Governor Snyder & Arne Duncan (Update: DPS, EAA and Ground Zero of Education Reform)

EDUCATION SECRETARY VISITS DETROIT SCHOOLS

Reform called encouraging

By Chastity Pratt Dawsey Detroit Free Press Education Writer

   Gov. Rick Snyder joined U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan Monday at Thirkell Elementary School and Brenda Scott Academy of Theater Arts in Detroit as part of three school tours highlighting local education reform and the importance of investing in preschool.

   Duncan, who in 2009 called Detroit Public Schools “ground zero” for education reform, said the statewide school reform district — the Education Achievement Authority — is “the right type of work.” But he stopped short of calling it a success.

   “It’s very early. This is their first year. Obviously long, long way to go, and there will be bumps in the road and hurdles,” he said. “I’m very, very encouraged.”

   Next year, Detroit Public Schools will add 25 preschool classes and will add early childhood programs for children who are three and younger, said Karen Ridgeway, the superintendent of academics for the district. Duncan and Snyder read a book entitled, “The Rainbow Fish” to Thirkell preschoolers before heading to their next stop on the tour.

   At Brenda Scott, the two officials were joined by Mike Flanagan, the state superintendent, and John Covington, chancellor for the EAA, for a town hall meeting with about 100 Detroit parents and staff.

   Scott is one of 15 Detroit schools now operated by the EAA, which has been at the center of controversy in recent weeks. The EAA was established in 2011 with Snyder’s support through an interlocal agreement between Detroit Public Schools and Eastern Michigan University. Its objective is to take control over and reform the lowest performing 5% of schools. It does not operate on traditional grade levels, but has an online curriculum that personalizes learning so students progress through school at their own pace.

   The EAA has experienced some budget shortfalls in its inaugural year operating schools, and used DPS as a conduit to borrow $12 million. The secretary of the board, mayoral candidate Mike Duggan, stepped down from the board on Friday after the loans were made public, saying he didn’t want the EAA to be drawn into the mayoral campaign.

   State Sen. Bert Johnson, a Democrat from Highland Park, gave Duncan a letter Monday asking him and President Barack Obama “to seriously consider the ramifications of giving the appearance of tacitly supporting this failed experiment,” a reference to the EAA.

   “What the Republicans are doing does not work, is not working and will not work,” Johnson said.

   During the town hall meeting, the panel encouraged local and state officials, along with communities, to stop fighting over politics and money.

   “There is one common enemy, that’s academic failure,” Duncan said. “All of us adults have to put aside our little petty differences or whatever and figure out how every single child in Detroit, in Michigan, and across the country has a chance to get a great education.”

   Parents who attended the meeting agreed.

   “We have too many chiefs. We need some more Indians,” said Shayla Summers, a parent at Beckham Academy.

   Roquesha O’Neal, whose son attends Osborn High, said the panelists engage in politics themselves.

   “They put on a good show today,” she said of the town hall meeting. “But they didn’t listen to the customers, let the parents and the young people speak.”

   The last scheduled stop on the tour was the Perry Child Development Center in Ypsilanti, where officials were to visit classrooms and lead a panel discussion with parents and education leaders on the advantages of expanding access to high-quality preschool programs.

   The HighScope Perry Preschool Study is a nationally renowned study that found that adults at age 40 who experienced preschool had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not attend preschool.

   Progress Michigan, a Lansing-based liberal advocacy group, sent a mascot in a skunk costume to Brenda Scott Academy and Perry to protest a group led by a Snyder appointee that had secretly studied the feasibility of a voucher-like system that would allow students to pay the costs of their schooling with a Michigan Education Card similar to the debit cards the state issues to pay welfare benefits.

   Snyder told reporters he never asked the group to launch the project nor to brainstorm on how to institute vouchers. The governor has since asked Flanagan to lead the group in brainstorming new uses for technology in the delivery of education.

   Contact Chastity Pratt Dawsey:

   313-223-4537 or cpratt@freepress.com   or on

   Facebook. Follow@cprattdawsey on

   Twitter.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan high fives fifth-grader Braxton Moss as he and Gov. Rick Snyder visit Detroit Public Schools’ Thirkell Elementary on Monday in Detroit. The visit was part of three school tours highlighting local education reform and preschool. PHOTOS BY MANDI WRIGHT/DETROIT FREE PRESS

Duncan works with Thomas Smith in his level 11-12 science class at the Brenda Scott Academy of Theater Arts in Detroit.

U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce Legislation (Webinar / Raising the Bar: Exploring State and Local Efforts to Improve Accountability)

Congressman John Kline, Chairman

FOR PLANNING PURPOSESMay 6, 2013 CONTACT: Press Office (202) 226-9440 ***MEDIA ADVISORY*** TOMORROW: Full Committee To Examine State and Local Accountability Systems WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Tuesday, May 7 at 10:00 a.m., the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Rep. John Kline (R-MN), will hold a hearing entitled, “Raising the Bar: Exploring State and Local Efforts to Improve Accountability.” The hearing will take place in room 2175 of the Rayburn House Office Building. The challenges facing our nation’s elementary and secondary education system are clear: fewer than 40 percent of 4th graders are proficient in reading and math, and only about three-quarters of students graduate from high school. Many students who do graduate from high school lack the knowledge or skills they need to succeed. Instead of working with Congress to change the nation’s K-12 education law (known as No Child Left Behind),  the Obama administration imposed a temporary waiver scheme that merely exchanges a few of the law’s most onerous mandates for new requirements dictated by the Department of Education. As the committee renews its efforts to rewrite No Child Left Behind, a top priority will be granting states and school districts the flexibility necessary to develop their own accountability plans that provide parents more accurate and meaningful information about school performance. Tuesday’s hearing will offer members an opportunity to examine the appropriate federal role in accountability and explore innovative state and local efforts to hold schools accountable for student performance. To learn more about this hearing, visit www.edworkforce.house.gov/hearings. # # #

Discovery Education: A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson (In case you missed it)

EAA (Update)

Duggan resigns from EAA school board

I don’t ‘want to be a distraction,’ he says

By Matt Helms and Chastity Pratt Dawsey Detroit Free Press Staff Writers

   Mike Duggan, the former Detroit Medical Center CEO who along with Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napolean are front-runners in the race to become Detroit’s next mayor, resigned Friday from the board of the Education Achievement Authority, the controversial school district the state set up to reform Michigan’s most troubled schools.

   In a letter to Carol Goss, the chairwoman of the statewide district that targets the lowest-performing 5% of schools, Duggan said Friday that his role as a volunteer board member “is drawing the EAA into the middle of a heated mayoral campaign. As long as I remain on the board, some will be motivated to try to keep the EAA engulfed in as much controversy as possible.”

   Duggan told Goss, who is president and CEO of the Skill-man Foundation, that he believes in the mission and goals of the EAA but doesn’t “want to be a distraction from these very important efforts.”

   Duggan was secretary of the 11-member board of the EAA, set up by Gov. Rick Snyder to fix student-performance problems at the weakest schools in the state. Duggan was one of Snyder’s seven appointees to the board.

   A bill in the state Senate proposes expanding the district to include up to 35 more schools. So far, its only 15 schools are in Detroit.

   The reform district has been controversial, amid charges from critics that it undermines the Detroit Public Schools and is unproven academically.

   The EAA competes with DPS for students and funding. However, DPS took out $12 million in loans since the fall and gave the money to the EAA to keep the state school district afloat financially.

   It was clear that Duggan was taking political heat for being a member of the EAA board, which did not know about the loans. At a forum for mayoral candidates earlier this week, one resident submitted a written question asking Duggan how he could campaign to become a mayor opposed to an emergency manager for Detroit while sitting on the board of the EAA that is getting loans with help from DPS, a system that is run by an emergency manager.

   Duggan conceded that the question has been raised frequently on the campaign trail but told the Free Press he does not believe stepping down from the EAA will impact his bid for mayor.

   “People who are against the EAA were against me last week and they’ll still be against me — whether I’m on the board is not going to change the dynamics,” Duggan said. “I wanted the attacks on the EAA that were being generated in the mayoral campaign not to impact the EAA. They have plenty of challenges already. They didn’t need a mayoral campaign on top of it.”

   Warren resident Mary Wood, who regularly follows EAA meetings, said she was the one who informed Duggan last week about the money DPS borrowed and passed on to the EAA.

   “The board may not have known, but it was their business to know,” she said. “I think he’s taking himself out of the hot seat right now.”

   Goss said Duggan will be missed because he asked tough questions about how the EAA operates.

   “I think he was and is really committed to trying to figure out how to educate kids better and he really believed in the EAA,” Goss said. “Maybe he thought the best way to support the EAA now is to not draw it into this political battle.”

   John Covington, chancellor for the EAA, said he had not received any notice of the resignation as of Friday afternoon, therefore he could not comment.

   Contact Matt Helms: 313-222-1450 or at mhelms@freepress.com  

Mike Duggan

Make sure to Get the STEM Story Straight! (and the one on the Knowledge Economy) hint...it's Innovation & Creativity that are in demand!

It’s Crowded at the Top: A NewMarketplace Podcast

STEPHEN J. DUBNER
05/01/2013 | 5:33 pm

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(Photo: Metro Centric)

Our latest podcast, “Crowded at the Top,” presents a surprising explanation for why the U.S. unemployment rate is still relatively high. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript.)

It features a conversation with the University of British Columbia economist Paul Beaudry, one of the authors (along withDavid Green and Benjamin Sand) of a new paper called “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks”:

What explains the current low rate of employment in the U.S.? While there has substantial debate over this question in recent years, we believe that considerable added insight can be derived by focusing on changes in the labour market at the turn of the century. In particular, we argue that in about the year 2000, the demand for skill (or, more speci cally, for cognitive tasks often associated with high educational skill) underwent a reversal. Many researchers have documented a strong, ongoing increase in the demand for skills in the decades leading up to 2000. In this paper, we document a decline in that demand in the years since 2000, even as the supply of high education workers continues to grow. We go on to show that, in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers.This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together. In order to understand these patterns, we off er a simple extension to the standard skill biased technical change model that views cognitive tasks as a stock rather than a flow. We show how such a model can explain the trends in the data that we present, and o ffers a novel interpretation of the current employment situation in the U.S.

So it appears that, while returns to education remain strong, there are far too many highly educated workers for the available jobs. We also make note in the podcast of a new paper by Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell which argues that, for all the hand-wringing about the U.S.’s inability to educate (or import) a sufficient number of STEM workers, there is in fact no shortage of such workers and that only half of U.S. STEM graduates end up with a STEM job.

We also make note of one potential silver lining in this “de-skilling” process, as Beaudry calls it: more highly educated workers may flow into fields like teaching. It’s worth noting that decades ago, when educated women had fewer job options than today, many of the best and brightest were teachers. Their outflow from the teaching ranks put a hurt on education in general. For further reading, see “Do Alternative Opportunities Matter? The Role Of Female Labor Markets In The Decline Of Teacher Supply And Teacher Quality, 1940-1990,” byMarigee P. Bacolod; and “Why the Best Don’t Teach,” by then-New York City schools chancellor Harold O. Levy.

U.S. House Education and the Work Force Committee (Raising the Bar: Exploring State and Local Efforts to Improve Accountability Tuesday, May 7, 2013 10:00AM)

Congressman John Kline, Chairman

FOR PLANNING PURPOSESMay 3, 2013 CONTACT: Press Office (202) 226-9440 ***MEDIA ADVISORY***  Full Committee To Examine State and Local Accountability Systems WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Tuesday, May 7 at 10:00 a.m., the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Rep. John Kline (R-MN), will hold a hearing entitled, “Raising the Bar: Exploring State and Local Efforts to Improve Accountability.” The hearing will take place in room 2175 of the Rayburn House Office Building. The challenges facing our nation’s elementary and secondary education system are clear: fewer than 40 percent of 4th graders are proficient in reading and math, and only about three-quarters of students graduate from high school. Many students who do graduate from high school lack the knowledge or skills they need to succeed. Instead of working with Congress to change the nation’s K-12 education law (known as No Child Left Behind),  the Obama administration imposed a temporary waiver scheme that merely exchanges a few of the law’s most onerous mandates for new requirements dictated by the Department of Education. As the committee renews its efforts to rewrite No Child Left Behind, a top priority will be granting states and school districts the flexibility necessary to develop their own accountability plans that provide parents more accurate and meaningful information about school performance. Tuesday’s hearing will offer members an opportunity to examine the appropriate federal role in accountability and explore innovative state and local efforts to hold schools accountable for student performance. To learn more about this hearing, visit www.edworkforce.house.gov/hearings. # # #

NASA Time-Lapse Solar Fluctuation (Time-Lapse Solar Motion Pictures Pioneered @McMath-Hulbert Observatory circa 1929)

EAA (Update: Detroit Buzz! Tom Vander Ark / Digital Learning NOW)

What's All The Buzz About Detroit?

By Tom Vander Ark on April 29, 2013 10:50 AM 

Hey, how about some good news from Detroit? As noted recently, education inDetroit is coming out of the tailspin. There are some very good schools serving high need populations and it rivals the Bay Area for innovations in blended learning.

Last week I toured schools and joined a CEE-Trust Blended Learning Summit (and today I'm back in Detroit headed for another innovative blended school, Nexus Academy of Lansing).

Cornerstone. With a long history in the independent school space, Cornerstone Charter Schools is a network of four growing blended schools with strong roots and capacity.

Winner of a Gates-funded Next Generation Learning Challenges grant (anddiscussed in an NGLC blog ), Cornerstone Charter Health High School is a Carpe Diem-like flex model featuring Apex curriculum. In its first year the school serves about ninth graders. The health-focused school has a great relationship with the nearby medical center where many students will spend time in their last two years.

The high school is currently co-located with Madison-Carver Academy. They opened in a beautifully renovated and expanded elementary school in gritty northwest Detroit just south of 8 Mile Road.

The K-2 structure is a Rocketship-like lab rotation model. Intermediate grades feature a classroom rotation model. Both use Compass Odyssey content and MasteryConnectassessments running on Education Elements platform. There is no better opportunity to see three different well executed blended models under one roof.

Charters don't get local funding, and state funding is low so the Cornerstone budget is tight (less than half of some of the east coast charters we studied at the Summit). They stay competitive for enrollment and employment with a powerful culture based on well-articulated values and embodied by a talented leadership team.

EAA Buzz. Equally impressive were the schools managed by the Education Achievement Authority (EAA). On each visit there was clear evidence of strong pedagogical vision, a powerful learning platform and great teaching in every classroom.

It's important to remember that the EAA is doing disaster recovery work. They took over 15 schools that were in horrible physical, cultural and academic shape. The fact that the schools are clean, bright, sane, and safe is testament to heroic effort given the relatively low level of funding (some schools received SIG grants).

The core EAA innovation is a mastery-based student-centered learning system. Instructional units are the building blocks of the system. Each unit includes approximately three standards-based learning targets. For each unit, the Buzz learning platform--developed with Agilix --includes a variety of learning resources, application opportunities, and assessments.

Mary Esselman is the academic driver behind the innovation. I met this pedagogical tinkerer in Kansas City three years ago where she developed and piloted Buzz. When her boss John Covington took on the EAA challenge, they brought Buzz and student- centered learning to Detroit along with a couple great principals.

There are eight things I really like about Buzz:

• Ownership. Each unit includes a rich library of learning resources that give students learning pathways choices (units include from Compass Learning, HMH, LearnZillion, Flocabulary as well as open and teacher created content).

• Application. Compared to competency-based systems where teachers tick off individual subskills, the Buzz units are big enough to allow interesting application projects.

• Evidence. Students must present three forms of evidence for each learning target--they have options in how they show what they know.

• Grading. The 1-4 grading system is the basis for the mastery-based system. Students must score a 3, proficient, in order to move to the next unit. Students scoring a 4, advanced, are eligible for peer coaching.

• Levels. The K-8 EAA schools and the Buzz platform are organized into 18 levels. Having twice as many levels as grades provides finer grained performance grouping. It also reduces the stigma for twelve year olds that are in Level 10 in ELA and Level 9 in math, for example. New students are placed in appropriate levels using adaptive tests from Scantron.

• Tracking. Student productivity is measured by the number of targets hit over an expected period of time and show on a speedometer on their desktop. Teachers can monitor the progress of all of their students at a glance. Some teachers display a project-tracking tool projected on an interactive white board to create a game-like leaderboard effect--a nice mixture of an individual progress model in a cohort environment.

• Motivation. The combination of student choice, engaging content, lots of feedback on performance and progress yields a motivating learning environment.

• Focus. Rather than focusing on lesson plans, teachers build and swap units--a bigger sequence of instruction, application, and assessment.

Buzz is as close to the merit badge idea I've been writing about for a couple years of anything I've seen. Still a work in progress, teachers quickly admit that they are "building the plane while flying it."

The platform is really interesting, but the step-function improvement in results that will be widely evident at most EAA schools at the end of the year will be a result of a coherent system that includes:

• High expectations and powerful performance-based culture.

• Pedagogical vision of a student-centered show-what-you-know learning system.

• Performance-based year round employment and a long student day and year.

• Student and teacher access to digital learning resources.

• Effective learning practices in every classroom every day.

• Relentless community engagement and outreach.

Like every other secondary school I visit, I'd like to see more writing across the curriculum. And while I appreciate the safety concerns, I'd still like to see take-home technology (or help with at-home technology for kids that need it...and Mary said that's coming).

Angela Underwood, came from Kansas City as well. She's the principal of Noland K-8 school (see NGLC profile). After filling over 30 dumpsters with garbage and junk, Angela found staffing the turnaround to be the real challenge. "It's really hard work," she said and the conditions in the old building can be pretty bad--hot in the summer, cold in the winter.

Like all EAA schools, they have a high percentage of first year teachers including many from Teach For America. Some veteran teachers take to the new system but many struggled with the student-centered model. Underwood has replaced 8 teachers at her school this year. She said they have learned to "screen for the learning facilitator mindset."

Like students, teachers progress through four levels of mastery. EAA uses PD360 to provide online supports in areas including learning environment, building learning units, fostering student ownership and use of data. There is a learning coach in every school.

As noted last month, EAA benefited from a $10 million grant from the Broad Foundation.Excellent Schools Detroit is funded by Kellogg, Kresge, Skillman, McGregor, and United Way.

If it's not clear to Lansing yet, the results posted by EAA schools will make the case for expanding their authority and investing in their capacity. Like Cornerstone, the EAA is doing work of national importance--and I'm glad that's happening in Detroit.

Disclosures: Connections and Compass Learning are Getting Smart Advocacy Partners. MasteryConnect and LearnZillion are portfolio companies of Learn Capital where Tom is partner.

DPS (Update: Stephen Henderson Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor on a Decade of Detriot Educational Discourse)

Stephen Henderson: Roberts leaves DPS - so now what?

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Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts outlines his 2012-'13 budget at a public hearing at Renaissance High School in Detroit on Wednesday, June 27, 2012. / Patricia Beck/Detroit Free Press

A few years ago, early in Robert Bobb’s tenure as emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools, he sat me down and showed me what it would mean to balance the school system’s books.

Bobb said if he spent only what the district took in each year, and set enough aside to retire the debt and pay back past overspending, the district would operate essentially as a warehouse for city kids. There would be an average of 60 kids per class, with roaming principals who were “in charge” of multiple schools. There might be vast sections of the city that didn’t have any elementary schools; and transportation would not be any more available than it is now.

The math, Bobb said, was simple. Any accountant could line up the zeros in the right place.

It was the consequences of that math that were unacceptable. The district was too boxed in — by its declining revenues and debt burden — to reasonably dig its way out of the financial hole.

Bobb said, as a result, he would leave DPS in better shape (racking up less annual deficit than it had been), but the overall debt would be larger and the solution to the long-term problems would still be somewhere in the future.

So here we are, two years later, watching the second emergency manager, Roy Roberts, pack it up.

And substantively, the long-term picture is not much different. Roberts, without question, has been more diligent about cutting expenses and re-scaling the district to reflect a smaller population. He has restructured the debt so that it sucks less money annually out of the budget, but that means larger overall indebtedness.

But even he says the district is a few years away from alleviating the financial emergency that precipitated an emergency manager in the first place. And what will remain once that happens? The district is in such a shambles already that it’s hard to imagine what will be left.

The real tragedy here has been the failure of the state — which first stepped into the failing district more than a decade ago — to see DPS’ struggles as anything beyond an inability to pay the bills.

The truth is that the district’s setup doesn’t work. It owes too much money, much of it to retirees whose benefits are, and should be, protected. (It’s not remotely fair to take pension or health care benefits from employees who were promised those things while they worked.)

And it is still losing kids, which is like death, financially, for school districts. Unlike cities, which can raise revenue in a number of ways, school districts get all of their money based on pupil count, so every family that leaves Detroit or puts their kids in private or the expanding charter schools takes money away from DPS.

As Bobb said, you can easily cut spending to match, but at some point, you reach a point of unsustainability as far as service delivery (actually educating kids) is concerned.

I don’t blame Roberts, who is a fine man and a taut, highly competent manager, for where we are.

But someone at the state level, which is where this system has been managed since 2009, needs to have come up with a bigger-picture solution. Bobb at one point suggested a GM bankruptcy-style fix that would have split the district in two: one small district that would be given wide latitude to retire the debt over time, and another, “new” district that would be given a fresh start.

Practicality might have been the biggest obstacle to that plan, but the idea should at least have sparked some discussion about alternative models.

It didn’t. Roberts has been trying to make the books balance, while the state cheers his efforts. Meanwhile, on the sidelines, the school district’s local elected leaders have been squealing for a chance to get control back, but they have no credible plan for a more stable financial model. (And frankly, it was irresponsible elected leadership that plunged the district into trouble in the first place.)

There has to be a better way. The sorry state of the city’s public schools is a huge drain on Detroit’s overall success, and remains a deeply repulsive incentive for families to move in, or stay. Fixing that ought to be a real priority for anyone who’s touting a better tomorrow for Detroit.

The model for city schools is broken. It’s time for someone to come up with a new one.

Stephen Henderson is editorial page editor for the Free Press and the host of “American Black Journal,” which airs at 1 p.m. Sundays on Detroit Public Television. Follow Henderson on Twitter@ShendersonFreep, or contact him at 313-222-6659 orshenderson600@freepress.com.

U.S. News STEM Solutions National Conference (Update: Early Registration Extended to May 9, 2013)

Thursday May 9th is the Last Day for Early Registration for US News STEM Solutions!

Submitted by Tommy Cornelis on May 2, 2013

The early registration deadline for the U.S. News STEM Solutions has been extended to Thursday, May 9th, due to popular demand. There is still time to save $100 if you register now.

Join leaders in academia, government and business for three innovative days packed with critical discussions, demonstrations and networking opportunities to address and solve the nation’s current STEM crisis. This year’s conference theme “Teach. Inspire. Hire.” is a call to action designed to help further propel improvements in STEM education and workforce development across the United States.

Meet the change-makers in Austin this June and help discover the solutions to a stronger STEM workforce and a more successful future. To see the most current list of confirmed speakers and exhibitors, visit www.USNewsSTEMSolutions.com.

MI STEM Partnership "Call to Action Seminar" (June 4-5 2013 @The Henry Ford)

Project: St. Clair Hub Company: Michigan STEM Partnership

James Emmerling posted a new message: MI STEM Partnership - Major Event, "Call-to-Action Seminar" The Michigan STEM Workforce Call to Action Seminar (“our” STEM event for this year) is scheduled for June 4-5 at Henry Ford Museum. We have scheduled some terrific speakers, including the US Secretary of Education’s STEM adviser. The following organizations have partnered with us for this event, NDIA, AIA or BISEC, and the MI chapters of these associations will be doing a major registration drive.  The cost of registration is $25 for educators and $100 for employers.  Although we would like everyone to attend, the St. Clair Hub has been provided 8 spots to represent our regional group (4 from education and 4 business partners).  If you would like to attend, please reply to this message, or you can register on your own at www.ndia.org/meetings/371B Hope to see you there, James Call-to-Action Seminar flyer.pdf 989 KB

Higher Education & Employers (Update: Gallup)

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Thursday, May 2, 2013

Higher Education and Employers: Thrive Together or Perish Apart

By Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education

No matter who you ask -- whether it’s a representative sample of Americans, incoming college freshmen, or parents of 5th-12th graders -- they say the most important reason for a degree beyond high school is to get a good job. But, few believe that those who have a post-high school credential are well-prepared for success in the workforce. And, although many workers who don’t yet have a college degree or certificate want to go back to get one, they see a number of barriers to doing so. The solution to these problems lies in new forms of collaboration between higher education and employers.

With a coming world-wide jobs war, it is imperative that higher education and employers get this collaboration right. If they don’t, we run the risk of destroying one of the things America is best known for -- our higher education system. If higher education and employers partner together, they will thrive. If they continue down their disconnected paths, a large number of colleges, universities, and businesses will perish.

Americans have given higher education a clear mandate: a degree had better translate to a good job, otherwise it’s very difficult to justify. Nearly every single American -- 97% to be exact -- says that education beyond high school is important. So, although America’s appetite for higher education is still incredibly strong, there are painful data suggesting the demand may come to a crashing halt if we can’t make a better connection between higher education degrees and jobs.

Half of recent graduates -- not even including the large percentage who drop out of college -- are in jobs that don’t require a degree, meaning we obviously have not built a direct pipeline between degrees conferred and the jobs available in the U.S. This is shameful. And it’s the direct result of employers and higher education failing to work together. Not only are they not working together now, they are barely even talking to one another.

Before employers start pointing fingers at higher education for failing to produce graduates with real work experience and 21st century skills, such as thinking critically, communicating effectively, and working collaboratively with diverse people and teams, they should look carefully at their own role in this problem. Gallup recently discovered that only 7% of high school students currently intern or work with a business, although 43% say they plan to start their own business someday. Employers are missing the mark right now just as much as higher education is.

Here are some ideas and examples for how business and higher education leaders can collaborate to make sure that those earning college degrees are prepared for jobs.

CEOs and other executive leaders of organizations must get to know their local college and university leaders. It is the obligation of employers -- especially those looking to fill jobs with talented people -- to make it clear what they are looking for. Make sure you build a relationship with your area educational institutions to connect their pipeline of degrees with your pipeline of job openings and ongoing training needs. The Manufacturer’s Institute -- an association of high-tech manufacturing companies -- for example, developed their own set of “stackable credentials” reflecting what they are looking for in those they hire. They partnered with community colleges, like Northern Virginia Community College, to offer these programs.

Colleges should give credit for outside knowledge and skills. Americans overwhelmingly support receiving college credit for knowledge and skills learned outside the classroom (87%), and they also support being evaluated and receiving credits for what they already know (75%). Northeastern University has one of the hottest degrees in the marketplace right now, thanks to their co-op program in which they actively seek a variety of Boston-area employers to participate by hiring students for six-month stints in jobs. These students earn college credit, and because they can spend more time in these positions than the typical summer internship, they are able to perform real jobs for the employers who hire them. Northeastern has blended real work experience with academic programming, and it’s working brilliantly. Many companies participating end up hiring students that were part of their co-op program.

Employers should ramp up internships of all kinds in their organization. These internships can be paid, unpaid, for high school students, college students, etc. The most desperate need of all students and schools is for real work experience in tandem with academics. Students can’t get this experience unless employers step up to the plate and dramatically increase the number of such opportunities.

Business leaders should offer “externships” for area teachers and faculty. One of the biggest disconnects in our system is the lack of teachers and faculty who have had real work experience in companies and organizations. If they gain a better understanding of today’s workplace and the needs of area employers, they will most certainly be better at adapting their curriculum to meet these new expectations. But they need the experience themselves, too.

In addition to building a much stronger relationship between employers and their local education partners, there are direct actions employers can take to dramatically improve the likelihood that Americans will pursue more and better educational opportunities.

Offer tuition assistance for employees pursuing degrees. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say their company does not provide financial support for enrollment in higher education courses. Employers could tie tuition assistance to retention efforts, by making the financial support contingent on number of years worked.

Help Americans overcome the biggest hurdle they cite to getting a college degree: “family responsibilities.” Fifty-one percent of Americans say they are not allowed any flextime to pursue additional education, and 54% say they are not offered on-site training that leads to a workforce certificate or certification. A unique benefit would be to offer flex hours to employees who take classes during work days and also subsidize or offer childcare support for parents without childcare coverage during evening and weekend times, when many continuing education degree classes are offered.

It is incumbent upon employers and education leaders to collaborate to make sure higher education degrees are a strong preparation for a good job. The world is changing far too fast for us to tolerate a disconnect between our educational system and the jobs our economy needs to thrive.

For more details on these findings and survey methods, read America's Call for Higher Education Redesign.