Welcome to INNOVATOR, an update on school change from North Carolina New Schools. Our newsletter aims to inform practitioners, policy makers, and friends of public education on innovation, research and success stories from schools. Please contact us to provide feedback and suggest article ideas.
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Working together for a stronger workforce
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Emily DeRocco
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Emily DeRocco, a national expert in workforce development, spoke at the recent Scaling STEM conference in the Research Triangle about the urgent need for schools to graduate students with the kind of skills demanded by employers. The following is an excerpt from her keynote address.
I believe, in this nation, we have created a false dichotomy between education and workforce development.
American workers are among the best educated, skilled, flexible, and most resourceful in the world. Our citizens adapt more quickly to changing processes and technologies than in many other countries; critical thinking and initiative taking are hallmarks of American education and workplaces. ....
The United States can no longer afford to treat education and job training as "social services," separate from our economic strategy. Even as states implement K-12 education reforms, we need to channel public investments in secondary and postsecondary education and workforce development in ways that catalyze complementary private sector commitment, investment, and employment. ....
So, I believe an important part of your mission here is about building the pipeline of new workers in America through our education system, and providing more "on" and "off" ramps to education and skills development for our transitioning workers. This is about the ability to get and advance in a career as an accountability measure for our education system. This is about ending that false dichotomy between education, to produce an educated citizenry, and some marginal workforce development system, to produce employable young people and adults. This is about building an innovative, education ecosystem that prepares citizens for good jobs and careers.
We are in this together, and we need to start thinking and doing together.
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NC early colleges cited by key foundation
A new report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York argues that new models of high schools, such as North Carolina's early college high schools, are needed for the nation's schools to deliver on the high expectations of the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards.
Both major educational initiatives are aimed at ensuring that all students graduate from high school well prepared for success in an increasingly competitive, global economy.
"American high schools must do a better job of preparing students to tackle college-level work," urges the report, Opportunity by Design: New High School Models for Student Success. "Across the United States, aggregate college data show that students often leave high school with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in postsecondary education."
But even as states, districts and schools are responding in various ways to the meet the higher standards established by the Common Core -- improved curriculum or efforts to strengthen teaching, for example -- they tend to fall short, the report says, because they don't go far enough.
Instead, the report recommends, comprehensive approaches to overall school design are necessary to achieve the kinds of educational improvement that will yield significantly better outcomes for students -- particularly those most in need.
"When the best practices around what we know works in schools are combined to create intentional new school designs that leverage talent, time, money and technology to meet the needs of each individual," the report says, "it produces powerful results."
The report points to two examples as evidence that such innovative schools can work on a broad scale to improve outcomes for students: New York City's small school initiative and North Carolina's early college high schools.
"The early college model provides students with strong, consistent support and increasingly challenging curriculum ... enabling them to earn a high school diploma and two years of college credit without tuition," the report says. "The network has shown impressive results, achieving a four-year [most NC early colleges offer five-year programs] graduation rate of 93.5 percent in 2012."
"What's needed now is a concentrated effort to design innovative schools that build on the foundation of New York City's Small Schools of Choice, North Carolina's early college schools, and other similar efforts and leverage the new tools and practices in development that support personalized learning."
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Investing in college readiness pays off
A new policy brief from Boston-based Jobs for the Future makes the case that public investment in programs that boost college readiness reduce postsecondary costs for remediation, protracted degree completion and attrition.
"Every student who falls short of the goal of earning a high school diploma and a college degree represents a financial investment that did not pay off in a credential of value in the labor market," notes the brief, The Economic Payoff for Closing College-Readiness and Completion Gaps.
Time is also a key factor. "The more efficiently the education pipeline moves students through high school and to postsecondary degrees," the brief argues, "the lower the cost to completion and the higher the return on the public's investment in education."
So states are wise to maximize the funds they devote to education by spending on strategies that increase student success -- especially among low-income students.
"Currently, states are wasting resources in their secondary and postsecondary education systems," the brief says, "particularly where programs and policies do not increase the numbers of low-income students who complete high school and college."
The brief says the focus on the success of low-income students is important for two reasons: they include demographic groups that are the fastest-growing parts of the future workforce, and the return on the investment is high.
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Meet an Innovator
 | | Ros Guerrie |
What do banking and education have in common?
When you're Ros Guerrie, senior vice president for leadership and professional development manager at BB&T University, the answer is leadership.
"BB&T's definition of leadership is about creating self awareness, being able to communicate well, setting a vision and getting people on board to accomplish that mission," says Guerrie. "So whether it's a bank manager or a principal, the beliefs and processes are the same."
BB&T University offers a blended learning approach for bank employees to develop leadership skills through classroom instruction, case studies and coaching. The connection between BB&T's efforts to train employees and NC New Schools' approach to leadership development for principals led the bank to make a $300,000 investment in NC New Schools' North Carolina Center for Educational Leadership (NCCEL). But BB&T's contribution goes beyond the financial gift.
"BB&T has served as a great thought partner and supporter in this work," says Jodi Anderson, director of NCCEL. "Our work involves very similar development strategies and activities, just in different settings. Because we are all focused on developing leaders within the broader context of the community, NCCEL is able to build upon their experiences and apply those lessons learned for developing principal leadership."
Guerrie identifies coaching - a significant piece of NC New Schools' support for principals and teachers - as a key element in leadership training.
"If you look at coaching in a very simple way, something is wrong and needs to be fixed. We look at coaching differently," Guerrie says. "As a leader, I'm going to coach to prepare others to succeed. That's the goal of the manager. At BB&T, we teach the process so that a manager learns and understands how to coach, then we give them the opportunity to practice. That's just like a school environment - doing that for principals and for teachers."
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