Search

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.

Opportunity Works is a national initiative to dramatically improve the life trajectories of low-income young people ages 16 to 24 who are not in school or working. This population, often called "opportunity youth," comprises a significant segment of America's potential workforce. Yet they are also the young men and women who face the greatest barriers to entering and advancing in the labor market. Launched in 2015, Opportunity Works has demonstrated how to make a difference in the lives of young people who find themselves without a clear path forward. Opportunity Works served more than 2,000 teens and young adults. Their successes include: (1) More than 800 individuals earned a high school credential; (2) Nearly 1,000 participants enrolled in postsecondary education or training; and (3) Almost half of all participants were young men of color. These initial results are particularly powerful for a population that has had limited access to effective programs in the past. In this report, the authors highlight lessons learned from the initiative, which was based on Jobs for the Future's (JFF) "Back on Track" model to reconnect opportunity youth and guided by JFF coaching to local anchor organizations and service providers. The authors also describe the complex nature of what it takes to reach these positive results and the many interlocking pieces that are part of the solution. [This report was produced by the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. Additional funding was provided by the Andrus Family Fund and the Ballmer Group.]

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.

At this moment, the role of community-based organizations (CBOs) has never been more important. The country is facing a dual crisis in youth unemployment and low postsecondary completion rates. Both are especially prevalent among low-income and minority young people. Across the nation, nearly 7 million young people are neither in school nor part of the labor market--17 percent of people ages 16 to 24. This group includes both those who have a high school credential but have not continued into postsecondary education and/or the workplace, and those who have left school without a high school diploma and have few if any educational or job prospects. Federal support for local education and career-related services reaches less than 10 percent of these young people. While most young people are aware of the connection between education and employment and have aspirations to succeed in both, young people in the group described above typically find themselves with very limited opportunities. The lost potential in these young people has enormous costs to our economy and our communities for many years to come. This paper shows the vital role of community-based organizations in addressing this dual crisis. The ideas and examples presented here are based on the groundbreaking work of four community-based organizations in California that participated in Opportunity Links for Youth, an initiative supported by the James Irvine Foundation. With support from Jobs for the Future, these CBOs are tackling the essential work of helping 18 to 25 year olds develop the skills and credentials they need for entry into and advancement in growth sectors of the economy. On-ramp design diagrams are appended. [For the executive summary, see ED561288.]

Almost 7 million young Americans (age 16-24) are insufficiently attached to school or work. Based on conservative estimates, we can generate over $1 billion just by helping a mere 0.1 percent earn a high school credential and complete their first year of college through Back on Track Designs. This brief lays out the cost of setting up these GED- and diploma-granting schools and programs, and how districts, colleges, and community-based organizations can partner to sustain them. Appended are: (1) Programs Consulted; and (2) Methodology.

Solving America's dropout crisis requires immediate, drastic action. Intractable as the dropout problem may seem, recognition of its magnitude has created an environment ripe for action. Most notably, federal regulations adopted in 2008 require states to use more accurate ways of counting dropouts and holding districts and schools more accountable for improving results. In addition, encouraging developments over the past decade have put major improvement within reach: better data collection and analysis; promising research showing that a small set of school-based variables are highly effective in predicting future dropouts; and pioneering prevention and recovery strategies in cities with the highest concentrations of dropouts. Ideally, policymakers and educational leaders in every state will draw on these developments to design and implement comprehensive approaches to improving graduation rates. This paper helps states take the crucial first step: evaluating each state's dropout prevention and recovery policies to determine how well they support innovation for better student outcomes. This report identifies six model policy elements that frame a sound legislative strategy for dropout prevention and recovery, and it assesses the extent to which recent state policy aligns with these model elements. Overall, 36 states and the District of Columbia have enacted new dropout legislation since 2002. While some states have moved toward adopting comprehensive dropout prevention and recovery policies, nearly all of them have a long way to go. Nearly one-third of the nation--14 states--have enacted no new laws aimed at increasing graduation rates in the past eight years. Methodology is appended. (Contains 25 endnotes.)

An increasing number of state leaders have begun to grapple with one of the significant challenges of K-12 reform: how to substantially increase the percentage of young people graduating from high school while also continuing to bring academic standards into alignment with the skills and knowledge required for success in higher education and employment. Addressing this challenge requires a new level of attention to the graduation and achievement gaps among different income and racial groups. This report calls upon state policymakers to commit to five key outcomes and suggests strategies and action steps they can take to focus high school reform efforts on ensuring that these commitments are met. By building on and complementing ongoing systemic educational reform efforts, states can improve the educational outcomes of and options for high school-aged students, especially low-income and struggling students. (Contains 14 endnotes and 1 figure.)

One of the major barriers to making good on this promise is the broad set of misconceptions framing most discussions of the dropout issue. Too often, both public perception and public policy seem based on the notion that dropping out is confined to a small--and particularly unmotivated--group of young people. A related assumption, although rarely voiced, is that dropping out is primarily a problem of disaffected black and Hispanic central city youth who have rejected mainstream values, including the importance of education. Such views have reinforced a third widespread misconception: that there is little anyone can do to get most young people who leave school back on track--earning a high school degree and advancing to higher education. Making Good on a Promise challenges those beliefs. It paints a new, more accurate picture of the dropout problem facing the nation today, with a detailed look at who dropped out and how much education they had completed by their early adulthood. It analyzes data from the first major national study to follow a representative group of young people over time: the National Educational Longitudinal Study, which tracked the educational progress of approximately 25,000 eighth-graders in 1988 over 12 years, to 2000. Methodology is appended. (Contains 14 figures and 11 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.

The number of high school age students who do not complete high school is receiving increased attention as a serious challenge facing the educational system. This is happening for several reasons. New research estimates that about 30 percent of high school students fail to earn a diploma in the standard number of years, a higher figure than state and local education officials typically cite. In many states, barely half of African-Americans and Latinos graduate from high school. The magnitude of the challenge is becoming clear at the same time that a consensus is emerging that education beyond high school is critical to economic self-sufficiency and success in today's knowledge-intensive economy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 60 percent of jobs created between now and 2010 will require at least some postsecondary education. In the emerging economy, a high school dropout or a young person who earns a GED, but no further postsecondary credential, has extremely few opportunities for a family-supporting career. Addressing the dropout crisis will require responding to a dual challenge: state education systems must promote and support both dropout prevention strategies and dropout recovery efforts. This brief describes current practice in both prevention and recovery, highlighting promising approaches in each area that can help reduce stubbornly high dropout rates. It concludes with several suggestions for how state policymakers can help promote a more systemic approach to the dropout crisis. (Contains 23 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.)

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)