October 20, 2016
REMINDER:
Don’t
miss your opportunity to participate in the National Advancing Equity in
Adult, Community College, and Career and Technical Education Symposium! Space
is limited, so register today for ED’s first convening of external stakeholders
around equity in adult, community college, and career and technical education. Registration
Deadline: Oct. 21, 2016 at http://conference.novaresearch.com/AdvancingEquity2016/.
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Recently, the Higher
Education Act (HEA) was amended
to restore the ability to benefit (ATB) provisions, thus allowing individuals
without a high school diploma or its recognized equivalent to access Title IV financial aid as long as they
are enrolled in an eligible career pathway consistent with the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.
On Thursday, Oct. 27, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. ET, the U.S. Department of Education
(ED) will hold a webinar on administering the ATB provisions under the HEA. The webinar will share guidance
from ED and present strategies for developing and strengthening local
career pathway programs. Additionally, postsecondary institutions will share
lessons learned and promising practices from ATB program implementation.
To join
this webinar, visit https://educate.webex.com/educate/onstage/g.php?MTID=e2906696a0148668c53c6d257df09aae7.
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The
Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) will hold a public forum, Reconnecting
Justice: Pathways to Effective Reentry Through Education and Training,
on Oct. 28, 2016, from noon–3 p.m. ET.
The forum will explore the intersection between criminal justice reform
and postsecondary education and employment, with a keynote
address by Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice. Panel
experts, including Sean Addie, OCTAE’s director of correctional education, will
discuss policy trends in correctional education and training with re-entry
opportunities that promote economic success.
Research
shows that incarcerated individuals are disproportionately people of color, as
well as adults with low education attainment. Over 600,000
people are released from prison each year, and two-thirds of those prisoners
will be rearrested
within three years.
Studies show that access
to correctional education can significantly reduce recidivism rates. Investments in education and
training opportunities for incarcerated individuals and connections to
continued education and employment opportunities once they re-enter their
communities are essential. Providing these opportunities, according to CLASP,
is not only cost-effective for states and communities, but also for these
individuals and their families—combining education and employment leads to
economic self-sufficiency and improved life outcomes.
Please see
the announcement for a full list of speakers and
other relevant information regarding the forum, and to register to attend in person. For
those who cannot attend in person, the event will be webcast live.
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The
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Food and Nutrition Service
(FNS), U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced a number of new
resources. All entities providing services to adult learners, particularly low-skilled, low-income workers are encouraged to access and
spread the word about the resources provided here.
FNS has recently developed the first first-ever SNAP E&T (Employment
and Training) Academy. The academy will use a “train the trainer” model to
create new leadership capacity to build the next generation of SNAP E&T
programs. It will provide an opportunity for a select number of individuals to
gain technical expertise on SNAP E&T that prepares them to work within
their state or across multiple states building job-driven SNAP E&T
programs. FNS plans to select up to 35 participants for the eight-month
engagement. It will draw on applicants from state and local government, along
with advocacy, research and other organizations that have a significant stake
in issues related to education and training strategies for SNAP participants.
For more information about the academy, please visit the FNS blog. A call for applications for interested participants will be posted on
the SNAP
to Skills website later this month.
FNS has officially launched a new digital platform for
the SNAP to Skills Project
(S2S), the SNAP to Skills website. This new resource serves as a one-stop-shop for information and news about SNAP E&T,
including SNAP E&T tools and resources, policy briefs, and stories from
successful SNAP E&T programs. S2S is designed to give states the technical
assistance, tools and resources they need to build more effective and
job-driven SNAP E&T programs.
Visit the SNAP to Skills Website for ongoing information and to sign up for the SNAP E&T Review to receive regular
updates. Also, see the FNS USDA
Blog for additional information.
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Do minority
students benefit significantly from demanding academic courses? Do some students lose out when high-achievers
are separated out for special classes?
David Card (University of California, Berkeley) and Laura Giuliano
(University of Miami) addressed these questions in their recent paper, “Can
Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?” (http://nber.org/papers/w22104). The authors looked at the
effects of a tracking program that offers separate “gifted/high achiever” (GHA)
classrooms for fourth and fifth graders wherever there is at least one gifted
student in a school-wide cohort. As
gifted students are in short supply in most schools, other students have to be
“recruited” to fill the remainder of the seats.
For this purpose, high-achieving students, as ranked by their scores on
the previous year’s statewide tests, fill the remaining seats in the “gifted”
classroom.
The
study found that high-achieving minority students made significant gains in GHA
classes, and there was no evidence of spillovers, good or bad, on those
students who remain in non-gifted classrooms.
Both the high-achieving students and the traditional students in this
study were taught by many of the same teachers and used the same textbooks, but
the pace and intensity of coverage of the subjects varied.
The
findings of the study were based on the achievement of third, fourth, and fifth
graders in 140 elementary schools between 2008 and 2011 in gifted and
traditional classrooms. The results
showed that participation in a fourth-grade GHA class had significant positive
effects on the test scores of high-achieving black and Hispanic students, who
gained 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and mathematics
scores, whereas the effects for white students were small and
insignificant. Additionally, the study
found no evidence of either positive or negative spillover effects on other
students in the same school or in others schools, including those who barely
missed the cutoff for getting into GHA classes.
To
understand why minority students in GHA classes made impressive gains on test
scores, while high-achieving whites did not make similar gains, the study
looked at a number of possible factors.
Perhaps surprisingly, only about 10 percent of the gains could be
attributed to the quality of teachers and the general positive peer effects
within GHA classrooms. Other factors
obviously made a difference, likely including higher teacher expectations
regarding achievement and the lack of negative peer pressure in GHA
classes. Regarding this second factor,
the study conjectures that negative peer pressure regarding learning is more
typical in traditional classrooms, causing minority high-achievers to be more
likely to underperform in such settings.
In
conclusion, the study suggests that “a comprehensive training program that
establishes a separate classroom in every school for the top performing
students has the potential to significantly boost the performance of higher
achieving minority students—even in the poorest neighborhoods of a large urban
school district.”
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