In 2007, Partnership for Learning and the College & Work Ready Agenda released Improving the Odds: Preparing Washington Students for Family-Wage Jobs. In the report, we refuted the notion that a high school diploma is sufficient to ensure a family-wage job. Instead, the research made clear that, to earn a family-wage job, students must receive an education that prepares them to succeed in college and beyond.
Since the release of Improving the Odds, changing economic conditions have only increased the demand for family-wage jobs. Since 2007, the United States has faced one of the worst economic recessions since the Great Depression. This national recession has had ripple effects in Washington, and employment reports released through the spring and summer of 2011 have confirmed a slowdown in both the national and Washington state economies.
That's why Partnership for Learning has updated this important report. In Improving the Odds "2.0", we provide an analysis of the existing workforce needs and outline policies that Washington state must address if every student is to graduate prepared to succeed in our globally competitive economy.
To read this report, click here.
As the urgency for improving America’s schools increases, the core ideas guiding education reform remain remarkably stable, defying the ideological or partisan claims that can often stifle political change. “
U.S. public schools are in the early stages of a revolution in how they go about evaluating teachers. In years past there was little more than intuition and anecdote to support the view that teachers vary in their quality and, as such, it has been nearly impossible to discover and act on performance differences among
teachers when documented records show them all to be the same.
In the Fordham Foundtion's first review of the quality of state U.S. history standards since 2003,