PCRD

U. S. Education and Workforce Crisis

The National Commission on Adult Literarcy released a report last month which is chilling. For example, the U. S. is the only country among 30 highly developed countries in which the current generation is less well educated than the previous generation. Another alarming statistic: every year, one in three youth adults drop out of high school. As my colleague, Ed Morrison, says: "This represents a lifetime economic disability." For more bad news and the call to IMMEDIATE action go here.

Meeting the Challenge of Failing High Schools

Across the country, our high schools are failing. The Alliance for Excellent Education has outlined some of the costs of this failure. So, for example:

• 70 percent of eighth graders can’t read at grade level, and a mere 3 percent of all eighth graders read at an advanced level.
• Though fourth grade reading scores have risen in the past few years, America's eighth and twelfth grade scores have remained essentially flat since the 1970s.

Download a fact sheet here.

According to the Alliance, In Indiana:

• If the nearly 25,000 high school dropouts from the Class of 2007 had earned their diplomas instead of dropping out, Indiana’s economy would have seen an additional $6.4 billion in wages over these students’ lifetimes.
• If the high school dropouts who currently head households in Indiana had earned their diplomas, the state’s economy would have benefited from an additional $1.6 billion in wealth accumulated by families.
• If all of the students in Indiana who are estimated to drop out of school this year earn diplomas instead, the state could save more than $284 million in health care costs over the course of those young people’s lifetimes.

Indiana spends over $40 million each year to provide community college remediation education for recent high school graduates who did not acquire the basic skills necessary to succeed in college or at work. Learn more.

In rural America, we have a wonderful opportunity to re-invent our high schools. Read the inspiring story of one rural school district in Indiana.

At Purdue, we worked with Deb Howe, the superintendent, to help her realize her dream of a more dynamic rural community energized by a new approach to high school. You can read more about her initiative to re-invent high school in Rochester, IN here.

Only 64% of the ninth graders graduate in Mississippi. Mississippi has set a target to reduce the dropout rate by 50% in five years. Read more.

The dropout problem is gaining more attention recently. For example, Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star launched a series on the issue yesterday exploring social promotion. Read more.

Last week, the Detroit Free Press outlined some solutions. Read more.

At the same time, hearings are taking place across the state to address the issue. Read more.

South Carolina is addressing the issue by connecting businesses more closely to high schools. Read more.

Last month, AT&T announced a $100 million effort to reduce dropouts. Read more.

What would Indiana look like in five years if we set the same target as Mississippi: Cut dropouts by 50%?

Here are some basic resources to learn more about reducing dropouts:

Alliance for Excellent Education
America's Promise Alliance
The Silent Epidemic report from the Gates Foundation
National Dropout Prevention Center

Strengthening Career Guidance

In the years ahead, economic competitiveness will depend on the pool of talent within a region. The deeper the pool, the brighter the prospects. Educational attainment, promoting the idea that education must continue past high school, will represent one of the key metrics defining the competitiveness of a community or region.

When it comes to career guidance counseling, South Carolina appears to be one of the states to watch. Across Indiana, career guidance counseling faces unprecedented challenges.

In many communities, it is not uncommon to see one guidance counselor at a high school handling a caseload of between 200 and 300 students. In these situations, the counselor tends to focus on the best students moving toward a four year college career. Other students are left to face more complex career choices largely on their own.

In a recent Indiana WIRED forum in Wabash, a group of us began to explore this challenge, as well as ways to address it. We might do well to learn more about what's going on in South Carolina.

The Career Pathways initiative is part of South Carolina's Education and Economic Development Act, passed in 2005. The Pathways initiative requires students in high school to clear a career major for course of study in one of 16 career clusters. You can read more about the initiative here.

You can visit South Carolina's Career Pathways web site here.

Regional Transformation in Just One Generation?

The North Central Indiana WIRED region has set its sites on transforming their economy in just one generation, by enhancing the K-12 educational system’s capacity to deliver STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) programming to students. Beginning this Fall, they will initiate what may be the nation’s most aggressive and comprehensive regional K-12 STEM initiative by supporting the implementation of Project Lead the Way (PLTW) in EVERY middle school and high school in the region (over the course of two years).

PLTW was developed by the Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology and is recognized as the most effective STEM program in the U.S. Students participating have a much greater chance of pursuing STEM-related higher education and, most importantly, succeed (graduate) from these programs at a much higher rate than students without a PLTW-background. Drop-out rates and change-of-major rates are high for these disciplines and PLTW provides the pre-college work that seems to make a significant difference.

This will certainly be one of North Central Indiana's most transformational undertakings - training an entire generation of scientists, engineers, and technicians. They must also work on other fronts (i.e., entrepreneurship, global industry competitiveness) to make sure the region is a place where these young people can create new businesses and launch careers in high-tech fields.

STEM-Focused Entrepreneurship Effort

What do you get when you cross the nation's top university-based research park with an economic region's best and brightest science, math, and technology high school students? The next Bill Gates or YouTube guys? Probably not, their old news! You just might end up with the NEXT big thing - the new business, product, or idea that will rock the world.

The North Central Indiana WIRED group is going to find out this summer by launching the state's first entrepreneurship academy exclusively focused on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Running the program is the Purdue Research Foundation, the folks who are behind the Purdue Research Park (the aforementioned #1 university-based research park in the country). Participants, coming from each of the region's public high schools, will be nominated by their teachers. These are the kids that excel in the STEM disciplines.

They'll come to Purdue for an intensive week-long (July 29 - Aug 3) academy led by PRF staff, university faculty, industry leaders, business experts, and successful high-tech business entrepreneurs. You can learn more about the academy here. The new model for regional economic development is all about linking assets and leveraging resources. This is a great example of that.