Not Enough Qualified Workers in DC? (Washington Post via DCentric): “Unemployment in some DC neighborhoods is as high as 25 percent. At the same time, cranes fill the skies in pockets of the city, signaling economic activity. So why not encourage hiring unemployed DC residents for those projects? That was the intent behind tightening the District’s hiring rules for projects receiving city money. But now builders and contractors say that the new hiring standards are impossible to meet because the city simply lacks qualified workers.” To learn about a CFP nonprofit focused on construction training, head to DC Students Construction Trades Foundation.

3 new private conservation reserves established by communities in Peru (Mongabay: environmental news): “Three new private conservation areas in the Amazon-Andes region of Peru will help buffer the country’s national park system while offering new opportunities for local people to benefit from protecting ecosystems. The new private conservation areas cover 18,882 hectares (46,659 acres) of habitat ranging from high elevation grasslands to cloud forests to rain forests [...] The new reserves are also significant in that they are part of a broader initiative by the Amazon Conservation Association, an NGO with offices in Washington DC and Peru, to support sustainable livelihoods in a region that is traditionally very poor.” A CFP nonprofit, ACA preserves miles of wilderness through sustainable use of resources, research, and education.

Housing costs trouble many Arlingtonians (Washington Post: Local): “The biggest problem facing Arlingtonians, by many measures, is the cost of housing. If you don’t have it, and you’re not financially well-off, you can be in for a long, painful search. “Affordable” housing options usually are targeted at those who make 60 to 80 percent of the median income,” which is $110,000 in the county. “Further down the income ladder are those who are already homeless. A-SPAN, the Arlington Street People’s Assistance Network, recently received a $93,000 grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide housing and case management for six chronically homeless adults in Arlington.” Also a CFP nonprofit, A-SPAN also operates Opportunity Place, where homeless individuals can take a shower, wash clothes, secure a health-care referral, and obtain an address.

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 CFP 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.

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?

Read all »

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:

Read all »

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.

Read all »

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.

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.

Read all »

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?

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. [...]

Read all »

Objections to Reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (WAMU: Diane Rehm Show): “The widely praised Violence Against Women Act faces a tough reauthorization battle. Though introduced in a bipartisan way, it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote with all the Democrats voting to move it to the full Senate and all the Republicans voting against.” Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, explains that the bill “as passed out of the Senate committee, recognizes the LGBT community [and] immigrant women who are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse;” but the bill does not include a “mandate for holding batterers accountable” or a reparations provision. 17 CFP nonprofits, including the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, focus particularly on girls and women and women; learn more right here.

President Obama’s Budget Request for the NEA: The Fine Print (Americans for the Arts blog): “We learned early that morning that President Obama is proposing an increase of $8 million (from $146M to $154M) for the NEA, which was a very positive start. In the past two years, NEA funding has dropped almost $22M and has yet to recover from the enormous cuts from its high of $176M in 1992. In particular, the budget of the Our Town program, which rewarded over half of its grants to communities of less than 200,000 in 2011, would increase from $5 million to $10 million. Two months ago, the NEA also announced Operation Homecoming, a partnership with the Department of Defense that will host “a new series of writing workshops for returning troops at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.”

Read all »