TeachAIDS

Students at the Shirimatunda Primary School in Tanzania use a Swahili version of an online course about AIDS created by a company called TeachAIDS.

Asia Jackson likes to learn at the computer because she can work at her own pace, which is usually faster than her classmates’. Al-Tariq Linton says, “It’s one on one. If I have a question, instead of competing for the teacher’s attention, I can go back and read it on my own.” Wanda Williams says her favorite part of the online course she’s taking is the narrator of the videos it includes. “Rufus made it funny,” she says. “It was fun.”

As interest in online education rages, these 17- and 18-year-old students at Newark, N.J.’s West Side High are guinea pigs in a global experiment to answer a key but surprisingly elusive question: whether and when it actually works.

Evidence is mixed about how well online courses teach core subjects such as science, math or reading, with a recent large-scale Columbia study showing disadvantages to online learning for community college students. (The study was done at Columbia’s Teachers College, which is also home to The Hechinger Report, producer of this story.) But new research shows that, in certain topics—as for these students in Newark — computer-based instruction is not only just as effective as the old-fashioned, in-person kind. It’s more effective.

These topics include sex, drugs and health — subjects in which privacy, personal comfort and customized information are especially important, and embarrassment or cultural taboos can get in the way of classroom teaching.

Simple video- and animation-based interactive courses in these disciplines turn out to be good ways of teaching subjects you may have giggled through in health class. And they’re increasingly being used all over the world with success now confirmed by peer-reviewed, controlled research. The results are important as online education continues to expand faster than its impact and effectiveness can be fully measured.

“We’re seeing significant and large effects on attitudes, knowledge, and also behaviors” from online courses in nontraditional subjects, says Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who coauthored one study of the subject.

Sex in Colombia
Gonzalez-Navarro, working with researchers at Yale and the University of Ottawa, found that Colombian students in an 11-week online course in safer sex created by Profamilia, part of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, knew more about safer sex practices than students who took the conventional, state-mandated health class. And their knowledge was put into practice. For every 68 students who took the online course instead of the traditional course, researchers estimated by reviewing students’ medical records and comparing them to those of peers who didn’t take the course, up to two sexually transmitted infections were prevented. The students were also 10 percentage points more likely than their counterparts to redeem vouchers for free condoms offered six months later.

It’s not just that students often feel embarrassed to talk about sex in conventional classrooms, the researchers found. Teachers don’t like teaching about it, making them less effective — assuming they even broach the topic.

“A lot of teachers are just not comfortable teaching these subjects,” says Gonzalez-Navarro. “The central education ministry might say you have to give this sex-ed course, but it’s not happening.”

Another series of independent research studies has confirmed the effectiveness of online education about alcohol awareness in the United States. In the largest, the researchers found a short-term reduction in harmful behaviors related to drinking among college freshmen at 15 colleges who took an online course called AlcoholEdu. Similar studies at the University of West Florida and Villanova and Roger Williams found similar results.

AlcoholEdu is produced by EverFi, a venture-funded startup backed by a group of high-profile Silicon Valley investors, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Eric Schmidt and Twitter's Evan Williams. In addition to alcohol education, EverFi offers animation, video and game-based courses in sexual violence awareness, financial literacy and digital citizenship, reaching 69 of the nation's largest 100 school districts, and 33 percent of the nation's incoming freshmen.

Five and a half million students have already completed EverFi courses, according to CEO Tom Davidson, each of which includes eight to 10 hours of instruction. Some are used as part of for-credit courses while others are woven into freshman orientation.

“You can’t get your dorm key at NYU until you do our sexual violence prevention course,” says Davidson.

The NIH-funded study of the company’s online alcohol-awareness course found that it was most effective when more freshmen took the class at the same time, suggesting that peer pressure plays a role — though the results had dissipated by the spring semester, meaning more follow-up was needed.

Tackling cultural taboos
Other ongoing research supports the use of online courses for sex education. Students in China, India and South Africa who completed an online sex-education program called TeachAIDS were 91 percent more knowledgeable about HIV than before they took the course, compared to an improvement of 73 percent for students who were taught the conventional, state-mandated curriculum.

TeachAIDS became a nonprofit in 2009. It was founded by Piya Sorcar and her husband, Shuman Ghosemajumder, who had spent six years in high-level jobs at Google, along with several others. In her Stanford dissertation, Sorcar had examined the role of cultural taboos in dealing with issues of sexual and reproductive health in India.

“Sex education has been banned in some states in India,” she says. “There have been incidents of teachers burning curricular material in the streets.” In Andhra Pradesh, a state with a population of 85 million, HIV-positive students have been expelled.

Sorcar set out to create a curriculum for HIV/AIDS that would be both culturally acceptable and scientifically rigorous, and that would attack social stigmas by showing what AIDS is, how the virus is transmitted and how to protect against it.

The TeachAIDS course combines a 20- to 25-minute animated video with interactive quizzes. So far, she said, it has been produced in 15 languages and used in 74 countries. For added appeal and to make it more relatable for young people, each country and region features likenesses of and voiceovers by local celebrities. In Botswana, the program stars a hip-hop artist named Scar, who hosts the TV show Idols East Africa; in India, it features Shabana Azmi, an award-winning Hindi actress.

“Our culture doesn’t talk about love or what comes out of it,” says Tristha Ramamurthy, who uses the TeachAIDS curriculum with seventh- through 12th-graders in a network of private schools she oversees in Bangalore, India. “We have arranged marriages — we’re very caste-driven. Sex itself is very uncomfortable to talk about, and in school it’s not taught.”

What makes the TeachAIDS material acceptable to her students, Ramamurthy says, is the use of culturally specific euphemisms. For example, a honeymoon suite and two lovebirds kissing suggests intercourse; images of a woman holding a baby stand in for childbirth.

Digital downsides
There are downsides to using online courses to cover health topics. Both the software and the hardware cost money, and funding is often a problem in schools worldwide. TeachAIDS’ video-based course has been projected on a wall in villages in Nepal and shown on outdoor screens in Rwanda in between World Cup soccer matches, which extends the program’s reach but sacrifices the advantages of interactivity and privacy. Even at West Side High in Newark, Everfi had to provide a version of the course loaded on a jump drive, because the school had problems with its Internet connection.

EverFi licenses its material to colleges for a fee, but public schools like West Side High can get it free with the backing of corporate or local business underwriters, which have included the National Basketball Association and Capital One bank.  The sponsorships, which can include prizes and giveaways, are seen by some critics as an unwelcome intrusion of business into the classroom.

Nor do any of these courses constitute a hands-off, digital-only solution. The learning effects are strongest in most cases when the programs are used as part of for-credit courses, with teachers in the room to guide and motivate students, and when students take the courses together. And companies like EverFi need to provide ongoing support and professional development for teachers.

But the need for easy-to-use, compelling resources to cover topics that teenagers are not all that eager to discuss with adults is likely to grow, opening more markets to organizations such as EverFi and TeachAIDS.

EverFi is already expanding its offerings. And TeachAIDS is being adopted as part of the official high-school curriculum in Karnataka, an Indian state with a population of 60 million, and the company plans to grow to 50 countries with 90 percent of the world’s HIV cases by 2018.

“We see such a need for these ‘everything else’ areas outside the core curriculum,” Davidson says of the apparent effectiveness of using online education in this way, and continued research into it. “New mandates are coming down at the state level, and schools are having trouble getting their arms around them. This is a model that we're following with the development of all our courses:  develop, test, redevelop.”

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As March Madness gets under way, a less widely noticed kind of intercollegiate competition is forcing students to churn endlessly through the higher-education system, wasting their own — and taxpayers’ — money.

In this game, the players score but it doesn’t count.

That’s what happens when students earn academic credit at one university or college, then try to transfer to another, which won’t accept it — even within the same states and systems. The result is that students end up spending far more time and money trying to finish their degrees, assuming that they even stick around to bother.

It’s a spectacle that may not have gotten as much attention in the past as NCAA basketball, but fed-up policymakers are starting to push for changes in the rules.

“One of the most common complaints a legislator gets from a constituent about higher education is, ‘My credits don’t transfer,’” says Davis Jenkins, senior researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has studied the issue.

“This is so common, but it’s heart-rending,” Jenkins says. “And it also pisses me off as a taxpayer.”

That’s because the problem is as costly as it is unnoticed.

A third of students now transfer sometime during their academic careers, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center says, and a quarter of those change schools more than once.

When these students’ credits don’t transfer with them, they churn, seemingly endlessly, in college, piling up debt and wasting time repeating the same courses. It now takes full-time students, on average, 3.8 years to earn a two-year associate’s degree and 4.7 years to get a four-year bachelor’s degree, according to the advocacy organization Complete College America — further increasing the already high cost to families, and, at public universities, states. Only 61 percent of full-time students who set out to earn a four-year bachelor’s degree manage to do it within even eight years, Complete College America reports.

Part of the problem is that public universities are largely funded based on their enrollment, not on whether students actually graduate. So while an institution has a financial incentive to take transfer students to fill seats left vacant when other students drop out, it may not have a financial incentive to help them successfully finish college and move on.

“I don’t want to suggest that all that people are doing here is this cold calculation of costs and benefits, but there haven’t been explicit incentives to get the students out of there,” says Michael Lovenheim, a professor of policy analysis at Cornell who also has studied the transfer process.

Dragging out their degrees
Experts say the difficulty of transferring credits is a major reason students stay in college for so long. On average, students now accumulate — and pay for — a wasteful 80 credits toward associate’s degrees that should require only 60, and 136.5 for bachelor’s degrees that need only 120, Complete College America says.

Take Karen Hernandez. She started at St. John’s University in New York and transferred after a year and a half to Nassau Community College, where, after another year and a half, she received an associate’s degree. Then she moved again, to Columbia University, where she hopes to earn a bachelor’s degree in art history and human rights.

The first time Hernandez switched schools, only 27 of the 36 credits she had earned and paid for transferred. The second time, 55 credits transferred, out of 63. That means Hernandez lost 17 credits — and that, after three years in college, she is facing at least three years more to get a degree that is supposed to take a total of four years.

“It has definitely prolonged my educational career,” says Hernandez, 23.

Columbia wouldn’t accept credits for a class Hernandez had taken and passed in meteorology, for example, she says. “My dean said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that covers.’ I would think that would be so simple: It’s, like, about the weather.”

But university faculty at some institutions often question the quality of courses taught by university faculty at others.

“Snobbery,” Jenkins calls it.

 “Everybody feels that the way they do it is the right way,” says Janet L. Marling, director of the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students at the University of North Georgia. “To admit that somebody else does it equally well can chip away at their foothold.”

Adds Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems: “There’s just the natural faculty hubris that says, ‘If I didn’t teach it, it can’t be any good.’”

Complications in the process
Even where transferring credits is possible, it can be extraordinarily complicated and misunderstood.

For example, while some credits from one school may be accepted by another, they may not count toward a major, something students often don’t find out until after they’ve transferred.

“Students are told, yes, your credits will transfer, and, yes, technically they do,” says Alison Kadlec, director of public engagement programs at Public Agenda, who has held focus-group sessions with students about the problem. “But if they don’t transfer toward your major, that’s a waste of time and money.”

That common experience stymied one frustrated student Jenkins met. “He probably wasted a year’s worth of courses,” Jenkins says. “It’s just a waste. These are motivated students, taking all these courses at their expense and ours, and they’re not getting anywhere. And that’s just wrong.”

A study in Texas found that students sometimes didn’t even learn if their credits were accepted until as long as four months after they transferred to a new school.

“It’s one thing if they’re swirling around because they don’t know what they’re doing,” Kadlec says. “But it’s another thing if these institutions can’t get their acts together to give them the information.”

Improving the advising process costs money, however, and forcing students to go through it — even if it’s for their own good — can be risky. When Klamath Community College in Oregon made orientation and advising mandatory, its enrollment fell 20 percent, costing it about $800,000 in state funding, the college’s president says.

Lawmakers step in to referee
Tired of waiting for universities and colleges to solve the problem, several state legislatures are now stepping in to impose reforms from the outside.

Florida has a statewide transfer policy guaranteeing that students who complete associate’s degrees at community colleges in that state can transfer all their credits to its four-year public universities. Legislators in Arkansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Tennessee have ordered similar changes.

But problems remain. It took Florida 10 years to bring its universities and colleges into line on transfer credits, for example. An analysis by a technical college in North Carolina found that only one of its English courses was accepted for core credit by all 16 of that state’s public universities. And some legislative efforts to make universities fix the transfer process have slammed up against the culture of competition.

Almost three years after California legislators demanded that anyone who earns an associate’s degrees at a community college be guaranteed transfer into the California State University system, for instance, students in two-thirds of all majors still don’t qualify, college and university officials there concede. The Campaign for College Opportunity, which pushed for the legislation, blames the California State campuses for being reluctant to accept community-college credit.

“We focus on losing time and money, but there’s also an impact on [students’] sense of hope and possibility,” Kadlec says. “Students are blaming themselves. And I’m listening to these stories and thinking, ‘Why aren’t you furious?’ And I think it’s because they’re thinking, ‘Maybe I should have known that these colleges are competitors.’”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Stephen Smith / American Public Media

Jennifer Larsen guides her third-grade class through a story-telling exercise at Edison Elementary School in Long Beach, Calif. She's one of three teachers at the school who coach other teachers on teaching writing.

Jandella Faulkner crouches beside a table of busy third-graders in Jennifer Larsen’s class at Edison Elementary School. The students have pencils in hand, outlines spread around them, and a story about penguins and otters in progress.

Faulkner stands to call across the room: “Loving how this group is already talking, Ms. Larsen.”  Then she swoops down on another table of young authors.

Jandella Faulkner is a teaching coach in the Long Beach, Calif., school district. Her job is to train a select group of teachers at Edison Elementary, including Jennifer Larsen, in a new literacy curriculum called Write From The Beginning.  It’s part of a district-wide training system that relies on teachers working with each other to improve classroom practices. So, with Faulkner’s help, Larsen and the other site coaches at Edison train their colleagues at the school how to use Write From The Beginning in their own classrooms.

Many American school districts rely heavily on outside experts, professional conferences and traveling consultants to conduct on-the-job training (also known as professional development). New York City, the nation’s largest school district, spent about $100 million last year on professional development consultants. In most cases, there’s little evidence to show whether the outside groups are helping schools improve, says Pamela Grossman, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

“There is a lot of money spent on professional development that does not really support teachers in learning how to improve,” Grossman says.

Long Beach creates its own training teams. For years, the Long Beach Unified School District has had one of the nation's best-regarded professional development programs for new and veteran teachers, according to Stephanie Hirsh, executive director of Learning Forward, a national nonprofit organization focused on teacher education.

“Our system is really invested in building internal capacity,” says Jill Baker, the district’s assistant superintendent for elementary and K-8, and chief academic officer. “What that means is teachers become leaders and trainers. We’re not bringing someone in from the outside. We’re teaching teachers within to go back to their school sites to train others.”

'Ahead of the curve'
Professional development is seen as a critical component of many education reform initiatives. National studies show that good training programs are especially important in high-poverty districts like Long Beach, according to Learning Forward. With some 84,000 students, Long Beach is California’s third-largest district. Most of the students are from families of color. Some 70 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch, an indication that families live at or below the poverty level.

Education experts say that good, independent research on what constitutes professional development for teachers is relatively scarce. Even so, more than $1 billion is spent on teachers’ on-the-job training each year in the United States, according to an analysis of data collected by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Long Beach district is “ahead of the curve,” Pamela Grossman says. “Professional development that’s embedded in teaching and embedded in practice is likely to have more impact on what teachers do,” Grossman says. “A model where coaches are familiar with the schools, the districts and the curriculum ― and are therefore able to offer fairly tailored coaching ― has a better chance of moving practice along.”

Long Beach administrators credit the Write From The Beginning curriculum ― and the teacher training that accompanies it ― with turning around dismal test scores at many of the participating schools. District figures show that schools scoring at or below 20 percent proficiency in state writing tests have boosted their numbers above 50 percent since 2007. Some once-struggling schools have posted writing test results above 80 percent.

Long Beach administrators say there have been no independent, peer-reviewed studies of its professional development program. But the district has been a winner, and a five-time finalist, of the prestigious Broad Prize, given by the California-based Broad Foundation to recognize urban school districts that improve student academic performance and narrow achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students. The Broad Foundation cited the district’s professional development program as an essential element in Long Beach’s ability to outperform other high-poverty school districts in student achievement.  (Disclaimer: the Broad Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Stephen Smith / American Public Media

Third graders at Signal Hill Elementary work on a writing assignment.

Writing 'so difficult to teach'
At Signal Hill Elementary, another Long Beach school, Principal Lauren Price points out that elementary school teachers must master a range of subjects, while middle and high school teachers specialize in single subject areas. Professional development is “essential” to keep teachers up to speed, she says. “Every year, researchers are learning more about the way kids learn and grow and develop,” Price says. “There are new and different ways to do things.”

The principal at Edison Elementary enlisted Jennifer Larsen and her colleagues, Kevin Quinn and Ruby Gaytan, to be the Edison site coaches for writing. They’re veteran teachers; all have been in the classroom 15 years or more. Each member gets 48 hours of training in the curriculum, starting with a summer workshop. Faulkner visits their classrooms about once a month. The Write From The Beginning curriculum was developed by Thinking Maps, a North Carolina education company.

“Writing was something that had been neglected for so many years because it was so difficult to teach,” Larsen says. “I saw this as something the kids really need.” Long Beach writing teachers are being trained to use graphical organizers ― the so-called “thinking maps” ― to help students organize their thoughts, describe characters, marshal evidence, come up with key words and plot other writing elements.

Fourth-grade teacher Ruby Gaytan points to a thinking map projected on her classroom wall with a list of qualities that describe Ivan, a character her students are writing about.  He wants to sell salt but is thwarted by a greedy king.  How to describe Ivan?  

“Broke, no money!” one student calls out.

“Determined!” another declares.

Gaytan directs her students to use their freshly minted list of adjectives in Ivan’s story of struggle. “If you can think it ...,” Gaytan prompts.

“You can say it,” the class responds in unison.

Gaytan says the off-hours training she gets with the writing curriculum keeps her fresh in the classroom. “The majority of teachers love to learn, that’s why we teach. It keeps me motivated,” Gaytan says.

Eye on Common Core standards
Kevin Quinn, also a fourth-grade teacher, says the training will help teachers stay “ahead of the game,” as Common Core State Standards are adopted by California schools in 2014.  The Common Core curriculum puts a heavy emphasis on student achievement in writing.

Larsen says the curriculum and the coaching have made her both a better writer, and a better writing teacher.  “I’m more aware when I’m reading aloud to the kids of all the great descriptions and the vivid language in every text,” Larsen says. “When I model writing for them, I express myself better.”

Coaches and teachers get paid for the time they spend on professional development, but Quinn and others describe it as “minimal compensation.” Meanwhile, the budget woes and accompanying teacher layoffs of recent years mean that Larsen, Gaytan and Quinn face classrooms of 30 children every day instead of 20.

“Whereas the majority of our staff wants to participate in the professional development, there is a lot of burnout,” Quinn says. “My workload has increased, my accountability has increased, but my discretionary time has not increased. So it becomes very difficult.”

Lisa Worsham, the head of English curriculum for K-5 schools in Long Beach, acknowledges that teachers are under stress. But she says professional development can help overcome the sense of isolation a busy teacher can feel. “There are a lot of us in the building, but we show up for work, we close our door, we teach all day, we’re exhausted, we leave the classroom and go home,” Worsham says. Without signing up for training, “there’s not a lot of opportunity to sit down with five other teachers and collaborate,” she says.

In addition to the in-class training, local site coaches meet four times a year with Jandella Faulkner at the district’s training center. Faulkner’s classroom is stocked with flip charts, baskets of colorful markers and a small mountain of sticky notes ― the raw materials of professional development workshops. A tall and magnetic figure, Faulkner encourages a group of nine site coaches to swap stories about what is working ― and what’s floundering ― back in their respective schools.

Faulkner holds up a training notebook. “When do you have the time to open up this binder and say, ‘what does my site need?’ This is your time to do it,” she declares.

Coaches as politicians
Coaching one’s colleagues can be a politically tricky enterprise. “It’s about having a rapport, really forming a relationship with each individual teacher,” says Jeff Lamperts of Willard Elementary.

Cheryl Hubert of Starr King Elementary, another site coach, says being a teacher in the local trenches gives her more credibility with her peers than some outside consultant who parachutes in. “They know who I am,” Hubert says. “They feel more comfortable with me than someone from a business [where they] think, what are they selling?”

Faulkner says many Long Beach teachers are eager to take up the new writing techniques that she’s helping to spread across the district. But not all. “We have teachers at the end of their careers say, ‘I’m not trying anything new.’ And convincing them to try something is a huge challenge,” Faulkner says.

At Lindsey Middle School, the language arts staff is using a similar literacy curriculum called Write For The Future And Beyond. The local site coaches at Lindsey get released from class nine days during a year for training. The district also sends teaching coaches to the school for in-class visits once a month or more, depending on how well the writing program takes hold, according to Stacy Casanave, a middle school literacy coach.

Lindsey teacher Shauna Hutchinson says the fat curriculum binder looked overwhelming at first. “But once you went to training they broke it down for you,” she says.

Another facet of the Long Beach professional development program is a close, long-standing relationship with the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. School personnel help with teaching and research at Cal State. Students at Cal State do their student-teaching in Long Beach schools.

Historically, most of the district’s beginning teachers have been Cal State graduates, according to Jill Baker, the district’s assistant superintendent. The district requires newly minted teachers to go through a prescribed on-the-job training program in their first years. But California’s fiscal crisis and the Great Recession have caused the Long Beach school district to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from its budget, laying off hundreds of teachers and cutting programs. Newer teachers were the first to go. Few beginners get hired.

Long Beach spends $5.4 million a year on professional development, less than 1 percent of the district’s $691 million budget. Professional development was cut nearly in half during and after the recession. In fiscal year 2006-07, 4,546 employees attended 11,763 training sessions. In fiscal 2011-12, 1,945 employees attended 6,982 sessions. Baker says the district has focused teacher training on areas that can have the most impact on how students learn. These include writing, mathematics and school behavior programs. There is less opportunity for individual teachers to select workshops or training programs in other areas such as creative arts and social studies.

“We’ve had to take a lot of things that we liked to do in the past and really narrow it down to what your students are showing us they need,” Baker says. “Professional development for teachers, and for principals as well, has been at the core of the work that we’ve done that has garnered results. “It’s part of the district culture, and it continues to work over time.”

This story was reported by Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks, in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a non-profit, foundation-funded education news site based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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From cable guy to nuclear technician: John Hoffmeister.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — Cable TV installer John Hoffmeister was strapped to a utility pole 30 feet in the air when his cellphone rang with the offer of a better job.

The energy company AREVA was calling to say that it would train Hoffmeister to repair nuclear reactors and at the same time send him to a community college in Lynchburg, Va., for an associate’s degree. He’d draw his full salary while spending 10 weeks a year in two compressed semesters of classes that the company helped devise.

For Hoffmeister, 37 — who had started college after high school but dropped out, and ended up installing home-security systems, delivering pizzas and even working as a cattle hand — it was a perfect second chance.

“When you find out about a program like this where you can kind of turn back the hands of time and get, essentially, a scholarship, it works out amazing,” said Hoffmeister, who received his associate’s degree four years after starting in the program. It also served AREVA by helping fill a glaring need for trained employees that many companies say the nation’s higher-education system isn’t turning out with the skills, and at the speed, they need.

The AREVA collaboration with its hometown community college is an example of an approach that has come to be called “learn and earn,” which the Obama administration and many higher education experts say the country needs to stay competitive: It offers more opportunities for working adults to earn a living, often supported by their employers, while they upgrade skills to take on specific, high-demand jobs.

Instead of just picking up stray credits and classes, older students like Hoffmeister are steered into carefully planned and structured programs that lead to degrees and certificates in particular fields in the shortest time possible.

Hospitals in Cincinnati, Ohio; Louisville, Ky., and elsewhere are providing higher-level training to prospective nurses and technicians they’ve already hired for lower-level jobs. Shipyard trainees in Newport News, Va., and newly minted jet mechanics and machinists in Seattle, too, are earning college credits while starting their careers, preparing them to advance to more sophisticated work.

Some of the biggest companies in America have joined the push to expand opportunities like this for low-income workers in dead-end jobs. Corporate Voices for Working Families, a non-profit business membership organization, has published case studies showcasing some of the best models like AREVA’s.

Business-community college partnerships like these are getting a push from a little-known, $2 billion U.S. Department of Labor initiative to improve career pathways at community colleges and address dismal graduation rates. While it sounds like common sense that everyone entering a community college would be enrolled in targeted, carefully focused programs of study, most students aren’t. They wander in, take a few credits and wander off again — a few because they land new jobs or promotions, but many because their educations were taking too much time or didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Meanwhile, an estimated 3.7 million jobs remain vacant because employers say they can’t find applicants with the right skills.

Only half of 62,000 students in community colleges in Washington state, for example, tracked over seven years by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College at Columbia University, passed at least three courses in a single field, and fewer than 30 percent earned certificates or degrees or transferred to four-year institutions.

But for those who found their ways into concentrated programs of study, the success rate approached 50 percent — especially if they did so right off the bat.

“All the data says the same thing: If you know where you’re going, you’re more likely to get there,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

25 percent high school drop-out rate
The Labor Department’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program is a remnant of the American Graduation Initiative, which President Barack Obama proposed early in his first term as part of efforts to regain by 2020 America’s standing as the country with the highest proportion of college-educated people.

That remains a goal. But it’s a tall order with 25 percent of teenagers dropping out of high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and anemic community-college graduation rates that have helped sink the United States from first to 16^th among developed countries in the proportion of its population with college and university degrees.

It’s also why policymakers, educators, employers and foundations are pushing to make community college courses more relevant to available jobs and speed up the journey to degrees and certificates.

Colleges including Central Virginia and Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville dovetail instruction to the needs of older, working students and the requirements of local businesses.

Related: Economic reality marries apprenticeships, college

Norton Healthcare and other hospitals in Louisville are working with Jefferson to fill their ranks of medical lab technicians and therapists’ assistants by sending them to specially designed evening classes at the college that help entry-level hospital workers advance into higher-paid, more demanding positions.

Gail Kuper, a receptionist in a Norton physicians’ practice, jumped at the opportunity and is on her way to becoming a medical assistant with an associate’s degree.

“What a mistake I made not going to college right out of high school, but I got married and had two kids. It just wasn’t in the cards at the time,” said the 43-year-old grandmother. Now she spends 15 hours in classes each week in addition to her day job.

In Cincinnati, a successful hospital-college partnership has propelled Carrie Martin from taking vital signs and administering shots in a clinic into the better-paid position of registered nurse. The Health Careers Collaborative that local hospitals launched with Cincinnati State Technical and Community College has become a national model. Cincinnati State and Jefferson are among 10 colleges that shared a $20 million U.S. Department of Labor grant last year to continue to expand pathways into high-demand medical professions.

It took Martin, who is 37, four years of evening classes, but she earned an associate’s degree and her nurse’s cap in 2010, then went on to get a bachelor’s degree the next year. Now she’s halfway through a master’s program from which she will emerge as a nurse practitioner, making $60,000 to $70,000 a year to start, all while working full time at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Community college 'boot camps'
Some learn and earn programs, like AREVA’s, pay workers’ salaries while they take classes. AREVA enrolls about 24 new technicians each year at Central Virginia, who take math, computer and general education classes while training at the company’s Lynchburg facility or going on the road to maintain or repair nuclear power plants.

Chris Connell / The Hechinger Report

The UPS Worldport is a noisy mammoth of a place, a whirligig of conveyor belts and bins. Lasers guide 1.6 million packages each night into the right bins so they can be trundled back onto the UPS fleet of 130 jets.

In Louisville, some 2,000 students at Jefferson and the University of Louisville are getting their full college tuition paid by working part-time on the midnight shift at UPS Worldport, the package delivery giant’s huge facility at the Louisville International Airport. The college students and other workers unload 130 UPS jets that converge there each evening, feed the packages onto conveyor belts that sort them into the right bins, then load them back again.

UPS was having trouble finding reliable workers for the 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift before it began a $1 billion expansion of Worldport in 1999. Rather than risk losing one of the city’s major employers, the state offered the company tax credits to cover half the cost of employees’ community-college tuition, and a collaboration called Metropolitan College was born.

It’s still an expensive proposition for UPS, but it has produced a dependable, highly productive and stable workforce, said Tom Volta, vice president for human resources. “People aren’t moving packages in the wrong places and sending them off to destinations unknown,” he said. The college students, added personnel manager Steve Oppel, “make the best employees because they have a lot more at stake. They don’t want to jeopardize their job.”

Since Metropolitan College’s inception 12,000 UPS workers have availed themselves of free tuition to earn 3,000 degrees and 4,000 certificates.

Utility companies in Georgia and elsewhere, worried about a looming shortage of line-workers among their aging workforce, have teamed up with community colleges to run “boot camps” that groom students for those critical jobs.

With help from an industry-sponsored organization called the Center for Energy Workforce Development, the utilities and colleges produced a curriculum for an eight-week electrical line-worker training program that combines classroom instruction about working safely with electricity with outdoor practice climbs on utility poles. Students earn 12 college credits and first crack at jobs that pay $14 to $16 an hour.

The five enthusiastic students at the boot camp last summer at Georgia Piedmont Technical College outside Atlanta included a laid-off machinist, a laid-off metalworker, a house painter, an electrician and a yard worker, ages 21 to 31. Corey Willard, the youngest, quit his last job because “I wanted more of a career than cutting people’s grass for $9 an hour.” The oldest, machinist Kenny Minish, said, “I’m a believer. I always wanted to be a lineman and this was the perfect opportunity.”

The Georgia Piedmont program “has been a godsend for us,” said Victor Hurst, vice president of line services for Snapping Shoals Electric Membership Corporation. “We were just failing too often hiring straight off the street.” And, he said, the college classes serve an additional purpose: letting the future line-workers know they need to keep learning.

“The equipment, the technology they have to work with, changes and changes fast. It’s getting hard for us to keep them abreast of the things they need to work on. They are constantly going to class,” said Hurst. “Training is part of what you’ll be doing in this business until the day you say, ‘I’m ready to retire.’”

This article, "Impatient employers step in to educate prospective workers," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. It’s one of a series of reports about workforce development and higher education.

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New pressure on colleges to disclose grads’ earnings

Mel Evans / AP file

The graduating class of 2012 at Princeton University after commencement ceremonies in Princeton, N.J., in June. How much are their degrees worth in earnings?

Joyce English was about to start studying toward an associate degree she hoped would lead to a job as a consultant to healthcare companies around Tacoma, Wash., where she lives.

Then she discovered a database created by the state’s workforce training agency estimating what she’d earn with that degree versus how much she could make in other jobs with other majors and degrees from colleges and universities across the state.

They paid more, she found.

“You obviously want something out of your education,” says English, who changed her mind and is now majoring in what she learned is the more lucrative field of business management at Pierce College. “You don’t want to go into something that’s going to pay you less than it cost to go to college.”

Efforts to disclose the earnings potential of degrees in specific majors from particular colleges and universities are picking up steam, promising to bring competitive pressure to bear on institutions by steering students away from programs with lower market value and colleges whose graduates fare poorly — and holding higher education directly accountable for the return on investments made by families and taxpayers.

“We’re on the cusp here of something really big,” says Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education during the George W. Bush administration.

Comparing schools, too
Wage information—by major, degree and institution — was made available for the first time this fall in Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia, which joined Florida and Washington. Colorado, Nevada and Texas are in the process of producing it, and a bill in Congress would require every college in the country to disclose the average annual earnings of its graduates.

The data already released reveal not only which majors pay more than others, but which universities’ graduates earn more and which earn less.

In Virginia, for instance, graduates of four-year nursing programs earn more than twice as much as liberal-arts majors, on average, and graduates of the University of Richmond make almost 72 percent more than graduates of Hollins University.

In Tennessee, majors in health professions make two and a half times what philosophy and religious-studies majors make, and graduates of the University of Memphis earn 13 percent more than graduates of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

10 best-paying jobs for community college graduates

“I can imagine some hard questions being asked” by parents, students and legislators armed with knowledge like this, says Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research and president of College Measures, which is helping states create such earnings databases.

Despite the appearance of choice, says Whitehurst, there’s historically been “no reliable information on which consumers can base a rational decision” about which college to attend. “But lots of students are making this decision largely for one reason, which is to improve their economic prospects. And not giving them that information has put all the power in the hands of the sellers instead of the consumers.”

In fact, nearly 90 percent of incoming freshmen say the main reason they enrolled in college was “to be able to get a better job,” UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute reports. “And probably 100 percent of their parents say that,” says Schneider.

State legislators and governors are also looking more closely at what they’re getting for the money they put into public higher education. “The question is, what are we getting out of that support?” says Tod Massa, director of policy research and data warehousing at the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, where it was the General Assembly that ordered the creation of that state’s earnings database.

Difficulty in making comparisons
The information has significant limitations. It can be hard to find and difficult to follow, for example. Proponents hope it will be picked up by private college-rankings services such as Barron’s and The Princeton Review and distributed more widely. It typically provides earnings of people only a year after they graduate, and it compares colleges that admit considerably different kinds of students who go on to work in places where living costs and wages vary.

The information is also based on such things as state unemployment insurance records, so it doesn’t take into account graduates who work for the federal government, join the military, move away or go on to graduate school. An analysis by the University of Virginia found that 22 percent of its degree recipients went on to graduate school and 43 percent left the state, meaning they weren’t being counted.

But the data could eventually put substantial pressure on colleges and universities whose poor rates of return cost them applicants and state support in favor of institutions with the best results.

“It’s the no-name comprehensives, the regional campuses, the third-tier not-for-profits — their business model is going to be held up and people are going to ask about it,” Schneider says. “ ‘Why are you charging me $40,000 a year? What’s the outcome at the end of the day? What am I getting for all this time and money?’ ”

Higher-education leaders complain that judging degrees based on prospective wages diverts students from the liberal arts and overemphasizes narrow skills and majors, not the broad knowledge they say employers really want, including the ability to problem-solve and communicate clearly.

“We are misleading students when we tell them over and over again that the major is the only thing that matters,” says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “And we’re making that even worse when we’re saying, ‘Pick a major that will make the most money for you.’ ”

Though she acknowledges that universities should be providing so-called “soft skills” to students regardless of what major they select, Schneider says that what she calls “major myopia” makes students “push back” against learning writing and math.

“Your college decision should be about becoming an educated person — giving yourself a resource that will increase in value your entire life, finding something you care deeply about, and developing the skills to go on learning what you need to learn,” she says. “We should not be telling them the only thing that matters is how much money they’ll be making a few years out. The more important message is, follow your passion.”

What's the return on investment?
But proponents of disclosing earnings say spiraling tuition is driving the demand for information about returns on families’ investments in a college education.

That’s the same force behind a contentious regulation proposed by the U.S. Department of Education called the “gainful employment” rule, which would disqualify from federal financial aid those programs in fields whose earnings aren’t enough to justify their students’ loan debt. The proposal has stalled by litigation brought by for-profit colleges and universities.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has introduced legislation that would require colleges to disclose the average annual earnings of their graduates, along with such things as average debt. “Students are entitled to know the value of their education before they go out and borrow tens of thousands of dollars from the banks and from the government” to pay for it, Wyden says. “Right now, consumers don’t have this information.”

Mark Schneider says that, given what colleges and universities charge, they shouldn’t object to being judged on graduates’ earnings.

“‘Leave us alone,’” he declares, mimicking what he says are the universities’ arguments. “‘Our students don’t get jobs, but it’s not my problem. They don’t graduate, but it’s not my problem.’ We’ve heard all these things. So I say, ‘Show me the return on investment. Show me what happens when you graduate. If you want to talk like that, then show me the outcome.’ ”

In Washington, Joyce English still sees many classmates start college not knowing whether there’s demand for the careers they want to pursue.

“That’s the crazy thing,” she says. “When you’re younger, you chase your dreams and sometimes you don’t look at the salary. That’s something you don’t even think about. But you need to make a living.”

This story, "New pressure on colleges to disclose grads' earnings," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Jackie Mader / The Hechinger Report

Students attend a summer session at Lyon Elementary School near the city of Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta. School districts throughout the state could see increased competition from charter schools if a controversial bill passes the Mississippi Legislature this session.

Mississippi lawmaker Kenneth Wayne Jones, a Democrat, briefly became a political pariah last winter when he voted in favor of a proposal to expand charter schools in his state. He was the only African-American state senator to support the bill, which most members of Mississippi’s legislative Black Caucus disavowed. Jones liked the idea of expanded school options for families, but he also understood his colleagues’ mistrust.

“You’ve got conservative Republicans all of a sudden showing a lot of concern about the education of African-American children, while in the same breath they are denying them health care,” Jones said.

This winter, charter supporters will make their fifth attempt in five years to bring charters to Mississippi, one of a dwindling number of states without a real charter school law. (The state has an existing law so restrictive that no charters have opened.)

But the deep-rooted skepticism of the state’s black leadership remains one of the biggest obstacles to bipartisan support for charters in Mississippi and throughout the South, where powerful white Democrats are a disappearing breed. It also speaks to broader mistrust among black officials nationwide — particularly those who came of age before or during the civil rights movement — toward contemporary school reform efforts they believe are being imposed by outsiders on low-income, minority communities.

“White people cannot tell us what’s best for educating our children,” said state Sen. David Jordan, a 78-year-old African American from the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood. “Heck, we did it for decades without even the money for books. Through the help of God we made it.”

Similar tensions have emerged in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, where veteran black politicians and venerable civil rights organizations like the NAACP have been among the most vociferous opponents of recent education reforms. Those changes include the expansion of charter schools, the recruitment of out-of-town educators through programs like Teach For America, and the weakening of job protections for teachers.

In Mississippi, which has the nation’s highest rate of childhood poverty and posts some of the weakest test scores, there’s particular urgency to improving the schools. Advocates of charters believe the autonomous schools will help boost the state’s abysmal academic performance. They say they can learn from mistakes made in other states to ensure Mississippi’s charter law is exemplary.

Critics counter that the state needs to focus on fully funding the schools it already operates and create a desperately needed pre-kindergarten program before it looks to alternatives like charters. They also worry that the charter movement will be hijacked by virtual schools and for-profit companies hoping to profit off of Mississippi’s children.

The support of the Black Caucus likely won’t be crucial to passing a new charter school law in Mississippi, though. Republicans control both houses of the legislature, some Democrats support charters, and Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, who is white, has made the issue one of his top priorities. (Last year’s bill failed largely because a few key Republicans didn’t support it.)

But the caucus’ response will be a litmus test for whether black leaders are growing more receptive—or more resistant—to the reforms that are steadily reshaping public education across America.

Charter skeptics
The debate over school reform doesn’t always fall neatly along racial lines. President Barack Obama has embraced charters and other controversial changes. Black leaders like Howard Fuller in Milwaukee and Geoffrey Canada in New York City are among the most outspoken and prominent supporters of radical changes to the traditional public school structure. And, as the divide between Jones and Jordan illustrates, not all members of Mississippi’s Black Caucus are united in full-throated opposition to charters. 

But in Mississippi and elsewhere, charter and reform backers have often struggled to win over civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as a majority of black lawmakers and voters.

In Washington D.C., for instance, former mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid in 2010 at least partly because middle-class black voters were frustrated with the hard-charging style of his schools chief, Michelle Rhee. She not only supported charters but also aggressively pushed to close low-performing schools and fire struggling teachers. In New Orleans, thousands of educators lost their jobs in the lead up to the rapid chartering of the city’s schools after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The move left many of the city’s predominantly black veteran educators feeling disenfranchised and suspicious of the changes. And in New York City, NAACP leader Hazel Dukes underscored her organization’s intense disdain for charters when she accused a parent who supported them of “doing the business of slave masters.”

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The racial tensions surrounding school reform have complicated origins. Mississippi State Sen. Jordan, a retired public-school science teacher, said he fears charters partly because they could bring more white out-of-state educators to Mississippi who won’t be able to relate to the children there. “Teachers who come in claim they can do a yeoman’s job,” he said. “But I don’t think someone can come from Illinois and do a better job with the kids of the Mississippi Delta than the teachers who are already here.”

Jordan also worries that charters could mean a loss of black power and leadership in rural communities where the black community fought long and hard to claim top positions in the schools. In the Delta town of Indianola, for example, the black community staged a lengthy boycott of white businesses in order to get the first African-American school superintendent appointed in 1986.

“If you go to another model, people are not going to hire African Americans in the top positions,” said Jordan. “The bottom line is to eliminate African Americans.”

In the Mississippi Delta, nearly 90 percent of the public-school children are black, and school districts are one of the few sources of stable jobs.

“In rural counties, the school districts are the main employer,” said Mike Sayer, senior organizer at Southern Echo, a black leadership organization based in Jackson that opposes charters. “If these school districts go down altogether, it will have a crippling effect. In a lot of these communities there are no other places to work.”

Lessons from New Orleans
Charter proponents say they hope talented local educators will open charters, and that fears of widespread upheaval and displacement are overblown.

“Forty other states have [charters] and, to my knowledge, traditional public education hasn’t been destroyed,” said Sanford Johnson, deputy director of Mississippi First, a nonprofit education advocacy organization that supports charters.

Mississippi First executive director Rachel Canter adds that charter supporters have been careful to specify in the proposed bill that all educators with strong track records will be eligible to open charters — regardless of whether their experience is with charter or traditional schools. That way, Mississippi locals will not feel dissuaded from the start.

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“Whether local people can open charters has been a huge issue for the Black Caucus,” Canter said.

A draft of the bill presented earlier this winter calls for a statewide authorizing board to vet charter applicants. In low-performing school districts, applicants would need only the board’s approval to open. But in stronger districts, they would also need a nod from a majority of local school-board members.

“The most important thing is to give new opportunities to talented educators who are right there in their communities,” said Kenneth Campbell, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which advocates for charters and increased school choice for low-income black families.

Campbell points out that in New Orleans — ground zero for controversy surrounding education reform — several of the most successful charters were started by black veteran educators who ran traditional public schools before Katrina. The city has a higher percentage of charters than any other, and could become the first citywide school system comprised entirely of charters within the next few years.

New Orleans has also attracted national charter-school networks such as the Knowledge is Power Program and Future Is Now Schools, and most of the school leaders recruited by the charter “incubator” New Schools for New Orleans have come from out of town. The new, less local leadership has helped contribute to the changing demographics of the city’s teacher corps.

Before Katrina, New Orleans had one of the highest percentages of black educators of any city in the country. But starting in 2007 that percentage began to drop steadily, to 63 percent during the 2007-08 school year, and 57 percent the next year, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Education.

Overall, test scores are going up for a variety of reasons, and parents of all races and income levels have reported growing satisfaction with the city’s public schools. But “one can be as kumbaya as they come and still worry about the psychological effect on black children who come to equate both education and authority with whiteness,” wrote Times-Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry of the shift.

Trying to overcome history, mistrust
History might be one of the biggest obstacles to building more broad-based support for charter schools in Mississippi.

Black officials say it’s tough to trust that the state’s white leadership has the best interests of children at heart when they have underfunded the public schools for so long.

Many also fear that charters could provide a means for dozens of nearly all-white “segregation academies” to obtain public funding. The draft legislation doesn’t allow private schools to convert to charters, but that provision has not squelched the fears. Many of the academies are facing declining enrollments as middle-class whites flee the Delta, and would jump at the chance to become charters, skeptics say.

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“Claiming that private schools can’t convert to charter schools is nonsense,” said Sayer, who adds that savvy school operators will be able to find a way around the letter of the law. But Mississippi First’s Johnson says the statewide authorizing board would be able to identify suspect applicants because of the rigorous approval process outlined in the proposed bill.

“Mississippi’s history is the reason people are suspicious about all these things,” said Nancy Loome, executive director of The Parents’ Campaign, which supports a more restricted charter law that would ban virtual and for-profit operators.

Campbell acknowledges that “people have long memories” in Mississippi, which can make it challenging to build trust. But he said lawmakers and citizens of all races and political affiliations are more open to the concept of charters than in previous years.

“There’s an increased desire to learn more,” he said.

Kenneth Wayne Jones, who will chair the Black Caucus during the upcoming legislative session, agrees.

“I don’t think it will be as toxic as it was last year,” he said. “I don’t know if the Caucus will be more supportive when it comes to votes, but I know we’ll be listening more than last year. If this train is coming, we need to make sure we are on it.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. Sarah Carr, a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, is the author of the forthcoming "Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children" (Bloomsbury Press, February 2013).

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Christopher Connell

Apprentice ironworkers from Local #86 with their instructors on a steel scaffolding where they learn their craft at Bates Technical College in Tacoma, Wash. The apprentices, who start at nearly $25 an hour, are among more than 200 the union is training as demand for them in the Seattle area picks up after a two-year lull. The apprentices earn college credit for the classes at Bates.

TACOMA, Wash. — Five-foot-two Jesica Bush exudes confidence, whether she’s scribbling notes in a 6:30 a.m. class at Bates Technical College here or wrestling 900-pound girders atop a mock two-story building.

With her blond ponytail tucked inside a brown hardhat, the 30-year-old is an apprentice with the ironworkers’ union, a job that starts at nearly $25 an hour and will lead her in three years to both a journeyman’s card and an associate degree.

Three years back, Bush sat in the state women’s prison in Purdy, finishing seven and a half years for an armed-robbery conviction. The former addict dropped out of school in seventh grade — “Me and school, we never saw eye to eye,” she says — was convicted of her first felony at 13, had a child at 15, and was sent to prison at 19.

But when it took her just six months to complete her GED in Purdy, the instructors asked her to be valedictorian at the graduation ceremony and to start thinking about college. When she got a chance to fight fires with a prison brigade instead of cleaning toilets, she jumped on it and made the discovery that “I loved hard work. I’d never worked a day in my life. You hike up the forest, you chain-saw trees all day. It’s hard — really hard — just like being an ironworker. But I loved coming back and being tired.”

Now Bush is one of 209 people learning the ironworking trade through apprenticeships like this one and others run by the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee, a state-funded partnership among community colleges, industry and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, at a time when skilled workers are needed by Boeing and the rest of the aerospace industry in Seattle and to help build a $4 billion replacement for the floating 520 Bridge over Lake Washington.

Christopher Connell

Jesica Bush, 30, who served 7½ years in prison for armed robbery, is now an Ironworkers Local #86 apprentice in Tacoma, Wash., making nearly $25 an hour and earning credits toward a community-college degree.

An age-old doorway into skilled trades and a middle-class life, the apprenticeship is making a comeback, rebounding after all but disappearing in recent decades in the face of a decline in union membership and dwindling demand for skilled labor. And as the economy changes, today’s apprenticeships combine the chance for workers not only to master skills while earning a paycheck but to get a college degree at the same time.

From the White House to executive suites, and from think tanks to such industry groups as the National Association of Manufacturers, there’s a push to link apprenticeships with conventional education, mostly at community colleges, and produce a better-educated workforce capable of filling the more than 3.6 million skilled jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates remain vacant in industries such as manufacturing — even at a time when more than triple that number of Americans are looking for work.

Higher education, advocates say, can not only provide these newly minted workers with the critical-thinking skills they need for today’s jobs, but also leave them better prepared and more appealing to employers the next time things get tough.

“What works so well about apprenticeships is that workers can gain tailored skills for the workplace along with critical academic learning, all while they earn a paycheck,” says Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a champion of federal support for apprenticeship programs.

The 'skills gap' may be your fault, employers

What makes them a model, Murray said at a U.S. Department of Labor ceremony marking this year’s 75th anniversary of the National Apprenticeship Act, are those paychecks, plus the programs’ reliance on strong public and private partnerships and the combination of academic and on-the-job learning.

Machinists these days have to operate sophisticated, computer-numerical-controlled equipment like the $3 million Makino vertical machining center that Seattle apprentice Irwin Downes has learned to run at JWD Machine in Fife, Wash. The company sent Downes and two other apprentices to Ohio to learn how to run the super lathe, which can cut titanium parts on several axes at once under high heat and jet sprays. Now the three are teaching the factory’s other 42 machinists how to use the time-saving machine to make critical parts for the aerospace industry.

Downes, who is 24, also spends four hours in class one night a week at Bates Technical College. “I knew my feeds and speeds for cutting aluminum, but why is it that way?” says Downes, who previously worked in a Chinese fast-food restaurant for a year after high school. “At Bates, they break it down into a math formula and show us where the numbers come from.”

Christopher Connell

Ironworkers Union Local #86 instructor Kelly Graves readies a piece of equipment at the union's training center at Bates Technical College in Tacoma, Wash. The four-year apprenticeship now comes with the opportunity to earn an associate degree.

Across the country in Virginia, at the sprawling Newport News Shipyard on the waterfront near where the James River spills into Chesapeake Bay, applications to the apprenticeship program have skyrocketed from barely 540 a dozen years ago to a record 6,300 this year. New apprentices spend two full days each week in college classes, while earning more than $30,000 to start and upwards of $50,000 by their fourth year. They spend the rest of the week on the waterfront learning one of 17 trades and helping build and repair the nation’s aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.

The best move on to advanced classes from which almost half will graduate with an associate degree from nearby Thomas Nelson Community College or Tidewater Community College, which teach some courses inside the shipyard gates and others back on their own campuses. The shipyard’s Apprentice School has its own 17-member faculty as well as nearly 70 craft instructors. Of those 6,300 applicants, it takes 260 new apprentices each year — making it more selective than Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

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The shipyard, owned by Huntington Ingalls Industries, also looks to the Apprentice School for future supervisors, managers and executives. Danny Hunley, who enrolled as an apprentice welder at age 19 in 1974 and is now vice president of operations, says that “human supply chain” is particularly reliant on the community colleges.

“We invest heavily in community colleges, not just for workforce development but for education of our employees,” says Hunley. “We rely on a lifetime of learning to prepare our people to create the product that we sell that no one else can.”

Hunley says he hopes that when the Apprentice School moves from its World War II-era brick building into a planned glass-and-steel showcase in downtown Newport News, it will even begin to offer bachelor’s degrees.

Malachi Underwood, 27, an apprentice in the foundry shop, came to the shipyard in 2010 after being laid off from a job making wheels for railroad freight cars. “The things you do in the classroom here relate to what you do every day on the job. They make them real life,” says Underwood, who was recently tapped to leave the foundry and become a nuclear test technician.

Christopher Connell

At the Newport News Shipbuilding Apprentice School in Virginia, new apprentices spend two full days in college classes each week while earning more than $30,000 a year. Director Everett Jordan, an alumnus (he was a shipfitter), says the college classes add "a critical dimension to our education here."

Everett Jordan, director of the Apprentice School and, like Hunley, an alumnus (he was a shipfitter), says the complex theory classes that apprentices take bring “a critical dimension to our education here.” Adds training manager David Tilman: “If you’re taking AC/DC theory as a freshman in college [elsewhere], you’re putting together little boards. When you’re doing it here, you’re putting together nuclear submarines.”

Conversely, employers say the instruction their apprentices get in college classes is broader than what new workers can learn on the job alone. The colleges typically work with local industry to design their classroom programs.

“Not only is the curriculum structured, but it helps the company build that apprentice’s skill in all facets,” says Jason Mohon, manufacturing director for JWD Machine. “Historically, if you were just an operator or a machinist out on the floor, you might find yourself spending years focusing on one task. This helps the company open their eyes and cross-train them.”

Christopher Connell

An Ironworkers Union Local #86 apprentice prepares to hoist a section of a steel beam to the second story of the building skeleton that students practice on at Bates Technical College in Tacoma, Wash.

The same is true of the 6:30 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. classes that the ironworker apprentices take in Tacoma, which occupy one month each year during their four-year apprenticeships. At the job sites where they spend the other 11 months, much of the trainees’ time may be spent carrying or tying rebar, or doing other hard, physical labor, rather than the more complicated work of following codes and blueprints.

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Some foremen and journeymen “have no problem explaining things so the apprentices build up knowledge as they go, but some do not,” says instructor Kelly Graves. He tells the apprentices that if they want to be superintendents, they’ll need college degrees. “The more education you have, the better off you are,” he says.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and the state legislature came up with $3 million to create the aerospace apprenticeship program in 2008, at a time of near-panic among employers about the aging of their skilled workers. Half of Boeing engineers are eligible to retire by 2015, and two-thirds of the company’s entire workforce is within a decade of retirement age.

Yet employers have their work cut out to convince a new generation to enter these trades, says Laura Hopkins, the program’s executive director. For them, the promise of a college degree can be an inducement.

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“In this day and age, if I’m trying to recruit young people, we have to have a college degree attached,” Hopkins says. “We have to convince their counselors and teachers and parents as well that this is a good career opportunity for them and that if the economy shifts and their industry goes down, they can move on to something else with that college degree.”

If apprentices have a college degree and work as machinists for a while but then decide they want to go into engineering, “they now have the opportunity to do that without starting from square zero,” says Hopkins, herself a former Boeing aircraft mechanic and dean at South Seattle Community College. “The more pathways we create for folks to go into these different careers, the better it is for everybody.”

Back at Bates, Jesica Bush is convinced she’s found the right calling. She wants to become a construction supervisor eventually and instruct apprentices herself.

“I’m a bossy person. I envision me running something sooner or later,” Bates says. “I grew up in prison. That’s where I got educated. I had to learn, and I’m still learning. I am driven — and I refuse to lose again.”

This story, "Economic reality marries age-old idea — apprenticeships — with college," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. It’s one of a series of reports about workforce development and higher education.

The Hechinger Report

Students in a real-time virtual classroom run by the company 2U, which is part of the new Semester Online initiative.

The race to capture a potentially vast market for college courses provided online has taken another big step with the announcement Thursday by 10 top universities that they’ll offer such classes for college credit — something earlier collaborations have struggled to do.

Semester Online envisions not huge, 100,000-student online courses such as those already being offered by MIT and Stanford, but a return to traditional-sized college classes of 12 to 15 students with live student-professor interactions — just delivered online instead of in person. And rather than making the courses available for free to anyone, it will likely have admission standards and charge tuition, according to the university provosts who have helped set it up.

The concept creates a sudden and significant divide about how best to educate online, just as America’s top universities try to get in on an anticipated boom in online learning.

“The biggest selling point is that it isn’t really new,” says Rogan Kersh, provost of Wake Forest University, one of Semester Online’s member schools. “It still feels like an extension of what we do now — the traditional university course that we already know works well, as opposed to a Wild West [where] all bets are off [and it’s] every student for him- or herself.”

Courses will be taught by university faculty following the same curricula used in conventional courses and with conventional techniques such as class discussions, using technology that allows students and professors to see and talk with one another in real time. Students will be graded on their work by faculty and earn college credit if they get passing grades.

Other collaborations have promised to figure out a way to offer credit or other kinds of credentials for large-scale online courses, called massive open online courses, or MOOCs — something that would threaten what has until now been a tightly held monopoly among traditional universities.

EdX, launched by MIT and Harvard earlier this year, plans to use private companies that will charge a fee to test students at examination centers around the world. Coursera, which includes Princeton, Columbia and Stanford, has proposed letting students take assessments online — and monitoring them as they do so via webcam.

On Tuesday, the American Council on Education said it would review a small number of Coursera classes, and may recommend that universities provide credit for them. Even if it does, however, such a recommendation would not be binding.

Semester Online, on the other hand, planned “from the very beginning” to offer credit, says Ed Macias, provost of Washington University in St. Louis, another member school. “That’s built into our model.”

The initiative also includes Brandeis, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Rochester, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt. More universities may be added by the time the first courses are offered next fall, organizers say.

Although they were reluctant to say their model is a repudiation of MOOCs, several provosts of these institutions described it as a logical evolution of online higher education.

The earliest online courses were provided “for credit by schools you [had] never heard of,” such as the now-ubiquitous University of Phoenix, says Jim Dean, dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill. “Then the MOOCs were about courses from schools you’ve heard of, but not for credit. Now you’re seeing courses for credit by schools you’ve heard of.”

Kersh said the scale of the wholesale model is larger than many faculty are comfortable with, while Semester Online classes will be a manageable size.

More from The Hechinger Report

• Q&A: Students teaching their teachers how to use technology
• Is the technology ‘ready’ for blended learning?
• Student advising plays key role in college success — just as it’s being cut

MOOCs “are sexy and exciting because they’re new and different, but as a teacher, I’ve taught classes, and, to me, large means 200, not two million,” Kersh said. “We want to deliver the kind of highest-quality educational experience that the United States has been the world leader in—and to abandon that for the sake of a massive global experience feels like something special has been lost.”

Still, a few universities are hedging their bets. Duke, Emory and Vanderbilt are members of both Semester Online and Coursera.

One thing the new collaboration has in common with earlier ones is that the details have yet to be fleshed out. The 10 universities will work with a for-profit company called 2U, which helps provide the infrastructure and support universities need to offer online courses. But the cost to students and the way that revenues will be split among participating schools, among other things, are still being negotiated, according to Macias.

“We thought it would be good to announce what we’re doing so people could hear about it,” he says.

A 2U spokesman, Chance Patterson, says tuition will likely be equal to what the universities charge for brick-and-mortar classes.

This story, "New online venture promises small classes and college credit," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Courtesy of Arizona State University

Arizona State University introduced eAdvisor in 2008. The software helps students to pick majors and to stay on track toward graduation.

TEMPE, Arizona – Devon Mills pulls out his smartphone at a Starbucks on the Arizona State University campus and maps out how long it will take him to finish his undergraduate degree.

Just exactly the right amount of time, his phone tells him.

In spite of double-majoring in political science and justice studies with a minor in sustainability, serving as president of the college council and vice president of the Residence Hall Association, working as a page in the state Senate, and cramming for the Law School Admission Test, Mills is on schedule to become one of the distinct minority of American university and college students who actually receive their four-year bachelor’s degrees in four years.

“I can see the goal in sight,” he says, serenely scrolling through an online color-coded plan that shows him the requirements he’s finished and the ones he still needs to fulfill before graduating in 2014.

While academics are debating whether students can effectively learn online, the program Mills is using harnesses technology to provide something else that is surprisingly essential to success in college: advising that can help prevent an education from slipping off track.

“The research clearly shows that when a student is more engaged on a campus they are more likely to remain enrolled and persist to graduation,” says Charlie Nutt, executive director of the National Academic Advising Association, or NACADA. “Academic advising is the key mechanism, and on many campuses the only mechanism, through which students have a person they're connected with.”

But just when it seems to be needed most, face-to-face advising is getting harder for students to find as the number of advisers shrinks and caseloads soar because of budget cuts and enrollment increases.

U.S. universities had, on average, one adviser for every 367 students last year, down from one for every 282 in 2003, according to a survey by NACADA and the college-admissions testing company ACT. Though more students than ever work to pay tuition and expenses, advisers are seldom available at night or on weekends. And waits for appointments during business hours can stretch for weeks.

Piling up unneeded credits
As a result, many students flounder through college, changing majors, piling up and paying for credits they don’t need, and taking more time than they planned to graduate.

On average, students rack up 136.5 credits toward bachelor’s degrees that require only 120, the advocacy organization Complete College America reports. One of every three switches majors, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. And the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics says that fewer than one in four students at public universities, and around a third at private ones, graduate within four years.

“There’s too much wandering around,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “It makes sense that if you know where you’re going, you’re more likely to get there.”

The picture is even worse at community colleges, whose students are particularly likely to struggle. Academic counselors at community colleges typically handle 1,000 students each, according to MDRC, a nonprofit research organization. In some cash-strapped California community colleges, the ratio is as high as one to 1,700.

Half of community-college students don’t even know advising is available to them, says Davis Jenkins, a researcher at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The one-third of them who finish their two-year programs within even three years take, on average, 80 credits toward associate degrees they could have gotten with just 60, according to Complete College America.

“We have a situation of almost completion by accident rather than completion by design,” says Jenkins.

The problem has grown more urgent as the type of student changes. More students today are older than traditional age, or the first in their families to go to college, or they attend part time while working or raising children of their own.

That makes navigating the bureaucracy of higher education even harder than it already was. Arizona State, for instance, offers 250 majors, and 3,071 undergraduate courses – many with prerequisites that, in turn, have their own prerequisites.

Even 18-year-olds who come from college-going families are so overscheduled by helicopter parents in their earlier grades that they struggle when they’re set free in college. 

“They have to learn to manage time,” says Nutt, who is also a professor of education at Kansas State University. “An adviser is essential to that.”

Turning to technology
In focus groups, students say they just want someone to tell them what to do, says Shanna Jaggars, also of the Community College Research Center.

Or if not someone, at least something.

More from The Hechinger Report

• A second chance for Mississippi charter schools
• Teachers unions show renewed strength in wake of elections
• Obama re-elected: What four more years means for education

Arizona State’s eAdvisor, which was launched in 2008, puts the information students need online, night and day, and follows their progress as a live adviser would.

“We’ve waited too long to use technology in this way,” says the university’s president, Michael Crow.

Students start by entering their interests, search engine-style – “I like to work with people,” for example, or, “I would like to do something with music” – and eAdvisor helps them pick a major. Each then gets a “major map,” which charts a trail through the complicated combination of requirements. If a student wanders off the trail by failing to finish a required course or threatening to fall below a certain grade-point average, eAdvisor tells him so, in big red letters, and sends him off to see a face-to-face adviser.

The results have been dramatic. The proportion of freshmen who don’t return for sophomore year has fallen from 24 percent to 16 percent, much lower than the national average, and 42 percent graduate in four years – up from less than 26 percent in 1997, and almost double the proportion at public universities nationwide.

“It’s about looking at universities from the perspective of the students,” says Elizabeth Phillips, the provost, who first introduced a form of eAdvisor when she worked at the University of Florida and brought it with her to Arizona State.

Human advisers are expensive, error prone and soft, says Phillips, whose academic field is psychology. Part of advising, she says, is taking the hard line of “telling a kid they’re not going to be what they thought they were going to be.” There are still real-life advisers at Arizona State. But eAdvisor frees them from the drudgery of scheduling courses. “By the time you go in to see your face-to-face adviser, you can focus on strategy and life issues,” Crow says.

The eAdvisor system helps in other ways, too. Since students are planning their courses in advance, it helps the university provide the right number of seats. Not being able to get into required courses is another reason students take so long to graduate at other universities. At Arizona State, administrators say and students confirm, it almost never happens.

The system tracks whether students do well in the kinds of subjects that are essential to careers they want. If they want to major in psychology, for instance, it makes them take statistics first – and if they don’t do well, suggests that they consider other majors. If they’re in danger of failing, it freezes their ability to continue until they meet with an in-person counselor.

There are other ways the university is using technology to track its students – and, for that matter, its advisors. Phillips gets a report if an adviser gives too many overrides, for example, waiving prerequisites or restrictions on class sizes. The system also captures information from the financial-aid and residence-hall offices, the campus police department, and judicial boards about financial or behavior problems students might be running into.

“Now we’re a machine, to provide the kids exactly what they need,” says Phillips.

There are some shortcomings. Meant to be simple to use, eAdvisor seems at first glance almost indecipherable.

“When I first looked through it, I was a little confused,” says Steven Denke, a senior electrical-engineering major in the honors college who had to take five different technical electives, plus the university’s core requirements, and transfer credits from advanced-placement and dual-enrollment courses that he passed in high school. “It was daunting at first, just looking at the major map.”

Phillips says the university is working on making eAdvisor more user friendly. Adds Crow: “What we have is a very early precursor of where this is going to go.”

Christina Arregoces, a junior majoring in English and creative writing, likes being able to monitor her progress at any time.

“I’m one of those people who double-checks everything,” Arregoces says. “It’s nice to have a map so you know what you’re doing and what you need to do.”

Too dependent on technology?
Not everyone is ready for technology to supplant advisers, however.

“Technology cannot replace one-to-one advising with a person,” Nutt says. “It’s enhancing that. It’s a bad idea to depend only on the technology and not the interaction, but also a bad idea to depend only on the interaction and not on the technology.”

Still, Phillips says she’s inundated by requests for information about eAdvisor from her counterparts at other universities, which are struggling to provide advising.

“We’re seeing universities and colleges becoming more focused on advising,” Nutt says. “But the advising they end up with may not look at all what advising looked like five years ago.”

Some schools are testing so-called group advising, in which an adviser meets with groups of students with identical academic and career goals.

“Instead of saying the same thing to, say, 40 nursing students 40 times a day, they meet as groups and say it once to 40 people in a room,” Nutt says.

A few universities promote advising weeks. And Beloit College in Wisconsin cancels all of its classes one day each semester so students can meet with their advisers.

“A lot of students come in because of social expectations or because it’s the next step toward a career, and not always with a clear sense of their own motivations for being there,” says Natalie Gummer, Beloit’s co-director of first- and second-year programs.

“We’re trying to help them prepare to move from a liberal-arts education into the job market,” Gummer says. “And it helps to keep them on track.”

This story, "Student advising plays key role in college success – just as it's being cut," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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President Barack Obama’s re-election on Tuesday — along with Democratic victories in key states — marked a reprieve for teachers unions after a difficult year of political attacks and shrinking membership.

The defeat of Indiana’s Republican superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett, combined with labor-friendly results on a series of ballot initiatives, demonstrates the continuing strength of unions, said Terry Moe, a political scientist at Stanford University and the author of “Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools.”

“They’re powerful enough that they can go after their enemies,” Moe said. “That tends to prevent a lot of policymakers from doing anything.”

With a combined membership of 4.5 million educators, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers have long been considered among the best-organized political forces in the country. But this election was marked by a particular sense of urgency, many union officials have told The Hechinger Report over the past few months.

“The 2010 election kind of woke a sleeping giant, if you will, in many of our members,” said NEA political director Karen White.

In the last two years, a majority of states across the nation have passed education laws that unions disagree with, including bills that have reformed tenure and tied student test scores to teacher evaluations. Legislatures have slashed state education budgets and limited unions’ collective bargaining rights.

Bennett — a favorite among self-proclaimed “education reformers” — was defeated by NEA member Glenda Ritz, in part due to a large-scale phone-banking campaign spearheaded by the union. Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., described Bennett’s unexpected loss as the “biggest single development for education” in this election cycle.

“The fact that a basketball-coaching, folksy native son … lost in the Hoosier state was a shocker, and [is] a big setback for would-be reformers,” Hess said.

In Idaho, union members also campaigned hard to overturn three pieces of major education-reform legislation by wide margins. Laws that would have included student test scores in teacher evaluations, introduced a merit pay system and mandated online classes for high-schoolers were all rejected.

“We really believe it was an overreach from the right wing after those 2010 elections,” White said of the laws. “Voters in Idaho believe in fundamental fairness.”

A Maryland ballot initiative to make undocumented immigrants eligible for in-state tuition to public colleges and universities passed, while a bid to remove language from the Florida state constitution banning taxpayer money from going to religious educational institutions failed. Had the initiative passed, it would have opened up the possibility of a statewide system of private-school vouchers, which unions staunchly oppose.

Ohio Education Association

Teachers Donna O'Connor and Maureen Reedy ran for state House seats in Ohio. Both lost on Tuesday.

In other places, though, the unions were less successful. In Georgia, for instance, citizens voted to create a state commission to authorize charter schools, which unions have fought against because they tend to hire non-unionized teachers. Initial results indicate that Washington will become the 42nd state in the country to allow charters. And in Ohio, only one of the 10 teacher-candidates running for state legislature won, despite all having had their union’s support.

Many of the Ohio teachers were spurred to run by a 2011 attempt to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights in that state. “The Ohio Education Association is extremely proud of all of our teacher-candidates,” OEA spokesperson Michele Pater said in a statement. “Each one of them ran a highly competitive campaign, laying the groundwork for the future.”

StudentsFirst, an organization founded by former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, also dealt blows to the unions this year. The group was active in helping to push through some ballot initiatives, like the Georgia charter school item. Of 111 candidates StudentsFirst endorsed across the country, 87 were elected.

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“[Tuesday] night was a good night for school reform,” said Tim Melton, legislative director for StudentsFirst.

The group, which aims to serve as a counterweight to the political power of unions, was particularly successful in Missouri. There, 19 of 21 the candidates they endorsed won, including Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder. (Six ran unopposed.) Candidates supported by StudentsFirst won six of eight contests against union-backed opponents in Missouri.

But Stanford’s Moe cautioned against viewing union losses as a sign of weakness. “Other groups are major new participants in the political process that are making unions’ lives more difficult,” he said. “That doesn’t change the fact that the unions are still enormously powerful.”

This story, "Teachers unions show renewed strength in wake of elections," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet located at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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A dozen states are poised to pass significant education reforms this year, depending on the outcome of next week’s election. State-level candidates in many of them want to abolish teacher tenure and tie teacher evaluations to student tests. On the ground trying to make sure they win is a new organization, StudentsFirst, founded by former Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

The group has infused cash and organizing into races in states such as California, Iowa and Michigan, where teachers unions have historically dominated politics and enshrined such policies as tenure and pay based on seniority in state law. StudentsFirst  hopes to undercut unions’ power and remove many of the labor protections that unions support.  

The 2012 election is the group’s first real test. In Missouri, another state on the brink of wide-scale changes in education, StudentsFirst has poured more than $100,000 into campaigns since the primaries and recruited more than 40,000 members to push for the election of 21 candidates it has endorsed. Nationwide, the group has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in primary and general elections.

Due to the reputation of its founder as a tough and unapologetic enemy of unions, StudentsFirst has the highest profile among a small number of similar groups, including Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform, that have emerged in the last few years to fight policies typically supported by unions. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he had formed a super PAC to back candidates that support, among other things, the education reforms he has pushed in New York, including expansion of school choice.

“Typically if you voted for school reform, you came under the wrath of the protectors of the status quo,” said Tim Melton, the StudentsFirst legislative director, referring to the unions. “[We’re a] new group that lets people know if they want to take some of those tough votes, someone’s going to stand with them.”

For years, the unions have dominated the political landscape on education. They are often  major campaign donors and organizers for candidates that they endorse. The rise of outside groups eager to influence education policy corresponds with a growing number of candidates who are paying attention to the issue. In recent years, nearly every state in the country has passed some sort of significant education reform bill. They have changed curriculum standards, expanded charter schools or revamped teacher evaluations.

“When you look at education, it hasn’t been something that has been a political dynamo issue for candidates to run on,” Melton said. “You just now see in the last three years a major shift.”

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StudentsFirst came to Missouri in January after being approached by both Democratic and Republican members of the state Legislature. It worked to get a charter school bill passed, but fell short on a bill that would reform Missouri’s teacher tenure law. The legislation would have extended the time before a teacher can receive tenure from five years to 10. It passed narrowly in the House, but failed in the Senate. Union officials say five years is more than enough time to weed out low-performing teachers.

StudentsFirst plans on returning to the issue after the election is over, and Melton is hopeful the numbers will be on his side this time. “It could be one or two members in a chamber that could make a significant difference,” Melton said.

The Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) and StudentsFirst have endorsed opposing candidates in eight races, including the race for lieutenant governor, and the same candidate in five. Chris Guinther, MNEA president, stressed that the union did not pay attention to the StudentsFirst endorsements. Her organization does its own independent selection process, she said.

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But she is unhappy about the presence of StudentsFirst in state politics. “I would hope the Missouri legislators are willing to listen to those who work in our public schools every day rather than someone who flies in from California,” she said. “Who in public education, who in service to our children doesn’t put students first?”

The Missouri Association of Teachers has found even less common ground with StudentsFirst. The union supports only one candidate that StudentsFirst also endorsed. In an open letter on its website, the association said the campaign of any candidate that takes StudentFirst money will be considered “anti-public education.”

Melton said he was unaware of the letter. “They represent their members, we represent the interest of students. I would hope that we can find [joint interest],” he said. “You can give them my phone number if they actually want to have a real conversation about that.”

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Whether StudentsFirst will have the impact it’s hoping for, however, remains to be seen. Only 10 of 17 candidates the group endorsed in Missouri’s primary elections last spring won.

StudentsFirst could gain as much power as the unions, eventually, said Mike Antonucci, director of the Education Intelligence Agency, a group that monitors teachers unions. That won’t happen any time soon though, he said. The unions have a built-in organizational structure that others have yet to match.

Teachers' unions push to get educators elected

“It looks to me like StudentsFirst has money; they don’t have the organization,” said Antonucci. “If you’re going to compete with [the unions], you have to have both.”

Nov. 6 will provide the first clues as to whether StudentsFirst is likely to be a true player in state elections.

“Part of what we perceive to be their influence will actually be determined next Tuesday,” Guinther said, noting that her group was braced to have a tenure debate again. “I’m sure they’ll be back.”

This story,"New player in education jumps into state races," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Ohio Education Association

Donna O'Connor and Maureen Reedy are running for state House seats in Ohio.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Special-education teacher Donna O’Connor and 23 of her colleagues gathered at their union’s headquarters here in January for a first-of-its-kind campaign boot camp. Prompted by an intense battle over collective bargaining that has pitted unions against a Republican-controlled State Assembly, the Ohio Education Association started grooming its own candidates to take back control of state education policy.

O’Connor, who is currently running for a House seat in the Columbus suburbs, felt her own sense of urgency as she learned how to fundraise, write speeches and debate during the union training sessions. “I started connecting the dots about seven years ago [that] I couldn’t just shut my classroom door and the politicians would leave me alone,” she said.

Teachers have long run for office, often with encouragement and support from their unions. This year, however, educators in states with some of the biggest labor disputes and most controversial education policies have been campaigning in record numbers, according to state-level union officials. It’s one of the most direct ways that teachers and unions are showing their frustration over mounting attacks on tenure, the growth of nonunionized charter schools and efforts to evaluate teachers based on student test scores.

“You’re starting to see a lot of teachers say, ‘Enough is enough. I want to run for office,’ ” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform.

The group works to elect Democrats committed to making dramatic changes to education policy, including many that the unions oppose, such as eliminating tenure. Williams said he expects the trend of educators vying for office to continue. Official statistics aren’t kept on how many teachers are running, but anecdotal evidence from several states suggests the numbers are up.

The teachers union in Wisconsin, which was the center of a lengthy battle over collective bargaining last year, has six members competing for statewide office. In Tennessee, the first state to pass a law tying teacher evaluations to test scores, nine out of 11 teacher-candidates survived state legislature primaries to advance to the November elections. (Typically, two or three teachers in Tennessee run for any sort of office in a given year, according to the state’s teachers union). And in Minnesota, where mounting class sizes and debates over changing the seniority system have upset teachers, 35 educators are on the ballot. Members of the Minnesota teachers union, Education Minnesota, have estimated that that number is about a third higher than normal.

“Unfortunately for the past two years, the Legislature has ignored the real problems and focused on bashing teachers,” Education Minnesota president Tom Dooher said in a written statement. “We’re hopeful more people with classroom experience will be elected and re-order its priorities next year.”

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Ohio was thrust into the national spotlight last year when its legislature passed Senate Bill 5, which banned unions from collective bargaining. A ballot initiative that November repealed the law, but the memory — and the anger it inspired — has not faded.

Although many potential candidates who attended the OEA’s training sessions decided not to run this year (and one lost in a primary), 10 remain on the ballot for state office — an unprecedented number, according to the OEA. In the last six years, just three other OEA members have run. This year, an 11th educator, a former member of the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT) in his first year of retirement, is also running.

The Republicans have a stronghold in both houses of the Ohio State Assembly. In the House of Representatives, they are one member away from a super-majority, which would mean that any law passed as an “emergency measure” would take effect right away.

State congressional districts were redrawn in Ohio this year, in what supporters of the teachers union claim was gerrymandering meant to help Republican candidates. Still, the changes created new seats for some teachers to run and prompted others to challenge incumbents. Many teachers are now locked in tight races in districts that lean heavily red.

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O’Connor, the special-education teacher, lost her current representative, Democrat John Carney, to another district during the redistricting process. Faced with an incumbent who had voted against collective bargaining and for a budget that cut state education funding by more than 10 percent, O’Connor decided it was time for her to get directly involved. She described the bill that outlawed collective bargaining as the “icing on the cake” in motivating her to run.

Tom Schmida, an OFT retiree up for election to the House in the Akron suburbs, was also spurred to run by a host of issues. A Democrat, Schmida is concerned about the future of collective bargaining, charter school accountability and a provision in the approved budget bill that will tie teacher evaluations to test scores. “An overreaching agenda by the extreme elements of the Republican Party, especially in the State House, [goes] beyond Senate Bill 5,” he said.

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Schmida is in a close race against incumbent Republican Rep. Kristina Roegner, a staunch proponent of charters, vouchers and the elimination of collective-bargaining rights. Schmida’s grassroots campaign has knocked on about 7,500 doors and made 9,000 phone calls. Many of his volunteers are teachers and union members themselves, he said.

Both of the state’s teachers unions have endorsed all of the teacher-candidates. The OEA has also sent out mailings to members about its teacher-candidates, organized phone banks and helped produce a campaign video. “We’ve supported them through every means we possibly can,” said OEA president Patricia Frost-Brooks.

OEA declined to give specifics on the amount of money it has spent to help teacher-candidates get elected.

To Williams, these steps are a logical extension of unions’ long-time political involvement. “Teachers unions all over the country have been pretty successful at keeping the pipeline for potential candidates for office filled with good candidates,” he said. “We’re starting to see the unions take their message up a notch. It’s not just about good candidates … [but] getting teachers to be recruited.”

Yet Williams worries that too many teachers in office might derail the current education reform agenda. “As we move into an area where there’s lots of debates about teacher-quality issues and teacher-tenure issues, [the unions] are going to want people who will shut that debate down,” he said. He believes having more educators in office will be helpful only if they offer perspectives from the trenches without sidetracking the reform conversation.

Several Ohio teacher-candidates say they’re open to discussion and compromise. They add that their larger goals—like a better system of funding education—need not be divisive. It’s more about ensuring a teacher voice, they say.

“In 2011, that really showed us what happens when we don’t elect officials that are pro-workers, pro-public education and pro-teacher,” O’Connor said in her OEA-produced campaign video, referring to Senate Bill 5. “Electing pro-public education candidates is most important this time around. I think the teachers that are running, we can help protect and improve public education from the inside out.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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