Youth Today: Powerful Pathways Indeed

By Karen Pittman, April 2002

Vulnerable youth. College access. Career success. Alternative pathways. Alternative credits. Learning supports.

These themes are increasingly the subject of conversations among progressive educators, particularly in groups that combine K–12 reformers with higher education researchers and specialists. This is a world in which we need to move. These are outcomes that youth workers need to claim as their own.

Report after report declares that high school diplomas are not terminal degrees, that every student needs to be ready for college, and that increasing numbers of young people will need college degrees to secure employment. Michael Cohen, a former assistant U.S. secretary of education and an Aspen Institute senior fellow, has just issued a report on high schools that declares them “pathways to nowhere.”

In Raising Our Sights, the 29-member National Commission on the Senior Year of High School (on which I served) put forth a series of bold recommendations, including that every student be enrolled in college preparatory courses unless the parents give written permission to do otherwise.

Colleges are struggling with the dual challenges of remediation and retention. Increasing numbers of students are coming to campus ill-prepared for college studies. Colleges are scrambling to create courses, students are spending precious loan dollars on courses they should have mastered in high school, and more and more students are just leaving.

According to the national commission’s research, more than 40 percent of students enrolling in public community colleges have to take remedial courses. Meanwhile, employers are looking for young workers who have mastered “the new basic skills”: Critical thinking, problem solving, communication and team building.

Leaders from various camps are turning up their efforts to make sure that the nation’s most vulnerable youth — from those exiting the foster care and juvenile justice systems to academically at-risk students in vulnerable families and neighborhoods — are not left even further behind. For example:

• The Youth Transitions Funders Group (http://www.ydrf.com)recently issued a report calling for a tighter alignment of education, work and life supports for young people who are having trouble making transitions or who, in the words of YouthBuild USA (http://www.youthbuild.org) CEO Dorothy Stoneman, need help making “life transformations.”

• Pathways to College (http://www.pathwaystocollege.net), a new higher education network funded by a gaggle of foundations including Kellogg, Irvine and others, has taken on the challenge of identifying effective policies, programs and practices that help disadvantaged students prepare for and succeed in college.

• The National Alliance to Reform American High Schools, a new group housed within the Institute for Educational Leadership (http://www.iel.org), is working to bring national education groups together to zoom in on an agenda for vulnerable youth.

• The Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Corp., creators of Communities and Schools for Career Success (http://www.commcorp.org), has partnered with the San Francisco-based New Ways to Work to bring the Commonweath’s CS2 approach to California. CS2 teams with state and local education departments to hire “entrepreneurs” to catalyze changes in career preparation programs and in policies for youths likely to fall through the cracks.

• The National Youth Employment Coalition (http://www.nyec.org) is working with a network of community-based organizations that serve older youth to assess and expand the organizations’ efforts to do academic as well as workforce preparation.

• Jobs for the Future (http://www.jff.org) has undertaken the From the Margins to the Mainstream (http://www.jff.org/Margins/Index.html) project to document alternative learning programs operated by schools and communities, and determine what it would take to move them to the center of high school reform efforts.

Things are happening. But they are happening separately and, for the most part, without significant involvement of “youth development” folks. Too often, I am the token YD person in the room during discussions about these efforts.

The educational pipeline is being re-examined and re-laid. States are being encouraged to create P–16 (pre-K through college) councils to increase retention, align standards and coordinate efforts. Community-based youth programs can and should be members of these councils. But to be players on these councils, the programs must work hard to determine collective resources and define the value they would add.

Going with the plumbing analogy, I liken what good community programs do to joint tape, insulation and bypasses: They reduce the leaks at transition points, help students flow through the systems, retain heat and reroute students who have hit barriers so they can rejoin the main pipe farther down the line.

In the rush to line up for federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers dollars, youth programs may be neglecting fertile ground at the other end of the pipeline. Maybe we should be as adamant about partnering to create true community colleges as we are about creating community schools.

Read More:
Transforming the American High School: New Directions for State and Local Policy.
Michael Cohen, Senior Fellow, The Aspen Institute, December 2001. Available online at: http://www.jff.org/jff/kc/library/0113?p_primarytopic=. (26-page PDF)
Paper prepared for Jobs for the Future’s From the Margins to the Mainstream initiative and the High School Transformation project at the Aspen Institute’s Program on Education in a Changing Society.

Raising Our Sights: No High School Senior Left Behind
National Commission on the High School Senior Year, October 2001. Available online at: http://www.woodrow.org/CommissionOnTheSeniorYear/Report/FINAL_PDF_REPORT.pdf. (56-page PDF)
“The problems of America’s high school seniors go deeper than the ‘senioritis’ that takes hold after college acceptance and require a comprehensive remedy involving all levels of education, from preschool to postsecondary education, according to the final report of the National Commission on the High School Senior Year.” (National Commission on the High School Year, 2001)

Powerful Pathways: Framing Options and Opportunities for Vulnerable Youth
Nicole Yohalem & Karen Pittman, The Forum for Youth Investment, October 2001. Available online at: http://www.forumforyouthinvestment.org/pwrflpthwys.pdf. (41-page PDF)
A discussion paper of the Youth Transition Funders Group that synthesizes “the insights, inspirations and future directions” created over a five-year period “to frame policies and programs directed at our most vulnerable youth.”
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Pittman, K. (2002, April). " Powerful Pathways Indeed." Washington, DC: The Forum for Youth Investment. A version of this article appears in Youth Today.

Karen Pittman is executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment.