Re-engaging Disconnected Youth through Expanding Opportunities for High School and Cross-System Collaboration: Professional Development for Local Leaders
Overview
The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF), working with the National League of Cities’ Institute for Youth, Education, and Families (YEF Institute), is planning a series of workshops and field trips to help local leaders learn more about reaching struggling students and out-of-school youth and expanding options and alternatives for high school-aged young people. This project, funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, supports the YEF Institute’s work engaging municipal leaders in building cross-system collaborations by providing hands-on professional development activities to mayors and superintendents, their staffs, and other local leaders engaged in efforts to reach young people who have dropped out of school, are out of work, or have been involved in the juvenile justice or foster care systems.
This project offers local leaders an opportunity to participate in strategically designed and intensive workshops and field trips during which participants engage in substantive policy discussions with their counterparts in other cities and visit exemplary programs.
Rationale and Strategy
The dropout problem in the United States is immense.
- Large numbers of young people aged 16-24 are neither in school nor employed. One-third of American students become high school dropouts. Only half of all African American, Latino, and Native American students graduate from high school.
- When young people drop out of school, they face multiple negative consequences. Fifty-five percent of young adults without a diploma are employed, compared to 74% of high school graduates and 87% of four-year college graduates.
Dropouts are 3.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than high school graduates and are much more likely to rely on public assistance than those with a high school diploma. The cost to the public of their crime and welfare benefits is estimated to total $24 billion annually in the United States. - Increasingly, youth advocates are calling on policy leaders to focus on the dropout crisis and the importance of reaching disconnected youth. Many local leaders are answering this call by committing to improving their outreach to school dropouts, young people involved in the juvenile justice system, and youth aging out of foster care; but they have varied levels of understanding of the needs of disconnected youth and the programs and policies needed to support these young people. What is more, communities that choose to prioritize programs for struggling students and out-of-school youth often find it difficult to negotiate the disparate funding sources and regulations involved in supporting educational opportunities for these young people.
- The current national policy context includes an intense focus on high school reform. As policymakers at all levels of government work to create policy and practice to improve America’s high schools, dropout recovery has increasingly become recognized as an integral and essential dimension of high school reform. With greater attention to the dropout problem, model policies and programs serving this population are required. Expanding options for high school and creating multiple pathways to graduation should be seen as part of any successful high school reform effort.
- Peer-to-peer workshops and site visits give participants an opportunity to learn how other communities are re-engaging disconnected youth and expanding opportunities for high school. For the past 14 years AYPF has facilitated over 100 professional development trips for policymakers, revealing two important lessons: 1) seeing excellent examples in the field is one of the most effective ways for policy leaders to envision needed changes and build the political will to make successful reforms happen, and 2) providing a well-constructed forum for policy leaders to exchange ideas and debate policy approaches assists them in formulating and implementing policies and reform strategies back home.
Project Goals and Objectives
Workshops and trips are carefully designed to accomplish three goals:
- expose local leaders to effective programs, policies, and collaboration from which they take away concrete, practical lessons;
- provide local leaders time to learn about successful strategies to re-engage disconnected youth and discuss with their peers various approaches to complex and difficult problems; and
- encourage local leaders to plan new strategies for their own communities, share lessons learned, and build a network of information, resources, and contacts
Contact
Jennifer Brown Lerner, Senior Program Associate