Looking for a specific grant?
Page Tools
Initiative helps connect youth to educational opportunity
By Duane M. Elling
Today, perhaps more than ever, a high school diploma represents more than a milestone of academic achievement.
The U.S. Department of Labor reports that high school graduates in 2002 earned, on average, $717 more per month than did non-graduates. It also found in 2004 that individuals who finished high school were 70 percent more likely to enter the labor market than those who dropped out.
In addition, more of today’s jobs require workers with advanced education, often including a college degree. This makes earning a high school diploma -- a prerequisite for admission to many such programs -- an increasingly vital step toward a stable, successful future.
Yet an estimated one out of every three youth in the U.S. leaves high school before graduating. And studies suggest many more, particularly those from low-income and underserved neighborhoods, are at significant risk of doing the same.
Helping communities engage these young people in educational opportunity as a meaningful pathway out of poverty is among the goals of the Initiative to Support Struggling Students and At Risk Youth.
Specifically, the initiative is helping communities explore strategies for reconnecting dropouts and near-dropouts to a quality education. It is supporting the development and implementation of data-gathering systems to guide and assess these strategies; raising the visibility of the dropout crisis and its impact on young people and their communities; and informing debates on school reforms and other public policies.
The Struggling Students and Out-of-School Youth Workgroup, part of the Youth Transitions Funders Group (YTFG), launched the initiative in 2004. Jobs for the Future (JFF) -- a nonprofit research, consulting and advocacy organization in Boston -- is the initiative’s national intermediary, providing consulting and technical assistance to the participating communities. The Coalition of Community Foundations for Youth serves as the initiative’s fiscal agent.
The Mott Foundation has granted $1 million to the coalition in support of the initiative since 2004. Additional funding has come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and various regional funders.
The five cities participating in the initiative since its launch are Boston; New York City; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; and San Jose, California. Two additional communities -- Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. -- joined in 2006.
Lucretia Murphy, senior project manager at JFF, says the initiative is helping shape a better understanding of the forces behind dropout rates. For example, data collected in the participating cities have identified key “transition points” during a young person’s academic life that can direct -- or derail -- his or her future success.
Among the most significant of these, Murphy says, is the transition to high school. Many young people at that stage wrestle with life-changing situations and decisions, both inside and outside of the classroom. Some disconnect from school and eventually drop out.
And the approach that teachers and administrators take with struggling students can either help alleviate or aggravate the problem, says Murphy.
Young people often recognize “when their schools have decided that they require too much effort or are simply beyond help,” she said. “And that recognition may push them right out the door.”
Understanding why students leave school before graduating is critical to exploring strategies for addressing the crisis, says Zeke Smith. The national initiative, with the help of local partnerships, is making important strides in this area as well.
Smith is director of community engagement at the Portland Schools Foundation (PSF), a community-based organization that seeks to impact education-related issues throughout that city. It is also the primary coordinating institution for Connected by 25, a program in Portland that, as part of the initiative, seeks to ensure all local young people are engaged in education, work training or employment by age 25.
Smith points to the success of several local “alternative schools” in creating educational options for area young people, including those who have dropped out of mainstream schools. These programs often provide individualized academic curriculums, as well as access to counseling services and assistance with transportation, housing and employment.
He says that expanding the reach of those services through the public school system may be key to helping struggling students find the strength, resources and direction to stay in school.
However, such a holistic approach generally requires the support and participation of numerous community partners. That, says Smith, is an area where the initiative has focused significant energy.
To date, PSF has helped cultivate and expand collaborations between the Portland School District and local, youth-oriented service agencies, including juvenile justice and foster care, as well as other area leaders and the business community.
According to Vicki Phillips, these relationships are leading to the more effective and efficient provision of services to young people, as well as opportunities to re-engage those who might otherwise drop out of school.
Phillips, superintendent of Portland Public Schools, points to PSF as an integral force behind the success of these collaborations.
“The foundation has glued the partners together in some really powerful ways. As a result, everyone -- from the city and the school district, to community-based organizations and the private sector, to parents and youth -- is starting to recognize his or her own role in keeping kids in the classroom.”
That recognition is also helping the initiative’s participating communities raise public awareness of the dropout crisis, as well as of the strategies for addressing it.
Another way in which these communities are fulfilling this goal is through the collection, analysis and sharing of reliable data on related trends and interventions.
Laura Shubilla is president of the Philadelphia Youth Network, a nonprofit organization that helps inform, support and manage many of the city’s youth-related programs. It is also the local convening partner for the national initiative and lead agency for the Philadelphia Youth Transitions Collaborative, a group of nonprofit, government and educational organizations focused on expanding and strengthening educational opportunities for youth in that city.
In October 2006, the collaborative released “Unfulfilled Promise: The Dimensions and Characteristics of Philadelphia’s Dropout Crisis, 2000-2005,” which found that 6 percent of the city’s 130,000 public school students from grades six through 12 dropped out in 2003-04. Another 4 percent were classified as “near-dropouts,” missing more than 50 percent of scheduled school days.
Researchers also found that, from 2000 to 2005, the percentage of students who graduated within the traditional four years of high school in the Philadelphia public school system ranged from 45 to 52 percent.
The report was released in conjunction with the launch of Project U-Turn, a citywide campaign -- also led by the collaborative -- designed to increase public awareness of dropout rates in Philadelphia and promote strategies to reconnect local young people with educational opportunities.
Shubilla says the national initiative is helping communities bring the concerns of these struggling students into the public debates on school reform. This, she says, is critical to building “high-quality educational options that will help keep current students in school and recover those who’ve already disengaged. Doing that successfully and in a sustainable way means transforming core educational systems in ways that better serve struggling youth.”
Such efforts among the participating cities are starting to bear fruit.
For example, advocates in Philadelphia have expanded educational options for students over age 18, while representatives in Portland are working with state and local leaders to help shape accountability measures for alternative education programs. In addition, members of the initiative in Boston are strengthening the call for new dropout prevention and recovery programs by documenting that available services meet less than 25 percent of the actual need.
While this broad, systems-level work is still in its early days, JFF’s Murphy says the emerging outcomes reflect a growing understanding among educators, advocates and others that the nation’s dropout crisis is critical.
“We need reforms that genuinely equalize the system, so that kids on different educational pathways have the same opportunities to learn, to graduate and to access opportunities to go to college or get living wage jobs.”
Portland’s Phillips agrees.
“This initiative calls on us to meet these young people where they’re at -- in life and academically -- rather than trying to put them into some standardized mold, then rejecting them if they don’t fit,” she said.
“Ultimately, we have the potential for creating school systems that serve all our youth, not just those living in specific neighborhoods. And that’s what education should really be about.”