Tag Archives: Education

In The News …

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The Effect Of Youth Unemployment On Crime (DCentric via Justice Policy Institute): “DC has an unemployment disparity, in which joblessness is very low in wealthy neighborhoods, while low-income neighborhoods have Depression-era unemployment rates. The Justice Policy Institute report also showed how unemployment is chronically high in places with a lot of crime.” A graph of 2010 property crimes, violent crimes, and unemployment rates by DC Ward show that the three correlate almost exactly. The report also points out that “as compared to their more advantaged peers who may have received more preparation from their family, school and overall community environment, youth from low-income areas of the District may need additional guidance to meet the expectations of the workplace.”

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In The News …

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For homeless single dad, nothing’s easy, even when it’s good (Washington Post: Local): “Hours later, after he produced his ID with no fixed address, his Social Security card, his medical records, the paperwork for [daughter] Kai, the letters from readers, two tellers still wouldn’t cash it. Finally, a branch manager took him into her office, closed the door behind them and listened to his story. […] If this is the process to simply cash a check when you’re without an anchor, imagine how hard it is to find work, housing and child care when your address is a shelter and a 1-year-old is clinging to your neck.” Juan Jordan, who recently received a place at the former DC General Hospital with help from the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, daily faces a specific array of challenges in securing food and shelter for himself and his daughter — precisely because it is just the two of them.

Program That Sends Urban Students to Elite Colleges Comes to Houston This Fall (New York Times via the Texas Tribune): Catalogue nonprofit the Posse Foundation is now expanding to the Houston Independent School District! “Teachers, principals and community leaders will get to nominate students to become members of the city’s inaugural “posses” — groups of students from large, urban districts organized by the Posse Foundation, which sends them to elite colleges and universities as a unit to serve as a pre-established peer support network.” Since its inception in 1989, Posse has grown “grown tremendously, sending more than 4,000 students from eight of the country?s largest cities to about 40 universities. Those students have netted nearly $500 million in scholarships […] and have a graduation rate of 90 percent.”

How Do Your Nonprofit’s Online Numbers Compare? (Huffington Post): “The 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study [researched by M+R Strategic Services and NTEN] showed nonprofit online fundraising grew for a second year in a row, driven largely by an increase in gifts to rights-based nonprofits. While the response rates to fundraising email messages stayed fairly consistent for nonprofits in 2011, the average rates of new Facebook fans, mobile subscribers, and people who took action from an advocacy email soared.” Among the notable results? By December 2011, “nonprofits on average had 70 percent more Facebook fans than they did at the start of the year” and “the number of email subscribers responding to calls to action online [… had] increased 28 percent.” M+R principal Bill Wasserman suggests taking similar stock of your own numbers and brainstorming how to improve them in 2012.

Second Chances

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If you have not yet checked out the American Graduate series on WAMU 88.5, certainly do so. Education reporter Kavitha Cardoza examines the “causes and consequences” of the drop-out crisis in our region and the country.

This week, WAMU highlights several dropout recovery schools (specialized programs that provide a second chance to students who have not succeeded in traditional schools), including Catalogue nonprofit YouthBuild Public Charter School. Through YouthBuild, students ages 16-24 move among the classroom (focusing on reading, science, math), a construction site (building affordable housing units), and service learning opportunities (creating community gardens and cleaning up local rivers).

Here’s a glimpse into the life of a YouthBuild student:

Students in overalls and hard hats saw and sand boards for new trim at the construction site where they’re currently working. They attend a dropout recovery school in the District, and they use the construction skills they’ve learned at school to renovate low-income housing. One of the students, 22-year-old Omar Mobley, measures a plank of wood.

“You gotta know math if you wanna do construction. You gotta read a measuring tape,” he says. “It ain’t as easy as it looks … Basically you gotta know your division.”

Mobley dropped out of school a few years ago after his twin brother was shot and killed. His is just one of dozens of rough stories of students at YouthBuild Public Charter School in Northwest DC. […] He felt his life was spiraling out of control. Going to school just made it worse; he couldn’t concentrate because classes were so chaotic, he says. He missed a lot of days, and eventually stopped going back.

Now at YouthBuild, Mobley has perfect attendance. He likes the small classes and feels the teachers there are different.

As Executive Director Arthur Dade explains, “We ask them when did they drop out of school, but it’s really when did they check out of school.” So the challenge is re-engagement as much as re-enrollment.

In The News …

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Investing in Education, Workforce Development and the Safety Net Will Close the Income Gap (Huffington Post): “In other words, while our region’s economy has led to economic growth and prosperity for many on the middle and higher rungs of the ladder, residents on the bottom of the income scale largely are being left behind,” writes Terri Lee Freeman, president of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region. “While philanthropy alone cannot address income inequality, it can make a difference. We believe economic security can be achieved by investing in three key areas: education, workforce development and the safety net.” Do you agree that these are the three key areas? What would you add?

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Post-Pi Day

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Hope that you had a good (and potentially tasty) “Pi Day” yesterday!

According to PiDay.org, “With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational and transcendental number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating.” As many of us learned in middle school, Pi is the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference and thus can be employed to calculate the area of a circle and volume of a rectangular prism. Pi also makes regular appearances in physics, statistics and probability, and calculus.

So if you celebrated with both edible and numerical pie yesterday, consider learning more about our educational nonprofits today — which are improving and supplementing math and technology education for students in our region. Just for some examples:

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Success Anywhere

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From the American Graduate series on WAMU 88.5, “Scaling Up Solutions To The Dropout Problem:”

The cheers are a daily ritual at Browne [Education Campus], a struggling K-8 school hosting a group of City Year volunteers as part of the “Diplomas Now” program. The volunteers also interact with students one-on-one. […]

Researchers and educators continue to design new ways to help improve the success rates of schools like Browne, which has less than 30% of its students reading and doing math at grade level. But one of the biggest challenges is translating those one-off programs into systems that can be successful in any school.

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Battle to Graduate

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From “Battling Homelessness, Crime On The Path To Graduation” on WAMU 88.5’s Morning Edition:

Homelessness often insurmountable for high school students

Staying in school with an ever-changing address hasn’t been easy for Christopher. That’s because his mother had a hard time holding down a job and they frequently couldn’t pay the rent.

“For the most part, things stayed in containers, so all I had to do was store some trophies here, put some papers there, done,” he says. “My room is packed up perfectly ready to go.”

Christopher also had to ration food, and hide the fact that he couldn’t afford to do laundry more than once a month. […]

School and other social support systems crucial

Children who are homeless are much more likely to drop out; one study shows that only 50 percent of children who are homeless for some period of high school will graduate. Christopher?s positive attitude has been tested. He has to travel farther and get to school earlier now to use the internet. Sometimes it gets to be too much.

WAMU also profiles Travaris, who is about to graduate from high school at 22 years old after spending 3 years in prison. But despite the financial and psychological challenges, he “comes to school on time every day and stays after class to complete assignments [and] mentors other students.” He attends Luke C. Moore Academy, which offers a second chance to at-risk students, and Christopher is set to graduate from Hospitality High School and continue on to Michigan State. The obstacles for these students are markedly different — and the supports that they needed (and need) to overcome them are not strictly academic. So how can we ensure that students have the tools that they need to get to class and be free to learn, be that a mentor or clean clothes?

Learn more about our enrichment-focused education non-profits here and get to know our human service organizations that are dedicated to kids and families.

In The News …

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DC schools with more low-income, academically troubled students should get more money, panel recommends (DC Schools Insider): “The 15-member [Public Education Finance Reform Commission] panel concluded its work last week with a series of recommendations to the Gray administration [including]: add an additional “weight” to the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula so that schools receive more money for serving larger numbers of students who are both from low-income households.” The panel also recommended a year-long study on the real costs of “adequate” public education in DC to inform further funding revisions. The commission did not study the “appropriate role for the District in funding and/or finding buildings for charter schools,” although that was a key topic of conversation.

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A Creative Test

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From “Schools We Can Envy” in the New York Review of Books:

Faced with the relentless campaign against teachers and public education, educators have sought a different narrative, one free of the stigmatization by test scores and punishment favored by the corporate reformers. They have found it in Finland. […]

Finland has spent the past forty years developing a different education system, one that is focused on improving the teaching force, limiting student testing to a necessary minimum, placing responsibility and trust before accountability, and handing over school- and district-level leadership to education professionals.

To an American observer, the most remarkable fact about Finnish education is that students do not take any standardized tests until the end of high school. They do take tests, but the tests are drawn up by their own teachers, not by a multinational testing corporation. The Finnish nine-year comprehensive school is a “standardized testing-free zone,” where children are encouraged to know, to create, and to sustain natural curiosity.”

The entire article is certainly worth a read, but I was particularly struck by the emphasis on “the development of each child as a thinking, active, creative person” — all qualities that are not only outside the realm of standardized test-taking, but that are arguably more essential to long-term development than the material on a standardized test. So what do you think? Do the words that we use to discuss public education reform themselves need reforming?

More For Schools

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Regarding “Report: Fixing Education Disparities Is a Public Safety Strategy” from the Justice Policy Institute, DCentric writes:

Researchers found the same stark disparities we’ve examined when it comes to education levels in DC’s wards; for instance, one-fifth of Ward 8 adults haven’t completed high school. But the report also breaks down formal education levels of DC’s adults by race. Nearly all white adults in DC — 99 percent of them — have a high school diploma or higher. For African Americans, 80 percent of adults have completed high school, while 57 percent of Hispanic adults have high school diplomas. […]

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