Afternoon Announcements: September 21, 2011

Here are today's announcements!

Detroit Public Schools expects to shed nearly 40 percent of its teachers in the next four years to help close a $327 million deficit, yet projects a loss of just 6,000 students under a state-approved fiscal blueprint, according to the Detroit News. The district would cut more than 1,500 teachers by fall 2015.

Education Week reports that a group of 20 states will lead the development of a new set of common standards in science, according to an announcement today from Achieve, a Washington-based nonprofit managing the effort. Participating states span the country, from California and Arizona to Michigan and Maryland. They will help craft what have been dubbed the Next Generation Science Standards based on a framework developed by a panel of the National Research Council earlier this summer.

According to US News & World Report, a large number of America's highest-performing middle school students regress during high school, according to a new study released Tuesday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an educational research firm.

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Are Students Graduating Ready for the RIGHT Career in This Economy?

Maria's blog post from last week about how "college ready" doesn't necessarily mean "career ready" got me to thinking about another common theme that staff here at the Alliance have heard from state leaders, business executives, and others about the job crisis: Contrary to most individuals' beliefs, there are jobs out there -- there are just not enough skilled workers to fill them.

What? With unemployment remaining stubbornly in the 9 percent range, how can there be jobs that aren't being filled?

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Stats That Stick: July 13, 2011

The June unemployment rate for high school dropouts was 14.3 percent, compared to 4.4 percent for individuals with a bachelor’s degree, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for high school graduates was 10 percent and 8.4 percent for individuals with some college or an associate’s degree.

In Alabama, more than 34 percent of 2010 high school graduates who attended a state public four-year or two-year college needed at least one remedial course, and many of them needed two. (Montgomery Advertiser)

The Huffington Post reports that the latest 2010 census data shows that the share of children in the United States is 24 percent, falling below the previous low of 26 percent of 1990. The share is projected to slip further, to 23 percent by 2050, even as the percentage of people 65 and older is expected to jump from 13 percent today to roughly 20 percent by 2050 due to the aging of baby boomers and beyond. And when this generation of children grows up, it will become a shrinking work force that will have to support the nation's expanding elderly population—even as the government strains to cut spending for health care, pensions and much else.

 

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Stats That Stick: May 25, 2011

On average, bachelor’s degrees pay off. But a new study confirms that some undergraduate majors pay off a lot more than others. In fact, the difference in earnings potential between one major and another can be more than 300 percent. In fact, the lifetime advantage ranges from $1,090,000 for Engineering majors to $241,000 for Education majors.
-Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce

The median starting salary of students graduating in 2009 and 2010 was 10% lower than the salary received by those who entered the workforce in 2006 and 2007. College educated women continue to earn less than college educated men. –Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

The nation’s overall education spending grew at a slower pace in 2009 than at any other time in more than a decade. Public school districts spent an average of $10,499 per student on elementary and secondary education in the 2009 fiscal year, up 2.3 percent from 2008. In contrast, spending rose by 6.1 percent and 5.8 percent in the two years before that. -New York Times

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Literacy: A National Priority

When I first moved to DC, I began tutoring and mentoring a young middle school student named Darius. To get a better sense for me, Darius’ mother invited me over for dinner one evening.  She cooked fried chicken, wild rice, buttermilk biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans.  It was an excellent meal, one that reminded me of home. But as dinner concluded, I couldn’t help but inquire about Darius’ infant sister crying in the corner of the apartment.  Her mother, Brenda, said the little girl suffered from an ear infection, but the doctor rushed the family out of the office with eardrops and antibiotics, noting the directions on the bottle.  The doctor prescribed the child with a certain dosage of both medications, but both Brenda and Darius found the instructions confusing – which led to them improperly medicating the 8-month old child. Though the baby ended up fully recovering, the situation could have been easily avoided.

I write this to say that literacy matters. Yet too many young and old people, especially African Americans, lack the skills necessary to read at grade level. In fact, only 14 percent of African American eighth graders score at or above proficiency according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress . To localize this information, 47 percent of the adult population in Detroit, MI is considered to be, “functionally illiterate,” according to the National Institute for Literacy. Roughly 50 percent of the Motor City cannot properly fill out a job application, critically read a newspaper, or accurately interpret text on a medicine bottle. Essentially, we have students and adults alike sleepwalking their way through life because they are illiterate. 

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Statement from Alliance President Bob Wise on the LEARN Act

Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Literacy Education for All, Results for the Nation (LEARN) Act, a comprehensive literacy bill that would authorize $2.35 billion to support state and local programs to ensure that children from birth through grade twelve have the reading and writing skills necessary for success in school and beyond. In response, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, issued the following statement:

"This critical legislation and strong federal investment will allow the nation to shift from a literacy lull to literacy for all. Currently half of the nation’s high school graduates are not prepared for college-level reading and American fifteen-year-olds rank fourteenth among developed nations in reading, trailing countries such as Poland and Estonia. In today’s global economy and 21st century workforce, literacy is an absolute precondition for success.

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Report Round-up

Closing the Expectations Gap 2011 by Achieve. This report finds that in the six years since the National Governors Association and Achieve co-sponsored the National Education Summit on high schools, the goal of aligning the expectations for high school graduates with the demands of college and the workplace is the new norm across the United States.

Breaking New Ground: Building a National Workforce Skills Credentialing System from ACT. This report introduces the need and associated benefits for establishing a national workforce credentialing system and emphasizes the importance of getting a critical mass of state, national, and public and private workforce leaders to co-construct a foundational framework to address our national workforce challenges.

Turning Around the Nation’s Lowest-Performing Schools from the Center for American Progress.  This report focuses on five steps that low-performing school districts can take to improve their chances of success.

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Morning Announcements: October 20, 2010

College graduation rates among young Americans, especially Latinos, are stagnating, according to the Wall Street Journal and a new report from the American Council on Education. Click here to view an interactive graph on the college attendance rates from the WSJ. The Washington Post also picked up on the study but focused on the finding that younger men are significantly less likely to have completed college than older men.

A new report from the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education finds that about 60 percent of students who graduated from public and private schools in 2005 and 2006 who enrolled at the Community College of Rhode Island needed remediation in one or more areas: reading, writing or math. To read more about the remediation problem on a national level, see the Alliance brief entitled Paying Double: Inadequate High Schools and Community College Remediation. While this RI study finds that high schools aren’t preparing students for community colleges, across the country, a report from the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento finds that community colleges aren’t preparing students for the workforce. Specifically, the study finds that seventy percent of students seeking degrees at California's community colleges did not manage to attain them or transfer to four-year universities within six years.

 

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"The Gray and the Brown: The Generational Mismatch"

In a National Journal cover story, Ronald Brownstein writes about "two of the biggest demographic trends reshaping the nation in the 21st century"--the nonwhite population of young people and the overwhelmingly white older generation, or, as he calls them, the gray and the brown.

He notes that children of color now make up more than two-fifths of all children under 18 and will represent a majority of all American children as soon as 2023. Meanwhile, whites will still make up nearly two-thirds of seniors by 2040.

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New Issue of Straight A's Spotlights Workforce Challenges of High School Dropouts

The June 28 issue of Straight A's, the Alliance's biweekly newsletter is now available. The following articles are included in this issue:

• HELP WANTED: New Report Finds Nearly Two Thirds of All Job Openings Will Require Postsecondary Education by 2018
• THE GED: New Report Finds that GED Recipients Fare Little Better Economically Than High School Dropouts
• JOBS WATCH: High Unemployment Rates Continue to Disproportionately Affect High School Dropouts

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