A theme at JFF these days is awards, both to our partners and from JFF and our partners. These awards recognize exceptional work in the field, encourage innovators to continue their efforts, and help spread the word to other practitioners and policymakers.

On April 18, MetLife Foundation announced the 2010 Community College Excellence Award. On April 27, the Council on Foundations announced its Distinguished Grantmaking and Critical Impact awards. And on May 3, the Early College High School Initiative issued the first Student Information System Diamond Awards.

Please join me in congratulating the award winners for their commitment and their success. I believe they will inspire you, just as they inspire us.

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

Today, economic success depends on bold and innovative action to build a highly skilled workforce. Jobs for the Future collaborates with community colleges to make the most of their unique institutional position and move more Americans through high school to postsecondary credentials and family-sustaining careers.

Achieving this vision requires a multifaceted approach.

One strand of our work focuses on preparing students for college and careers. For example, the transition to college—even community college—is a major barrier to postsecondary success. Students in early college high schools earn a high school diploma and up to two years of college credit—tuition free. In 24 states, school systems partner with community colleges and other postsecondary institutions to build this effective pathway to graduation and careers.

The second strand of our work in this area focuses on helping students succeed in community college. JFF manages the policy component of the Developmental Education Initiative and works with policymakers in six states to encourage colleges to take actions that promise better results.

The third strand is serving adults returning to college. Community colleges are essential to Jobs to Careers, which supports 17 partnerships that bring together employers, educational institutions, and other organizations to create advancement opportunities for frontline workers in health care.

This issue of Newswire highlights JFF’s participation in Achieving the Dream through which over 100 community colleges, 16 states, and many partner organizations are improving outcomes for students, particularly those from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds. This national initiative’s policy component, which JFF manages, is designed to make it easier for participating colleges to succeed in broadly institutionalizing and sustaining change. The policy efforts also move lessons from participating colleges to all institutions in a state and nationally.

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

Macomb Community College in Michigan just sent JFF a story I’d like to share with you. It’s about Marly Treier, a person who loves flowers. As a little girl, the 23-year-old resident of Macomb Township, Michigan, could always count on receiving a birthday bouquet from her grandfather. And recently, she created the floral arrangements for her grandparents’ 50th anniversary celebration. This year, she became a Michigan Certified Florist, a designation the Michigan Floral Association has awarded to only a few dozen individuals.

Ms. Treier’s is one of the many success stories being featured across the country as part of Workforce Solutions Week, which began this Monday. The week highlights the successes of individual participants, service providers, employers, funders, and other partners in four national initiatives:

• The 32 Breaking Through community colleges promoting and strengthening efforts to help low-literacy adults prepare for and succeed in occupational and technical degree programs;

• The 5 Connecting Literacy and Work sites designed to strengthen the connections between adult literacy and workforce development;

  The 17 Jobs to Careers projects helping frontline health care workers gain the skills and credentials they need to advance their careers, while helping their employers retain a talented workforce and ensure that patients receive high-quality care; and

• The 22 regional funding collaboratives and over 60 local workforce partnerships in the National Fund for Workforce Solutions that are addressing a critical problem in America today: the crisis in workforce preparedness.

To help her land a job at a florist, Ms. Treier was able to take advantage of floral design classes offered through the workforce and continuing education program at Breaking Through partner Macomb Community College. Later, the program helped her earn her certification, a success that is especially notable because Ms. Treier has a learning disability that makes reading and memorizing particularly difficult.

JFF invites you to check out what is happening in your community during Workforce Solutions Week 2010. It’s a great opportunity to honor local successes, expand the reach of local efforts, and deepen the community relationships that are essential for future growth and stability.

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

I believe that JFF, an organization that spans the educational pipeline from secondary school through adult workforce development, has a distinctive perspective on how this nation can achieve an ambitious, 10-year goal: doubling the number of low-income youth and adults who earn postsecondary credentials or get training that helps them advance to family-sustaining careers.

This NEWSWIRE highlights two publications that help move us toward that goal by focusing on perhaps this nation’s most essential challenge: reengaging young people who have dropped out of school and engaging youth who are in danger of dropping out.

The first publication reports on the groundbreaking work of Philadelphia’s Project U-Turn to take citywide strategic action on behalf of disengaged youth. This effort took a major step forward in 2004 when a national funders collaborative selected Philadelphia to participate in the Youth Transition Funders Group Strategic Assessment Initiative, coordinated by JFF.

The second piece, an Education Week commentary, provides a framework that policy and practice leaders can use in developing statewide approaches to the same challenge.

We at JFF have just completed our 25th year, prepared and poised to undertake an ambitious next generation of work: improving the educational attainment of low-income young people who have been historically underrepresented in higher education.

The growing knowledge base of promising strategies, combined with concerted efforts to match reforms to the circumstances where they are most likely to succeed, can go a long way in helping the nation once again be first in the world in the percentage of our young people who complete high school and earn a postsecondary credential.

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

VIDEO: MARLENE SELTZER ON DOUBLING THE NUMBERS

Most people would agree that if this nation wishes to remain competitive in the evolving global economy, more Americans must earn postsecondary credentials. But we are in a bind: the challenge is to improve the productivity of the U.S. higher education system so that more students graduate within existing resources.

Not only that, the goal must include ensuring that more students graduate in a timely manner. Earning an Associate’s degree within two years or a Bachelor’s degree within four years is no longer the norm. Extended “time to completion” is a critical barrier to increasing the productivity of U.S. higher education.

With improvements in both practice and policy, we can address many of the factors that extend students’ time to completion. States, higher education systems, and institutions have begun to experiment with new ideas that hold real promise for promoting timely completion. Building on those experiments—and taking a student-centered approach for states, systems, and institutions—Jobs for the Future is leading the Time to Completion project for Lumina Foundation for Education. Our work, detailed in this issue of Newswire, has two goals:

• To expand what we know about time to completion through research and analysis; and
• To advocate for policies and practices that will lead to more students earning degrees faster.

As the new year approaches, we at JFF wish you all seasons greetings. Together with you, we will continue to build pathways to success in education and careers.

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

We as a nation have yet to meet all the conditions for prosperity in the years ahead. Nearly 1.2 million young Americans each year—almost one in three students—do not graduate from high school on time. Of those who do graduate, only 45 percent are actually prepared to succeed in college. The reality is even more dire among low-income youth. Meanwhile, amid record-breaking unemployment nationwide, severe skill shortages stymie entire industries and threaten regional competitiveness.

As the United States fights its way out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, we must restore both our country’s physical infrastructure and its human capital. Indeed, the federal government has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to stimulate significant progress in addressing economic hardship in America by putting every individual on the path to college and a family-sustaining career. Although the challenge is great, progress is possible.

A FOUNDATION FOR LASTING PROSPERITY

The United States must invest in expanding the supply of models that directly reduce poverty, writes JFF president and CEO Marlene B. Seltzer in a commentary for Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, a foundation-led, non-partisan initiative aimed at ensuring that political leaders take significant actions to reduce poverty and increase opportunity. It also must replicate and adapt what works on a scale that responds to the national need, using public policy to promote that expansion.

Seltzer cites a number of JFF partnerships that provide both models of practice and precedents for scaling up success. She concludes, “We must think about education and skill investments, in both our young people and adults, as a single pipeline, leading to individuals who can support their families and help communities thrive. Our nation’s livelihood depends on it.”

CONNECTING LITERACY AND WORK

In October, in honor of Adult Education and Family Literacy Week, JFF announced that it will partner with five communities in a new project, Connecting Literacy and Work, supported by the Dollar General Literacy Foundation. JFF will provide technical assistance to and coordinate a peer learning community joining the Literacy Coalition of Southeastern Wisconsin in the Milwaukee region; the Workforce Solutions Collaborative in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Durham Technical Community College in North Carolina; Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska; and the Mississippi Office of Nursing Workforce and Hinds Community College in Jackson, Mississippi.

Through the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, five community colleges are receiving $40,000 grants to scale up their Breaking Through programs. These programs help underserved and under-skilled young adults prepare for and succeed in occupational and technical degree programs. Breaking Through is a partnership of Jobs for the Future and the National Council for Workforce Education.

The colleges receiving scale-up grants are Durham Technical Community College (North Carolina), Lake Michigan Community College (Michigan), Owensboro Community & Technical College (Kentucky), Pamlico Community College (North Carolina), and Tacoma Community College (Washington).

PROFILE: GLORIA CROSS MWASE

Guiding Connecting Literacy and Work is Gloria Cross Mwase, whose life journey has taken her from Mississippi, where she earned a B.A. in economics from Tougaloo College, to Boston, where she earned a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Massachusetts. On the way to JFF, she served the Annie E. Casey Foundation as its Boston representative and taught adults at Cambridge College, a unique environment where working adults can build their education in a lifetime of learning.

“I learned a lot about the importance of literacy growing up in rural Mississippi. My mother was a librarian and encouraged a strong focus on reading and academic excellence in my immediate family. Yet I saw the limitations on life and work opportunities for extended family, friends, and neighbors with low literacy levels,” says Gloria. “It inspired in me a desire to find solutions to the challenges they confront, which ultimately led to my focus on public policy. Teaching adults, include some college students with low reading and writing skills, further fueled this passion.”

Better Together, Gloria’s report for the Breaking Through initiative, explored how states can help working adults bolster their skills in order to take advantage of college credit-level programs. She also leads the capacity-building and peer-learning efforts of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

“I’m extremely grateful for the support of the Dollar General Literacy Foundation and excited about this new project,” says Gloria. “Our work at JFF has demonstrated that hard-working practitioners are developing effective solutions. One role we can play is helping to expand and scale up these innovations.”

Now available from JFF are four reports produced for the One Step Forward initiative under a Wal-Mart Foundation grant to the National Center on Education and the Economy. One Step Forward identified quality indicators for programs that help low-skilled workers acquire the basic skills they need to succeed and to enhance the competitiveness of U.S. employers. The reports were prepared by the NCEE Workforce Development Strategies Group, which recently joined with Jobs for the Future to form the Workforce and Education Policy Group within JFF.

JFF and other national organizations that are committed to improving educational outcomes for high school students are urging passage of the Graduation Promise Act. The act, supported by the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, National Council of La Raza, the Everyone Graduates Center, and JFF, is designed to improve high schools and reduce dropout rates. It reflects the recommendations in Addressing America’s Dropout Challenge, co-authored by JFF and the Center for American Progress.

Minorities and low-income young people continue to be less likely than their white and more affluent counterparts to enroll in college, even though degree attainment rates among minorities have improved. A Council of State Governments report documents the work of the Early College High School initiative to address that gap, focusing on three states that are leaders in this movement. Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas combine innovative public policy initiatives with public-private partnerships to create systems that encourage early college high schools and improve opportunities for young people who otherwise might not attend college.

Testifying before the House Committee on Education and Labor, Michael Webb, Associate Vice President at JFF, drew from the experience of the Early College High School Initiative, a national effort to significantly increase the number of underrepresented—like early college—students who attain a college degree. The topic was dual enrollment, arrangements that enable high school students to take college courses.

PREPARING ALL STUDENTS FOR COLLEGE SUCCESS

When Massachusetts released scores on state-mandated tests this fall, the results for University Park Campus School in Worcester were outstanding. Matching the achievements of wealthy, suburban schools, UPCS ranked #15 of 353 high schools in Massachusetts on the tenth-grade English test and #24 of 351 high schools on the tenth-grade math test. As a point of comparison, last year’s seventh graders ranked 294 of 466 middle schools on the English test after one year at UPCS; on the math test, they ranked 197 of 466.

These dramatic gains between the seventh and tenth grades are extraordinary, even more so given the community UPCS serves. Chosen by lottery, the vast majority of students enter this public school at least two grade levels behind in reading and math. Three-quarters of the students qualify for free lunch; two thirds come from homes where English is not spoken. JFF partners with the school and Clark University to train small school developers, leaders, and teachers to implement the strategies and techniques that have led to universal college readiness at UPCS.

ACHIEVING SUCCESS

The latest issue of Achieving Success, the state policy newsletter of Achieving the Dream, features a special Q&A: “What the Experts Have to Say about the Federal Community College Initiative.” Five community college experts comment on proposed federal legislation. Also in this issue is an update on the Developmental Education Initiative, an ambitious, three-year effort to help states and institutions dramatically improve student success in developmental education. Achieving Success is published by JFF for Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative to help more community college students succeed.

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Jobs for the Future identifies, develops, and promotes new education and workforce strategies that help communities, states, and the nation compete in a global economy. In over 200 communities in 41 states, JFF improves the pathways leading from high school to college to family-sustaining careers.

One in three high school students will not graduate from high school “on time.” Fewer than one in four low-income youth who do graduate will actually be prepared for college. Only one in five eighth graders eligible for free or reduced lunch will complete a college credential within eight years of graduating from high school—but half of their middle-income peers will achieve that valuable milestone.

We need dramatic action to spur the proliferation of learning environments that demonstrate success, particularly for students typically left behind—young people from lower-income families, minority and immigrant communities, families that have never had a college graduate, and those who attend “low-performing high schools” where a graduation rate of 50 percent or worse is the norm.

The temptation is to quickly scale up interventions that have made a difference in a few places. However, it would waste precious resources to do so without knowing what makes success possible. Moreover, no single approach will work for all low-performing high schools.

Graduating America, featured in this NEWSWIRE, provides the tools for examining the characteristics of schools, districts, and states that make certain approaches more likely to succeed in certain places. Through such analyses, states and the nation can not only identify reform opportunities but also target human, financial, and knowledge resources to where they are most needed and will do the most good.

The tools in Graduating America, coupled with the growing knowledge base of promising strategies, are essential if we are to ensure that our young people complete high school and earn postsecondary credentials. We must get beyond the myth that nothing works, that low-performing schools cannot be transformed or replaced successfully.

TURNING AROUND FAILING HIGH SCHOOLS: KEY FACTORS FOR SUCCESS

The federal government has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to stimulate significant progress in solving the nation’s graduation crisis, according to Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools, a new report from Jobs for the Future and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.

High schools with low graduation rates are concentrated in a subset of 17 states that produce approximately 70 percent of the nation’s dropouts. The report uses data from these states to develop analytic tools for examining the characteristics of schools, districts, and states that make certain approaches more likely to succeed in certain places.

“It would be a waste of precious resources to quickly scale up interventions that were successful in one place without carefully analyzing the conditions that make success possible,” said report co-author Adria Steinberg of JFF. “To transform or replace low graduation-rate high schools, states and districts need access to the growing knowledge base of what works and where it works.”

“The go-it-alone approach of leaving it to failing schools to fix themselves has not worked,” added report co-author Robert Balfanz of the Everyone Graduates Center. “With the federal government ready to invest billions of dollars into turning around low-performing schools, the time is right to form the federal-state-local and community partnerships needed to transform or replace the low graduation-rate high schools that drive the nation’s dropout crisis.”

PROFILE: CHERYL ALMEIDA

When JFF convinced Graduating America co-author Cheryl Almeida to join our staff in 2001, she had already worked alongside us for many years, and we welcomed her 20+ years of experience in research, evaluation, policy, and program development.

In her time at JFF, Cheryl has creatively combined policy and programming work through such major initiatives as the Benchmark Communities Initiative, From the Margins to the Mainstream, and Connected by 25.

These days, Cheryl directs JFF’s research on improving options and outcomes for struggling students and out-of-school youth. She keeps our attention fixed on both the policy conditions conducive to scaling up effective program designs and the practical application of a portfolio of such options. She contributed to two recent reports of major importance, one focused on the education persistence of dropouts (Making Good on a Promise: What Policymakers Can Do to Support the Educational Persistence of Dropouts) and the other on state policies that can improve outcomes for struggling students and out-of-school youth (Raising Graduation Rates in an Era of High Standards).

PARTNERING WITH STATES: JFF’S COLLEGE READINESS SERVICES

Toward JFF’s goal of doubling the number of young people who graduate from high school and who are well prepared for college, and to help states support the priorities of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, we offer two sets of college-readiness services:

• Strategic school design, planning, and implementation: Services include school design evaluation and selection, assessments of policy conditions, postsecondary partnership development, fiscal planning, and implementation support.
• College readiness professional development: Services include instructional coaching, leadership training, and capacity-building support to help schools design and implement a coherent, college-ready instructional program for all students.

Throughout our 25-year history, JFF has helped state and district partners develop and implement a wide range of secondary school designs that prepare all students to succeed at the postsecondary level. These designs include early college high schools, integrated high school/college pathways, and back-on-track options that prepare over-aged and under-credited youth for college success. In this work, JFF uniquely marries innovation with proven strategies through the introduction of pioneering school designs and the expansion of the most promising practices in the field.

ACCEPTING NOMINATIONS FOR THE 2010 METLIFE FOUNDATION AWARDS

Nominations are being accepted for the 2010 MetLife Foundation Community College Excellence Awards. Colleges are invited to fill out the simple self-nomination form on the JFF Web site. The deadline is Friday, October 2. Next, selected institutions will be invited to provide additional information.

MetLife Foundation will give three awards, one in each of three categories: Exceptional Service to Students; Service to Communities; and Service Through Innovation. Each winning college will receive a $40,000 grant.

HOW TO HELP STRUGGLING STUDENTS IN HIGH SCHOOL? SEND THEM TO COLLEGE

In July, the Chronicle of Higher Education took an in-depth look at the Early College High School Initiative, launched in 2002 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and coordinated by JFF. The report notes the successes of the initiative, including the launching of 201 schools that bridge the gap between secondary and postsecondary institutions. It also looks at the challenges ahead, including the need for sustainable financing in an era when “California’s 110 community colleges, for example, have said they may have to turn away as many as 250,000 students this fall.”

A college credential is essential to earning a decent income in today’s economy. A well-educated workforce is essential to the ability of businesses, communities, and the nation to compete.

These widely accepted propositions are central to President Obama’s economic agenda—as is the role played by community colleges in meeting that dual mandate. In a major address on July 14, he announced The American Graduation Initiative, an effort to “reform and strengthen community colleges . . . from coast to coast so they get the resources students and schools need—and the results workers and businesses demand.”

Yet large numbers of students entering community college are ill-prepared for college-level work. They must start with developmental education courses, a delay that erodes their chances of earning college credentials. Many of these students come straight from high school and have a high school diploma. Many others, from young adults to men and women over 60, are victims of the recession and the changing needs of the American economy.

Ensuring that all students who enter community college through developmental education eventually achieve their educational and career goals is the keystone of many JFF projects, including Achieving the Dream, Jobs to Careers, and Breaking Through.

Of course, the ideal is that all young people graduate from high school and are prepared for college. This proposition, too, is essential to JFF, including our Connected by 25 initiatives, some of which are also described in this Newswire.

STATE POLICY AND IMPROVING STUDENT OUTCOMES

In a new JFF policy brief, Michael Lawrence Collins describes the role of state policy in helping community colleges advance students who are placed in developmental education. Setting Up Success in Developmental Education highlights ways in which 15 states have approached the task of improving outcomes for students who test into developmental education. These states are participants in Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative focused on student success.

PROFILE: MICHAEL LAWRENCE COLLINS

“Developmental education could be a bridge, helping low-income and students of color succeed in college and achieve their dreams for better jobs, better wages, and better lives,” says Mike Collins, explaining his motivation for writing Setting Up Success. “Instead, it often acts as a filter through which thousands of students and their hopes of earning credentials and degrees are lost.”

Mike came to JFF from Texas, where he served as Assistant Commissioner for Participation and Success at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Seeking to increase college access and success, he worked with K-12, higher education, the business community, the Texas Legislature, and community-based organizations. Today, Mike applies his Texas experience on a national scale as JFF develops and advocates for state policies that promote student success. He helps states craft and implement public policies designed to increase the numbers of low-income students and students of color who make a successful transition from high school into college, and then earn postsecondary credentials and degrees.

DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION INITIATIVE

JFF will manage the state policy component of the Developmental Education Initiative, a new endeavor funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation for Education. Working with six Achieving the Dream states, this initiative will highlight and scale up institutional strategies and state policies that can dramatically improve outcomes for community college students who test into developmental education. The Developmental Education Initiative will build on strategies described in Setting Up Success.

POLICIES TO IMPROVE ACADEMIC SUCCESS FOR LOW-SKILLED ADULTS

In Better Together, JFF’s Gloria Cross Mwase examines how states can help working adults bolster pre-collegiate skills that restrain them from taking full advantage of for-credit, college-level career and technical programs. She offers examples of meeting this challenge by 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. The effort 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 at community colleges.

CAREER PATHS FOR FRONTLINE WORKERS IN BEHAVIORAL HEALTH

In June, JFF and the Annapolis Coalition on the Behavioral Health Workforce convened Developing the Behavioral Health Workforce: Stimulus Funds & Workforce Models, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson and Hitachi foundations. This meeting of leaders from the mental health and addiction sectors shared information about accessing stimulus funds and models for improving the skills of workers in addiction and mental health treatment.

At the meeting, JFF released From Competencies to Curriculum: Building Career Paths for Frontline Workers in Behavioral Health by Randall Wilson. This issue brief documents the efforts of a partnership anchored by the Philadelphia’s District 1199C Training and Upgrading Fund (a labor-management partnership) and two employers serving people with mental illness. This unique effort is addressing the gap between the critical role played by behavioral health workers and the training—and career opportunities—open to these workers. The brief was prepared for Jobs to Careers, a national initiative that is developing the skills and career paths of workers on the front lines of health and health care.

The first step to a college credential is completion of a high school diploma or its equivalent. For far too many young people, this remains an elusive goal. JFF continues to expand its efforts to improve outcomes and options for this group of young people, through its work on dropout prevention and recovery with school districts and their partners, as well as through two new efforts, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

TOOLKIT SUPPORTS BACK-ON-TRACK PATHWAYS TO POSTSECONDARY SUCCESS

Leaders in high school policy and practice confront the dual challenge of significantly improving graduation rates, while simultaneously preparing graduates to succeed in college. To do this, they complement school reform strategies with early interventions and “back on track” options to reengage and accelerate the learning of students who have fallen off track. JFF’s Connected by 25 team works with a dozen communities on improving graduation rates without compromising on academic achievement goals.

Based on lessons and tools from leading communities, JFF offers Bringing Off-Track Youth into the Center of High School Reform, a “starter kit” for school districts seeking to introduce a systemic approach to dropout prevention and recovery. This toolkit supports the efforts of a school district and its partners to create a system of back-on-track options for off-track and out-of-school youth. It focuses on key decision points in identifying young people who are falling off track and on creating high-quality learning environments to help them reengage and graduate college-ready..

GED TO COLLEGE:
ON RAMPS TO POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION FOR LOW-INCOME YOUNG ADULTS

JFF has launched a research and development effort focused on growing a new GED to College pathway that provides students who have dropped out with what they need to succeed in postsecondary education. Through this effort, JFF seeks to build the capacity and advance the efforts of youth-serving national and local intermediaries, community colleges, and community-based youth employment and education programs to develop GED to College models that provide low-income young adults with on ramps to college, leading to a degree or other meaningful credential.

INCREASING POSTSECONDARY SUCCESS OF LOW-INCOME YOUNG ADULTS

JFF is partnering on a multiyear effort with the Postsecondary Success Initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal is to build the capacity and advance the efforts of YouthBuild USA and the National Youth Employment Coalition as these national intermediaries work with local affiliates and/or members to develop on ramps to postsecondary success for low-income 18 to 26 year olds, many of whom are out of school and shut out of jobs and careers that lead to economic self-sufficiency.

NATIONAL CENTER ON EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY'S WORKFORCE STRATEGIES GROUP JOINS JFF

The Workforce Development Strategy Group of the National Center on Education and the Economy joined with JFF to form JFF’s Washington, DC-based Workforce and Education Policy Group.

“JFF will benefit greatly from the depth of knowledge and experience of talented individuals at NCEE,” says JFF president and CEO Marlene Seltzer. “At this critical moment in Washington, this is a great opportunity for us to expand our reach as we work with our partners to double the number of low-income youth and adults who by 2020 attain postsecondary credentials that help them advance into family-sustaining careers.”

“The Workforce Development Strategies Group of NCEE has achieved remarkable success in helping to guide the evolution of the nation’s employment and training policy,” says Ray Marshall, former Secretary of Labor and chair of the NCEE board. “We will miss them but recognize the extraordinary value they bring to the workforce development mission of Jobs for the Future.”