PND - News - Report Calls for National Effort to Help Youth Navigate Path to Employability

Report Calls for National Effort to Help Youth Navigate Path to Employability

Despite billions of dollars spent on education reform efforts over several decades, American high schools and colleges are failing to prepare millions of the county's young people to lead successful lives, a new study from the Pathways to Prosperity Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education finds.

The report, Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century (52 pages, PDF), argues that the nation's strategy for education and youth development has been too narrowly focused on an academic, classroom-based approach, which in turn has produced only incremental gains in achievement and attainment.

To remedy the situation, the authors recommend the development of a broader school reform effort that embraces multiple pathways to help young people successfully navigate their personal development. According to the report, only 30 percent of young adults successfully complete the preferred pathway to success — attending and graduating from a four-year college. The report further argues that American employers need to play a greatly expanded role in supporting the pathways system and providing additional opportunities for young adults to participate in work-based learning related to their programs of study, and that the nation needs to develop a new social compact in which every young adult will be equipped by their mid-20s with the education and experience needed to lead a successful life as an adult.

Supported by Accenture, and the DeVry, GE, Pearson, Irvine, Kellogg, and Nellie Mae Education foundations, the two-year study found that the percentage of teens and young adults with full-time jobs is at its lowest level since the end of World War II.

"We are the only developed nation that depends so exclusively on its higher education system as the sole institutional vehicle to help young people transition from secondary school to careers, and from adolescence to adulthood," said Robert Schwartz, academic dean and professor at HGSE, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity Project. "Unless we are willing to provide more flexibility and choice in the last two years of high school, and more opportunities for students to pursue program options that link work and learning, we will continue to lose far too many young people along the path to graduation."


“Report Calls for National Effort to Get Millions Of Young Americans Onto a Realistic Path to Employability.” Harvard Graduate School of Education 2/02/11.

Are Bad Schools Immortal?
The Scarcity of Turnarounds and Shutdowns in Both Charter and District Sectors
December 14, 2010

by David A. Stuit

Foreword by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Amber M. Winkler

This study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that low-performing public schools—both charter and traditional district schools—are stubbornly resistant to significant change. After identifying more than 2,000 low-performing charter and district schools across ten states, analyst David Stuit tracked them from 2003-04 through 2008-09 to determine how many were turned around, shut down, or remained low-performing. Results were generally dismal. Seventy-two percent of the original low-performing charters remained in operation—and remained low-performing—five years later. So did 80 percent of district schools. Read on to learn more—including results from the ten states.

Read full report:
http://www.edexcellence.net/publications-issues/publications/are-bad-schools-immortal.html

The One Billion Dollar Man

http://www.fatherhood.org/downloadable_files/FatherAbsenceCost.pdf

Why should policymakers care about responsible fatherhood?
The federal government spends $100 billion every year to support father-absent homes.In June 2008, National Fatherhood Initiative released The One Hundred Billion Dollar Man, a ground-breaking study that showed that the federal government spends $100 billion each year supporting father-absent homes. And that's a conservative estimate - the study did not measure impact for related costs such as the criminal justice system, which is overwhelmed by men who grew up in father-absent homes.
The most challenging social problems of our time are connected to father absence.If you want to address poverty, child abuse, crime/recidivism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, or education, then restoring fatherhood is an integral part of the solution. Father absence is not a single issue, and its social and economic consequences are felt across society.
Father absence has a direct impact on the well-being of millions of children. 25 million children, 1 out of 3, grow up in homes in which their biological fathers do not live. In the African-American community, the rate is 2 out of 3. These children are significantly more likely to live in poverty, drop out of school, engage in risky behaviors…all issues the government grapples with every day.

Knock Knock, Spoken Word by Daniel Beaty