Expanding efforts to keep high school students in the classroom and on the road to long-term stability and success is the focus of the Initiative to Support Struggling Students and Out-of-School Youth.
The national initiative -- designed and funded by member organizations of the Youth Transition Funders Group (YTFG) -- seeks to build community strategies and partnerships that reduce high school dropout rates and reconnect students not on track for graduation with educational opportunities. Participating cities also work on issues of race- and class-based inequities in local schools and their effect on graduation rates.
YTFG is a network of local, regional and national philanthropies supporting efforts around the country to help underserved youth and young adults.
Three YTFG members -- Mott, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York -- provided a total of nearly $2 million to the Coalition of Community Foundations for Youth (CCFY) for the initiative, which was formally launched on January 12 in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Portland (Oregon) and San Jose (California). Those five cities were selected in 2004 via a competitive application process. Each received grants of $275,000 from CCFY for strategic planning, assessment and capacity-building activities.
Additional locations may be identified in the future.
Marlene Seltzer is president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based nonprofit research, consulting and advocacy organization which is providing technical assistance to the participating cities. She notes that more than 30 percent of young people in the United States who enter the eighth grade annually either fail to earn their diploma within the traditional four years of high school or drop out of school altogether. This statistic grows to more than 50 percent in some inner-city communities, where a lack of available resources for quality programs exacerbates non-graduation rates among low-income and minority youth.
Advocates note that some high schools also try to improve their overall performance measures by “pushing” out of the system those youth who arrive undereducated and with limited skills. Others point to a lack of information being gathered about why individual students leave school, as well as the absence in many communities of quality alternative educational opportunities for struggling and out-of-school youth.
Helping communities address these issues requires a multi-pronged, systemic approach, Seltzer said.
“This project truly embraces that approach by bringing together numerous partners -- educational systems and providers, parents and youth, community-based organizations, and others -- to identify and implement meaningful solutions.”
Participating cities will focus on four key goals in the initiative’s first year:
- Identifying existing and potential educational challenges, options and opportunities for struggling students and at-risk youth;
- Improving local capacity to gather, examine, and use education-related information and resources to benefit those youth;
- Building relationships and mobilizing support among key partners and stakeholders; and
- Assessing related policy and funding opportunities at the state and local levels.
Based on these activities, says Seltzer, the local partnerships will prepare by 2006 a comprehensive set of action steps for addressing local dropout trends and for expanding the quantity and enhancing the quality of options for struggling students and out-of-school youth.
“The lessons learned in these cities may also help us create effective models and strategies that can be replicated around the country,” she said. “And promoting a broad system of quality educational opportunities would be an important step forward for all of our nation’s youth.”
Additional Resources
- Click here to read a story about Mott Middle College, the nation’s first multidistrict, middle college high school.
- Click here to read a Q&A with Gary Orfield -- co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University -- about the challenges and opportunities of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
- Click here to read a Q&A with Jeannie Oakes -- presidential professor in educational equity at the University of California - Los Angeles -- about equity-minded school reform.