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2020-06-30
Mastercard Foundation;
Mastercard Foundation, together with a group of strategic partners, has initiated a research project to look at the role of secondary education in preparing African youth for the future of work, with emphasis on ensuring youth acquire the skills, knowledge, and competencies necessary to succeed in a dynamic and globalized labour market.Significant challenges remain in access, quality, and relevance of secondary education in Africa. Given the transformative potential of the growing youth population, the shifts in African labour markets, and the evolving technology and its impact on nature of work — fundamental changes in secondary education are needed to equip young people to be successful in work and in life. Only a small fraction of students in Africa complete university level studies, and with secondary school becoming more accessible, it will increasingly become the main bridge to work for most youth.Rethinking and reforming secondary education, including what young people learn andhow they learn it, is necessary to make education relevant for youth employment orentrepreneurship in a dynamic and globalized labour market.
2020-03-11
Journal of Youth Development;
Given the recent emphasis on social and emotional development, many professionals who manage, develop, or influence expanded learning systems are beginning to ask, "How do we better prepare staff to promote social and emotional development?" California has adopted a statewide professional development strategy for publicly-funded expanded learning programs that is designed to raise awareness of the importance of social and emotional learning (SEL) among practitioners and build tools for the field to support implementation. The strategy -- led by a partnership among a state agency, expanded learning intermediaries, and funders -- combines leadership development, field-building initiatives, and program-level supports. It also complements the current expanded learning system. In this article, we describe the statewide strategy and discuss how it addresses workforce challenges, the core levers that California used to develop the strategy, and why and how the state-level leadership prioritized social and emotional learning. We conclude the article with lessons learned about collaboration, implementation, and assessing impact.
2020-01-01
S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation;
Through the New Generation of Educators Initiative, the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation invested more than $20 million across six years, 2014 to 2019, to support high-quality preparation for new teachers in California. This preparation included a focus on instruction aligned to the state's new academic standards for math and science.The Foundation directed its investment to the California State University (CSU). The CSU system comprises 23 campuses that collectively prepare more than 50 percent of the state's teacher workforce for K-12 education -- and about 10 percent of the nation's teachers.The overarching goal was to demonstrate improved practices that prepare new teachers for success on their first day in the classroom, to scale and sustain these improvements across the CSU system, and to inform and influence the approaches used by other teacher preparation program providers as well as funders and policymakers supporting their efforts.
2020-09-01
WestEd;
This 13th report in WestEd's evaluation of the K-8 Early Implementers Initiative for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provides an extensive response to the following question: What does NGSS teaching look like in the classroom? The report also briefly describes specific ways that teachers have advanced in their NGSS teaching over the years of the Initiative and how the Initiative prepared them for such teaching.The report draws most strongly from more than 50 classroom observations of, and interviews with, 24 teachers across six districts. It is also informed by multiple interviews with each district Project Director as well as results of an annual survey with high response rates from more than 500 K-8 science teachers.
2020-08-01
WestEd;
Many educational initiatives are funded for only a couple of years. The California NGSS Early Implementers Initiative spanned an extraordinary six years, during which eight school districts worked toward districtwide implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which call for teachers to transform their instructional practice. This 12th report in our evaluation series for policymakers, school and district administrators, and professional learning specialists describes the Initiative's scale-up in its later years to reach all K-8 science teachers. Specifically, the report addresses the following questions:In contrast to focusing in Years 1-4 on developing Teacher Leaders, what strategies did districts use in Years 5-6 to reach all other K-8 teachers of science (called "expansion teachers" in this report)?What impacts has the Initiative had on expansion teachers?Which professional learning strategies have been most and least effective for influencing the practice of expansion teachers?What special attention was paid to providing administrators with professional learning to prompt their support of NGSS implementation?
2020-01-01
National AfterSchool Association;
In 2019, the National AfterSchool Association (NAA) convened a series of leadership conversations focused on creating a culture of professionalization in afterschool, which included a discussion of the need to build a leadership pipeline and to foster more diverse leadership, starting with a focus on supporting and retaining leaders from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds. These leader-focused discussions were a natural next step in NAA's long track record of commitment to equity and advocacy for the professionalization of the afterschool field, including through the development of Core Knowledge and Competencies for Afterschool and Youth Development Professionals, and by annually honoring the Next Generation of Afterschool Leaders. NAA is now elevating the importance of building a diverse leadership pipeline through the launch of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) in spring 2020, with grant support from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation and in partnership with the California School-Age Consortium (CalSAC) and Development Without Limits (DWL). NAA also engaged Policy Studies Associates (PSA) and Public Profit as learning and research partners. This brief, researched and authored by PSA and leveraging interview and survey data from Public Profit, results from a collaborative effort intended to frame efforts to embrace, support, and retain afterschool leaders of color.
2020-07-15
Child Trends;
This brief summarizes the results from Child Trends' evaluation of the Character Development Learning Institute (CDLI), drawing from interviews, program observations, and surveys of staff and volunteers from many of the 208 Ys that participated in the final phase of the CDLI (see Appendix 3 for a summary of Ys in each phase). Child Trends has served as the evaluation and research partner for the CDLI since 2017, when the CDLI debuted its framework for a small cohort of Ys in what they called the "Translate phase" (Redd et. al., 2017; Stratford et. al, 2018; Redd et. al., 2019; Lantos et al., 2019). The data presented here were collected from fall 2019 to spring 2020. Following a brief summary of key findings, we provide background on the CDLI, describe the study methods, and offer detailed findings on the outcomes of the study.
2020-08-01
How Kids Learn Foundation;
Every year researchers and experts on youth learning and development issue reports with new concepts and frameworks. They are developed to guide the design and implementation of community initiatives, schools and youth programs. The purpose of this paper is to compare recent frameworks and note their commonalities. This paper offers a summary or overview of many of these frameworks as well as resources to learn more. It also provides a crosswalk chart to learn where their critical features overlap.
2020-01-17
HERE to HERE;
Over the past 15 years, New York City has made strong progress in improving education outcomes for students,particularly related to high school graduation and college enrollment. But we still see drastic disparities for youngpeople in the areas of college completion and employment across lines of race, ethnicity, and household income.These inequities have sharpened during recent periods of overall economic growth, highlighting how increasinginequality, gentrification, and community segregation remain persistent challenges to inclusivity and sharedprosperity. This report will discuss how an expansion and enhancement of work-based learning can combatthese trends.
2020-02-24
Open Society Foundations;
The Roma Early Childhood Inclusion (RECI) studies and reports aim to build a comprehensive and detailed picture of the extent of early childhood provision and services, available to Romani families. The studies have been carried out in five countries—Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania and Serbia—and endeavour to identify the major obstacles that Romani families face in accessing high-quality, socially inclusive, early childhood care and education. More generally, the studies and reports deliver data and information about communities that are often ignored or misrepresented by official statistics, government policies, ministerial strategies and plans for spending.As previous studies carried out by Open Society Foundations have shown—No Data—No Progress, 2010—the lack of reliable data hampers any attempt to measure the impact of government or international NGO intervention. Planning services and allocating resources to Romani communities are the consequence of "guesswork" rather than knowledge and careful study. The Roma Early Childhood Inclusion reports present a distillation of the most recent and reliable data to be had, in these circumstances, drawn from the actual communities themselves, through interviews and focus groups. Government strategies, policies and action plans are all assessed in this context; what has been the effect of the initiatives aimed at improving the economic and social position for Romani families, in these countries?This Overview Report draws upon data from the five country studies, carried out by Romani and non-Romani researchers working together, to present what are the themes and topics of most relevance to families and young children in settlements and neighbourhoods across central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. A profound lack of equality of access and services, beset by numerous obstacles, characterizes the overall picture, for Roma. The numbers of Romani children that have access to good quality, early childhood education and care provision or who can participate in community and home-based learning programmes, remains minimal in comparison with the surrounding, majority populations.The desperate need for Romani children to be able to access, at least for two years, high-quality, socially inclusive, early childhood education and care services and benefit from effective home visiting and community-based early childhood development (ECD) programmes, is a particular theme throughout the report. This is a minimum requirement that the partner organizations (UNICEF, Open Society Foundation's Early Childhood Program and Roma Education Fund) advocate for at national and international levels, if progress is to be made in improving education outcomes for Romani children.The scale of the changes that need to be undertaken in order to provide equal opportunity for Romani children and families requires that national governments and international institutions (such as the Council of Europe, the European Commission and the European Union's Parliament) act, following the recommendations that these reports deliver.
2020-01-27
Bank Street College of Education;
This report asserts that every child—regardless of race, income, or opportunity—should have consistent access to high-quality learning experiences from birth and provides a roadmap toward change at scale, including the development of residency programs and improved compensation for the infant/toddler workforce.
2020-01-29
Educators for Excellence;
This resource shares the results from the second edition of Voices from the Classroom, a nationally representativesurvey by teachers that captures the views and opinions across the country on a wide variety ofeducation issues. The purpose of this survey is to provide decision-makers with key insights from untapped classroomexperts — teachers.
