Education – General

New York Times on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

/ The Old Crank

The New York Times published a good editorial earlier this week on the school-to-prison pipeline issue:

[B]y criminalizing routine disciplinary problems, they have damaged the lives of many children by making them more likely to drop out and entangling them, sometimes permanently, in the criminal justice system. The policies are also discriminatory: black and Hispanic children are shipped off to court more frequently than white students who commit similar infractions.

According to the Times, the New York City School-Justice Partnership Task Force  has found that “the overwhelming majority of school-related suspensions, summonses and arrests are for minor misbehavior, behavior that occurs on a daily basis in most schools.”

Investing in Parents

/ The Old Crank

A couple of weeks ago, in a post about a meeting between a group of adult learners and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, I mentioned being struck by how often the discussion turned to the non-academic barriers that can make adult education a challenge for many people.

Yesterday the National Journal published a story about the Jeremiah Program in Minneapolis, which provides low-income single mothers enrolled in college with subsidized housing in residential communities with on-site child care, in the belief that a lack of secure housing and child care are the biggest barriers preventing these young women from finishing college. (A pilot program in Austin, Texas is also underway, and there are plans to open a new campus in Fargo, North Dakota, next year)

To qualify for the program, these women have to be enrolled in college, but it’s not difficult to envision how this model could be adapted for adult learners seeking to improve their literacy and/or earn a high-school credential.

Jeremiah’s return on investment numbers also demonstrate, once again, the wisdom of investing in parents (especially mothers) in order to improve school readiness and reduce child poverty:

An independent study from Wilder Research of St. Paul found that every dollar invested in Jeremiah Program families can return up to $7 to society at large, both by reducing the family’s dependence on public assistance and by increasing the economic prospects of both mother and child. Sixty percent of the program’s 2011 graduates were unemployed when they entered the program, and the rest were earning an average of $9.46 per hour. Upon graduation, the women started earning an average wage of $19.35 per hour. Graduates leave with better parenting skills, and their children get the benefit of high-quality early-childhood care. 

Gloria Perez, Jeremiah’s president and CEO, told the National Journal that “everybody seems to acknowledge, across all political lines, that the mother tends to be the primary educator of the child and role model for the child,” but unlike the calls to invest in pre-K education, you don’t hear as much about scaling up programs that invest in parents. And yet the return on investment numbers here are just as powerful as those used to support the case for investing in pre-K.

Graduation Rates of Students With Learning Disabilities Stunningly Low in Some States

/ The Old Crank

The National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) just released a report called report that has some pretty interesting statistics on the drop-out rates of students with learning disabilities, or SLDs. According to NCLD, nationwide, the current dropout rate for SLDs is 19%. But 22 states have dropout rates higher than the national average, led by South Carolina, where a startling 49% of their SLDs drop out of school before earning a diploma.

I haven’t looked into this a while, but for years I’ve been surprised/concerned that there isn’t a firm, widely agreed-upon estimate of the percentage of enrolled adult education students with learning disabilities. (If anyone can point me to this, please do.) But if the dropout numbers for SLDs are this high, it stands to reason that many of these folks find their way into adult education classrooms.

Via Education Week

New Aspen Institute Report: “Helping Adult Learners Navigate Community College and the Labor Market”

/ The Old Crank / 2 Comments

After all that depressing news about college in my last post, the least I can do is share this new report, Helping Adult Learners Navigate Community College and the Labor Market, released by the Aspen Institute’s Workforce Strategies Initiative back in February— although I just got a notice about it today.

The report looks at the challenges adult learners face “as they attempt to enter community college, persist to completing a certificate or degree, and successfully transition to employment,” and is designed to assist workforce development leaders, community colleges, and workforce investment boards help adult learners navigate both  the community college campus and the labor market.