Newswire #53

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The Breaking Through Practice Guide

In This Issue: JFF co-hosts the Multiple Education Pathways Learning Exchange, The Early College High School Initiative releases "Lessons from the Lone Star State," Achieving the Dream is featured in Change Magazine, and more...

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February 25, 2009

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2009

Title:

Multiple Education Pathways Learning Exchange: A National Conference

Body:

In November, JFF joined the U.S. Department of Labor as chief sponsor, along with other national partners, to plan the first Multiple Education Pathways Learning Exchange. This national conference enabled city leaders to share practice on a wide range of topics and issues.

JFF’s role grew out of our work over the past five years with the Youth Transitions Funder’s Group and with the Department of Labor’s Multiple Education Pathways Blueprint Initiative. JFF has provided technical assistance and peer learning support for a group of 14 large and mid-sized cities designing new education options as a key component of high school reform efforts.

An extensive set of materials from the Learning Exchange is available on the U.S. Department of Labor Web site. They cover educational models, using data for visibility and intervention, career and technical education as part of multiple education pathways, financing education options, building a supportive policy environment, and a number of other topics.

Visit the Multiple Education Pathways Learning Exchange

Title:

From High School to Success In College

Body:

Early College High School Initiative

Lessons from the Lone Star State: Expanding Early College High School

Texas is a national leader in creating early college schools, an innovative small-school model that blends secondary and postsecondary education with intensive supports to increase college readiness and success for underachieving students. The state has 29 early college schools, with more opening in the 2008-09 school year, thanks largely to education reforms favorable to their development.

Texas leaders hope to further expand the model, using it as a priority strategy to boost college success rates. JFF’s Susan Goldberger and Janet Santos detail the efforts of El Paso Community College, South Texas College, and their partners to build regional clusters of early college schools. Their experiences highlight important lessons about how to make the most of a state’s public policy environment to create, sustain, and expand these schools.

Blending High School and College: Rethinking the Transition

The transitions that happen before, during, and after the undergraduate college experience are the subject of the winter 2008 issue of the New Directions for Community Colleges series. As contributors to The First Year and Beyond: Rethinking the Challenge of Collegiate Transition, Nancy Hoffman, Joel Vargas, and Janet Santos of JFF describe how early college schools and other dual enrollment pathways can provide an “on ramp” to college for underrepresented students, improving their readiness for and success in postsecondary education.

Portrait in Numbers

This four-page summary provides current information on the growth and impact of the Early College High School Initiative, including data on the schools’ impact on students, descriptions of the various types of early college schools, and much more.

Five Core Principles

In 2008, the 13 founding intermediary organizations of the Early College High School Initiative and their partners, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jobs for the Future reaffirmed and refined five core principles underlying the initiative. All early college schools adhere to these principles, even as they use a wide range of strategies for attaining them and for meeting the specific needs of students, communities, and institutional partners.

200 Schools and Counting

Since 2002, the partner organizations of the Early College High School Initiative have started or redesigned more than 200 schools in 24 states and the District of Columbia. Through the initiative’s continued efforts, the partners will ultimately open about 250 small schools, serving over 100,000 students annually.

Title:

Improving Economic Opportunity

Body:

National Fund for Workforce Solutions

Realizing the Potential of Workforce Intermediaries and Sector Projects

Complex workforce development projects managed by intermediaries provide a wide range of education, training, and support services for low-income adults. As this field matures and seed funding for many of these projects expires, a key question emerges: how can workforce intermediaries be sustained so that they can fulfill the promise of meeting both worker and employer needs? According to Sustaining the Promise, by Sarah Griffen, sustainability lies in the ability of such projects to manage complex relationships and funding streams, meet multiple needs simultaneously, and stay ahead of the curve in their areas of expertise.

Sustaining the Promise was prepared for the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, a five-year, $30 million effort to strengthen and expand high-impact workforce development initiatives around the country. JFF is a national partner with the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, a joint investment by leading national foundations, corporations, and the U.S. Department of Labor.

Jobs to Careers: How to Make a Job the Basis for a College Education

A Primer for Work-Based Learning: How to Make a Job the Basis for a College Education

This practice brief from the Jobs to Careers initiative introduces work-based learning, which is central to how workers participating in the initiative learn and advance. JFF’s Randall Wilson and others describe how two partnerships are implementing this core concept of the initiative. One, headed by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, designed a four-step, work-based learning process for public health technicians on the Navajo reservation. A partnership headed by Asante Health System in Oregon then adapted and refined the process for an urban hospital, showing how the method can be successfully applied in a completely different environment.

Jobs to Careers is a five-year, $15.8 million national initiative dedicated to improving the quality of care for patients and communities by changing the way frontline workers are trained, rewarded, and advanced in careers. The experiences of the two partnerships illustrate how practitioners—at Jobs to Careers sites and across the health care industry—might apply work-based learning to a wide variety of frontline jobs.

Section 4

Title:

Community Colleges: Pathways to Opportunity

Body:

Achieving the Dream

Courageous Conversations: The Importance of Student Success

Three articles in the January/February issue of Change Magazine highlight Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative to help more community college students succeed. A better way to measure student success is the focus for Susan Goldberger and Richard Kazis of JFF, which coordinates efforts to improve policies in the 15 Achieving the Dream states. This topic is described in detail in a JFF policy brief, Test Drive: Six States Pilot Better Ways to Measure and Compare Community College Performance.

Conceived by Lumina Foundation for Education, Achieving the Dream has been designed and led by a partnership of organizations with the mission to work long term on a community college student success agenda. In Change, the initiative’s national director, Carol Lincoln of MDC, looks at its successes and challenges. Arthur Rothkopf, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, describes why our nation’s response to the economic and educational challenges of the 21st century will be as important as the response to the Panic of 1893, which helped lead to the creation of the first community colleges.

Read Change Magazine

Download Test Drive

What Educators Can Learn from Quality Strategies in Health Care

The winter 2009 issue of Achieving Success, the quarterly state policy newsletter of Achieving the Dream, features an interview with Dr. Donald Berwick, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and an authority on health care quality and improvement. Dr. Berwick discusses his experience and how it can be instructive to higher education policymakers and institutional professionals engaged in efforts to design and implement policies supporting student success.

Making Opportunity Affordable

Initiative Launches New Web Site

Check out the new Making Opportunity Affordable Web site. Making Opportunity Affordable is a multiyear initiative focused on increasing productivity within U.S. higher education, particularly at two-year and four-year public colleges and universities. The aim is to use dollars invested by students, parents, and taxpayers to graduate more students. Supported by Lumina Foundation for Education, the initiative relies on partner organizations, including JFF, working within various states to develop, promote, and implement policies and practices that will help achieve this goal.

Investing in Student Success

The Web site describes Investing in Student Success, an element of Making Opportunity Affordable funded by Lumina Foundation for Education and the Wal-Mart Foundation. This project is exploring whether college first-year programs designed to retain students are a cost-effective investment. For a one-year pilot program, JFF, working with the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability, has recruited 13 colleges and universities with student success programs considered effective at serving freshmen, especially low-income, first-generation, at-risk students.

Trends in College Spending:
Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does It Go?

With support from Making Opportunity Affordable, the Delta Project has released an analysis of recent trends in revenues, spending, and results in higher education, and includes state-by-state data and recommendations for action.

Breaking Through: Community Colleges and Pathways Out of Poverty

Three projects that are helping students succeed in college-level work, particularly those who might otherwise struggle academically, are featured in the Fall/Winter 2008-09 issue of Mott Mosaic. Breaking Through, a partnership of JFF and the National Council for Workforce Education, is one of several supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation that are demonstrating how community colleges offer an affordable, accessible option for getting an advanced education and gaining entry to living-wage jobs. Breaking Through focuses on adults whose math and reading skills are below the eighth-grade level to prepare for, and succeed in, college-level professional and technical programs. Thirty-one schools in 18 states have been participating in the demonstration project.

View Breaking Through: Community Colleges and Pathways Out of Poverty

Section 5

Title:

JFF Community Breakfast Honors Martin Luther King, Jr.

Body:

On January 15, JFF’s Making a Difference Forum reviewed the commitment to education and economic development in Massachusetts over the last 25 years. State leaders from education, business, government, and the community shared innovative local strategies for expanding opportunity for those who need it most.

The keynote speaker, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray, highlighted the education and workforce reforms that have helped more people in the state become educated and gainfully employed in the past 25 years.

The forum transcript and other materials are available on the JFF Web site.

Section 6

Title:

From Our Friends

Body:

Measuring Skills for the 21st Century

This Education Sector report by Elena Silva examines new models of assessment that illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way.

Targeting Industries, Training Workers and Improving Opportunities

According to P/PV’s final report on the Sectoral Employment Initiative, participants in skills-training programs found work in targeted sectors, increased their wages and earnings, and accessed higher-quality jobs with health care insurance and paid sick leave. The collective result was a marked decrease in poverty.

Bridges to Opportunity for Underprepared Adults:
A State Policy Guide for Community College Leaders

This Ford Foundation publication, authored by Davis Jenkins from the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University; Kay McClenney and Byron McClenney of the University of Texas; and other leading scholars and innovators, provides policy and practice guidance for community colleges systems, stakeholders and advocates for low-income workers, and their families. Also available is a CD of "how to" tools and tips from the field related to key issue areas including developmental education, finance, and data.

Accelerating the Agenda:
Actions to Improve America’s High Schools

Building on the national imperative set forth at the 2005 National Education Summit on High Schools, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, National Conference of State Legislatures, Council of Chief State School Officers, and National Association of State Boards of Education have released a joint report measuring the progress states have made improving America’s high schools and citing the challenges to ensuring that high school students are prepared for college and career success.

From “Work First” to “Worker Mobility”:
A Critical Review of Career Advancement Strategies

This report analyzes career advancement programs targeted to low-wage workers and contrasts those models with a new Seedco career advancement program, EarnMore, which addresses limitations of traditional career advancement or sector-based employment initiatives.

Preparing Low-Skilled Workers for the Jobs of Tomorrow

Many state economic development leaders focus resources on strategies to spur growth in science, technology, engineering, and math—the STEM fields. Most efforts seek to generate highly skilled scientists and engineers. This brief from the Working Poor Families Project identifies how state policies can help prepare lower-skilled workers for middle-skill, technical, and support STEM positions.

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