Focus on the Future: Building ONE System for Youth Development and Opportunity

A Forum — January 31, 2003

Background

To celebrate its ten years of service as a non-partisan, professional development organization educating the youth policy community and bridging the gaps between policy, practice, and research, AYPF commissioned a series of four papers focusing on the next decade of youth policy. At this forum, Hilary Pennington presented her paper on the development of a single system for youth development; Wendy Puriefoy and Christine Sturgis responded.

Summary

Hilary Pennington, CEO of Jobs for the Future, argued that what it takes to get ahead in our nation has changed dramatically over the past twenty years: to thrive in the 21st century economy, all young people will need some education beyond high school. Improving outcomes for youth will require that we build our current, fragmented system of secondary, second chance, and postsecondary education into a coherent system of pathways towards recognized postsecondary credentials to help young people advance in the workforce.

A new unified system for youth development and opportunity would involve making a compact with all young people that would ensure that they all complete some postsecondary credential by the age of 26 and reducing disparities in educational attainment by race and income by the end of the decade. It would promise that no matter where youth start or what path they take they will have choices and support through their early twenties. Backed by public money, young people could choose among a variety of educational options of equal quality. The system would be based on a set of principles that derive from research about what works in youth development and education reform: a) mass personalization/customization; b) continuous and cumulative opportunities for development; c) high, common standards across different learning environments; d) multiple pathways to and through college; and e) accelerated progress through high school and the first two years of college.

Pennington reflected on the progress that has been made in building this one system of youth development over the last decade and asserted that relatively little progress has been made. This lack of progress is not due to lack of evidence of the need. Rather, it can be attributed to a lack of public urgency about the needs of older adolescents, our success in building a universal secondary school system that has dramatically increased the number of adolescents graduating from high school since the early 1900s, and a deep-seated conviction that centralized approaches to education will narrow young people’s choices. People also do not see young people as a resource that matters to the country and it is always difficult to get people to think beyond the status quo.

However, we do have a lot to build upon, Pennington continued: most people now accept the idea that we should have high expectations for all students, that student progress should be based on achievement, and that students in failing schools should have options. We can also draw upon the conservative agenda’s focus on results, a rigorous curriculum for all, and high expectations, as well as the liberal agenda’s focus on mass personalization through small learning environments in which students are known well, changing the learning environment so that it engages and motivates students, and the provision of multiple pathways to postsecondary education.

There are many barriers that remain if the goal is to move from a smorgasbord of programs to a system of multiple pathways to postsecondary credentials at a scale commensurate with need. The biggest barrier, Pennington said, is the lack of public will to tackle these issues with the urgency and creativity they deserve. However, some steps can be taken to accelerate movement towards one system for youth development founded on the premise of providing all youth with the opportunity to complete a two-year postsecondary credential by the time they reach their mid-twenties: a) make lost youth visible and hold institutions accountable for their success; b) adopt the principle that money can follow the learner; c) expand the supply of alternatives through a large public/private innovation fund to seed and scale new learning environments; d) build public will by appointing a Congressional Commission to develop strategies for a single youth development system and by building a new civil rights movement around the right to a quality education through the second year of college.

Wendy Puriefoy, President of the Public Education Network, agreed that issues related to developing sufficient public will and overcoming inequities related to race, gender, and class are fundamental to school improvement. The American dream acts as fuel to provide all children with an equal educational opportunity, said Puriefoy, however, we also believe that it is sufficient to merely offer this initial opportunity and if people do not take advantage of it, it is their own fault for being insufficiently meritorious. The ideology of individual merit sometimes blocks us from taking collective responsibility to ensure that all of our children have the support needed to be successful. Thus, our policies are developed around egalitarian ideas, but when we implement them, we advantage some children over others. While many changes are needed, we first and foremost need to change the language we use when we engage in policy discussions from the current emphasis on education as a market and learners as consumers to a language that makes reference to our collective responsibilities in a democratic society, she concluded.

Christine Sturgis, Program Officer at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, argued that to make the system that Pennington described or the system we currently have work for our most vulnerable youth, we need to look at all of the systems that impact youth and align them to reinforce the provision of educational opportunities. As quickly as we churn out innovations, we are also manufacturing new policies, regulations, and procedures that deny children access to education and increase access to the juvenile and criminal justice system. Sturgis pointed, for example, to zero tolerance policies that limit or deny access to education, increasingly punitive juvenile justice systems, policies that transfer “troublemakers” to alternative schools, and disenfranchisement and limited employability of ex-felons. Such policies have a disproportionate impact on children of color. Their cumulative effect is to create a separate and very unequal pathway for some of our youth that severely limits their future opportunities. Sturgis concluded, for every policy decision we make, we must ask ourselves: how would this expand the college track? What are the ways it may be implemented to reinforce the prison track? What can we do to make sure that our most vulnerable youth have an opportunity to fully engage in a college track?

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