three years.

In February, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions announced grants to support innovative approaches to job training and career support in six cities: Atlanta, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; Louisville, Kentucky; Mobile, Alabama; and New Orleans, Louisiana. This brings the number of regional collaboratives supported by the National Fund to 30. The awards, totaling $1.8 million, are the second step in implementing a $7.7 million grant awarded to the National Fund and its implementation partner, JFF, through the federal government’s landmark Social Innovation Fund.

The expansion, noted Damian Thorman, national program director at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the new chair of the National Fund, “will allow us to broaden our effort to find the best ways to prepare jobseekers and workers for the positions that will emerge as the economy recovers.” In a recent interview, Thorman discussed his vision for the National Fund.

There is growing evidence that the most effective way to grow the U.S. economy is to promote innovation at the regional level. In a new JFF report, Pete Carlson, Robert Holm, and Ray Uhalde take an in-depth look at the kinds of partnership structures regions are putting in place to grow their economies, where leadership for those efforts comes from, and how they are addressing workforce issues. The authors offer key lessons about what regions can do to put effective partnership structures in place.

In an online Education Week commentary, JFF says it’s time for the nation to pay attention when any community boasts results like those in Hidalgo, Texas. The results are especially remarkable when 9 out of 10 students in the high school are considered economically disadvantaged, and over half enter with limited proficiency in English.

Documented in JFF’s recent publication, College Success for All, the story of Hidalgo is also about turning an entire school district around. In the late 1980s, student achievement in Hidalgo ranked in the bottom 10 percent in Texas. Local leaders took giant steps to improve student performance, and they gained support from every segment of the surrounding community. Over the past two decades, everyone—from bus drivers to principals, from teachers to school board members—has focused on doing what it takes to raise the achievement levels of all 3,500 young people in the Hidalgo schools.

Recently, The New York Times, The Texas Tribune, and The Washington Post have all lauded the Hidalgo Independent School District, a partner in the Early College High School Initiative. Managed by JFF, the initiative includes more than 230 schools nationwide that give young people the opportunity to earn free college credit while in high school. And like Hidalgo’s, these students are mostly from minority and low-income families. As Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews wrote, “There is no question the feeling in [Hidalgo] about where their kids are going is different than most neighborhoods full of people without much money. . . . That is worth thinking about when we worry that putting such emphasis on college may be too much for those kids.”

An effective, efficient workforce is essential to addressing rising health care costs. Nevertheless, investments in career advancement for frontline health care workers are limited. Creating Career Pathways for Frontline Health Care Workers focuses on promising practices drawn from Jobs to Careers. At 17 sites around the country, the initiative explores new ways to help frontline health care workers get the skills they need to provide quality care and build sustainable careers. It also helps the health care industry improve the quality of patient care and health services by building the skills and careers of frontline employees.

To deliver care to an ever-increasing number of patients, and to make that care more patient-centered, hospitals must focus on the career and skill development of all members within the existing workforce, not just doctors and other high-level professionals. The Resource Within demonstrates best practices for advancing and retaining frontline hospital workers in order to meet the rising demand for health care talent. These practices are being implemented at eight hospitals that participate in Jobs to Careers.

The National Fund for Workforce Solutions is an unprecedented national partnership testing new ways to address a critical problem: the large gap between the skills many workers have and the skills employers need in order to compete. At the center of the initiative, 24 regional collaboratives of funders come together to support workforce development projects—to decide, in partnership with employers and practitioners, how and where these investments should be made. This report traces the history of seven collaboratives, from before the launch of the National Fund through early 2010. It notes what conditions gave rise to them, how they began and developed, what challenges they have faced, and what key lessons they hold for future project developers.

Each regional collaborative in the National Fund for Workforce Solutions invests in local workforce partnerships that organize key stakeholders, mobilize service providers, and secure local resources to help workers gain the skills they need and help employers access the skilled labor they need. Critical to their success is engaging employers as active partners. This report, based on interviews with the coordinators of workforce partnerships, details how employers identify and meet their needs and what challenges they face in doing so.

We invite you to attend JFF’s sessions at this year’s NAWB Forum in Washington, DC, February 5-8. Maria Flynn and Gloria Mwase will offer perspectives on how Workforce Investment Boards can expand adult education to strengthen regional career paths. Randall Wilson will presenting findings from Jobs to Careers on advancement for frontline health care workers. And Robert Holm and John Dorrer will discuss the role of labor market information in fostering local and regional economic growth. And, of course, please stop by our booth (#20) in the main exhibit hall.

On January 12, at 3 p.m. EST, JFF will offer a webinar on why and how to expand early college designs across states and school districts. Presenters will include Superintendent Ed Blaha of the Hidalgo, Texas, school district: 95 percent of its 2010 high school graduates earned free, transferable college credit last year, even though Hidalgo is one of the nation’s most economically depressed areas. Also presenting will be Alma Garcia of the Texas High School Project. And JFF’s Joel Vargas and Nancy Hoffman, coauthors of A Policymaker’s Guide to Early College Designs, will share ways that districts and states can create stories like Hidalgo’s.

JFF offers states, districts, and intermediaries a comprehensive range of well-tested services to help reengage youth who are off track from graduating or have dropped out altogether. We offer Back on Track services in four areas: planning; school implementation; instructional and leadership professional development; and Counseling to Careers training and system building.

Grantees of the U.S. Department of Labor’s new Community College and Career Training
Grant Program may be interested in the services JFF can provide to consortia of
community colleges. We offer a comprehensive range of well-tested products and services
to innovate, redesign, and grow education and training programs serving dislocated
workers and adult students.

JFF is expanding its successful Breaking Through initiative in North Carolina thanks to a
$1.9 million grant from The Walmart Foundation. Breaking Through helps 35 community
colleges nationwide prepare low-skilled adults to succeed in occupational and technical
degree programs. With this new funding, JFF will assist in developing occupational and
technical pathways for adult students at six North Carolina colleges, as well as improve the counseling capacity of these colleges and their youth-serving community partners.

In 2005, the Hidalgo, Texas, school district made a commitment: all of its students, not just a select group, would earn college credits on the nation’s southern border before graduating from high school. And this June, when the first group of young people to go through four years of the early college program graduated, they had accumulated a remarkable 3,743 college credit hours. College Success for All tells how this low-income, 95 percent Hispanic community created a college and career culture, established strong partnerships with local colleges, and developed high-quality course sequences and career pathways.

Like Texas, North Carolina is a frontrunner in adopting college-level work in high school as a statewide, full-scale reform strategy. According to ninth-grader results from a rigorous experimental study, North Carolina’s early college high schools are improving school environments for students, resulting in better attendance, reduced suspensions, and more students on track for college. These schools are also expanding the college preparatory pipeline for students of all backgrounds. The study was conducted by Julie Edmunds of the Serve Center at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Reducing college students’ “time to degree” and eliminating the excess credit hours many students take can help states graduate more students faster—and save money for students, institutions, and states. To improve data-driven decision making about time and completion, JFF has prepared online tools for diagnosing why students are not graduating on time and analyzing the factors that contribute to extended time to completion.

Currently available are:

• Time to Completion Tools for Institutional Data Analysis: This comprehensive resource includes research, a ready-to-use student survey, and templates designed to enable college administrators to use institutional data to conduct time-to-completion analyses, disaggregated by key student and institution factors.
• Time to Completion Policy Exploration Tool: This interactive tool builds from a research base on barriers and supports to timely completion. It enables a state or system to audit its own policies against powerful policy levers for improving time to completion. The tool yields a state policy profile that can help policymakers make decisions on improving time to completion.

The challenge is all too familiar: The nation needs to improve postsecondary completion rates to ensure a competitive labor market, but how do we get more people to complete? This opinion piece by JFF Vice President Nancy Hoffman looks at the data confirming that if you want more students to finish, it’s critical to help them go faster. Time matters. But acceleration strategies have to be coupled with institutional change: policies, practices, and pathways that lead to degrees with fewer choices, better structures for completion, and clearer connections to the labor market and/or further education.