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Texas has long been an innovator in policies, systems, and practices to ensure that young adults from low-income backgrounds are prepared for postsecondary education and careers. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis have cast a harsh light on the importance of reengaging young adults who are disconnected from school and work and putting them on a path to success. This population, known as "opportunity youth," is so named based on the promise they hold for society as a whole and for themselves and their families. Their numbers grew dramatically in 2020, and that rise calls for bold action. This paper provides a starting point for movement on Texas state policies that can be built upon, strengthened, and/or implemented. Jobs for the Future brings its evidence-based Back on Track model to this work, helping schools and programs implement proven practices to boost the success of opportunity youth. Evaluations have shown strong evidence that Back on Track improves postsecondary enrollment and completion by opportunity youth.

Despite the growing popularity of apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships, and in-school youth apprenticeships in the United States, young adults who lack the credentials and connections to seamlessly enter postsecondary pathways remain overlooked. Young-adult-serving agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs) are underutilized key actors in employer-driven approaches to worker development. In this brief, the authors explore: (1) How CBOs serving young adults can connect constituents who are not in school or employed in high-demand careers through apprenticeships; and (2) How the CBOs can operate within a broader landscape, particularly with employers, workforce intermediaries, and other apprenticeship partners. This brief is organized in three sections. Section 1 defines apprenticeship--particularly Registered Apprenticeship--within the workforce development system and highlights why the model can be particularly valuable for young adults lacking on-ramps to skilled jobs. Section 2 considers how CBOs that serve young adults can learn from other CBOs that have successfully connected underrepresented populations to Registered Apprenticeships. It outlines a range of roles and activities that leverage the mission and capacity of CBOs, and offers keys to success. Section 3 brings together the first two sections with summary recommendations for CBOs as well as considerations for other key stakeholders, such as employers, workforce boards, city and other public and private partners, and policymakers. [This brief was produced by Jobs for the Future's (JFF's) Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning and was funded by Salesforce.org as part of JFF's Apprenticeship Awareness and Expansion Initiative.]

Through Job For the Future's (JFF's) work with communities around the country on the Back on Track model, postsecondary bridging strategies have emerged as a particularly critical and especially replicable component of programming for vulnerable youth. This issue brief offers a typology of evidence-informed bridge programming, drawing on frontrunner programs that have designed their strategies specifically for this population and that have attained early indicators of success. Hopefully, this typology will inform the design and support the scale of bridging programs that provide a critical leg up for vulnerable segments of the opportunity youth population to earn the postsecondary credentials that are so essential to thriving in today's economy. Contains one endnote.

In the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District has achieved a startling success over the last two years: it has recovered and graduated over 600 dropouts and put them on a clear pathway to college. Just a few years ago, low graduation rates, struggling high schools, and poor staff and student morale characterized this predominantly Hispanic and low-income tri-city community. Since then, the dropout rate has plummeted and the graduation rate is rising steadily. Under the leadership of Dr. Daniel King, Pharr-San Juan-Alamo illustrates how Texas districts can use innovative state policy to improve graduation rates by reengaging and graduating out-of-school youth. Pharr-San Juan-Alamo teamed up with South Texas College to create the College, Career, and Technology Academy (CCTA), a college-connected dropout recovery school that puts into action policies Texas has created over the past five years. Through CCTA, former dropouts complete their high school diploma and seamlessly transition into college courses when they are ready. The design is both effective and efficient. Students focus only on what they need for graduation and for college-readiness, and they begin college courses while finishing their high school requirements. Texas policies that encourage districts to recover dropouts, provide state funding for students who are over compulsory school age, and promote college-connectedness for students still in high school created the environment for a successful back-on-track program, like CCTA. This case study spotlights how the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District has leveraged policies and conditions that the Texas Legislature put into place and achieved extraordinary outcomes in not only graduating students but also in facilitating smooth transitions to postsecondary education and training. (Contains 4 endnotes.)

For generations, Americans have known what to expect from their high schools. Teenagers in cities across the U.S., like their parents and grandparents before them, could expect to go to a large high school with as many as three or four thousand of their peers. They could anticipate a day segmented into 45 minute blocks, each devoted to a different subject, and a year punctuated by predictable rituals from the annual Thanksgiving day football game with the arch-rival school to the periodic honor roll assembly. They could expect to hear at graduation the names of those going on to college and those receiving special scholarships and honors. The rest (many not unhappily) saw high school as the end of their formal education. The "one-size-fits-all" assumption of the large comprehensive high school is giving way to increased choice for young people and their parents among a variety of schooling designs, some of which look quite different from the regularities and rituals of the past. In just a few short years, the landscape of high schooling in Boston and a number of cities has been redrawn--a development that is beginning to attract the attention of educational, community, and philanthropic leaders in many other urban areas throughout the country.

A growing number of school districts around the country are using small school development as a central strategy for improving high schools and overhauling the way the district itself does business. Driven by an increasing sense of urgency and frustration with reforms that fail to fundamentally change the quality of instruction or the nature of student-teacher relationships, they are transforming large, under-performing high schools into "education complexes" made up of multiple autonomous small schools under one roof. For school districts, this conversion process offers a potentially powerful opportunity for a "defining moment" of change--an opportunity to provide the most fertile conditions for excellent teaching and learning. A small schools strategy provides educational leaders with an opportunity to fundamentally rethink such key areas as administrative structures, staff roles, student/teacher relationships, course sequences, subject matter, the use of time, community partnerships, and parent engagement. Communities undertaking a small schools strategy are developing answers to two basic issues: (1) how quickly to proceed; and (2) what process to undertake in developing and managing small schools. This report examines a range of strategies being undertaken by districts across the country to plan and launch multiple small schools within the walls of large high schools. It also explores implementation issues that arise concerning school-level autonomies, governance, and leadership of high school reform at the district level, and it delves into the challenges for "central office" leaders of managing a system of learning options that offers a broader range of choices for students and parents. (Contains 15 endnotes.)

Many young people learn a discouraging set of lessons between the ages of 16 and 24. They come to see secondary school as irrelevant, available jobs as demeaning, and their prospects and choices as diminishing. Some continue to "drop in" to school long enough to get a diploma, but leave lacking the skills or interest to pursue further education. Others drop out of school altogether. Seen in this context, the ambitious promise implied in the federal law to "leave no child behind" will require moving expeditiously beyond the "one-size-fits-all," factory-model high school to a far richer diversity of learning environments. This paper focuses on four types of learning environments that appear to hold particular promise for vulnerable and potentially disconnected youth: reinvented high schools, secondary/postsecondary blends, education/employment blends, and extended learning opportunities beyond the school day, year, and building. The first section paints a statistical portrait of the substantial number of urban youth who could potentially benefit from these new programmatic options. The second section describes the authors' process for identifying and investigating emerging, powerful learning environments, then profiles four programs that show evidence of effectiveness. The report concludes with a discussion of the policy opportunities today for creating multiple avenues for young people to achieve to higher standards, along with four specific policy recommendations to meet this goal. (Contains 11 endnotes.)

Although communities are making progress in establishing comprehensive systems for serving youth, they still face challenges. Enabling conditions that have allowed innovative youth councils to develop systems of youth development, education, and employment include: (1) youth opportunity grants; (2) established intermediary organizations; (3) strong school-to-career partnerships; (4) community-wide planning; (5) influential stakeholders; and an aggressive state youth policy organization. Policymakers and practitioners can improve youth services by eliminating onerous and cumbersome eligibility requirements, streamlining the accountability system, and improving upon outcome measures. (Information from ten youth council case studies, amounting to 75 per cent of the report, concludes with a recommendation for federal funding reauthorization in 2003.) (AJ)

This paper describes the experiences of five high schools in Boston, Massachusetts, a district with a successful history of career pathways and academies that, in the last 3 years, has encouraged schools to restructure entirely into smaller learning communities. The schools work to benchmark curriculum to high standards, ensure effective instructional practice, implement multiple and ongoing assessments, create small learning communities, reduce student-teacher ratios, create respectful learning environments, and build partnerships with families, communities, businesses, and higher education. Data from interviews and document reviews at these schools indicate that a strong curricular leader is essential to developing a strong, effective learning community; tensions result from decisions regarding how to fully cluster students and teachers into small learning communities; it is difficult to maintain basic services for bilingual students; it is difficult to balance the desire of teachers for input into staffing decisions with the need to ensure that students have equal access to a range of pathways; and it is challenging to focus simultaneously on implementing new district initiatives directed at preparing students for high stakes tests and on restructuring schools into small learning communities using inquiry-based, contextual learning strategies. The research methodology is appended. (Contains 18 references.) (SM)

This issue brief considers how to involve English language learners in community-connected learning, a set of strategies to engage young people in learning experiences beyond the classroom. Such strategies include internships at work sites, and project-based learning in classrooms. In successful community-connected learning strategies, students come to understand how they might pursue and expand upon their own interests, and to observe and work alongside adult experiences in a variety of workplaces and occupations. Specifically, they advance their language skills by interacting with English-speaking adults in the workplace, experience being treated as adults, participate in learning as an active rather than passive process, earn wages while charting long-range career plans, and gain opportunities for valuable job experience and learn about academic options at post-secondary institutions. Other issues considered include the following: effective strategies for involving English language learners in internships and project-based learning and the best role of community supervisors and high schools. A check list of potential barriers to English language learners involvement in community-connected learning is matched with specific suggestions for addressing these barriers. Twenty additional resources are recommended. (KFT)

This guidebook provides suggestions and directions for increasing and improving English language learners' involvement in school-to-career initiatives across the country. It describes model career initiatives that either target or include significant numbers of English language learners, and it analyzes some school restructuring issues raised by the research conducted for this book. Chapter 1 presents a typical school-to-career program design and describes the benefits for English language learners. It explains some of the challenges that arise when involving English language learners in school-to-career initiatives and offers possible solutions. Chapter 2 provides case studies of internships, community service learning, project-based learning, and job shadowing programs that are organized around the needs of English language learners. Chapter 3 focuses on school restructuring issues, providing several examples. Chapter 4 discusses next steps for practitioners who seek to integrate English language learners into school-to-career programs. Three appendices contain the following: (1) discussion of education for English language learners; (2) glossary; and (3) list of people interviewed. (Contains 12 references.) (KC)