This story was originally published on L.A. Youth. 

By Jennifer Gonzales-Romero

My mom, my brother and I used to go to the movies or eat out almost every weekend. We weren’t rich but I could tell my mom wasn’t struggling because she could always afford to take us out. Things changed in June 2009 when my mom was laid off from her job as an assistant property manager for a property management office.

I never thought she’d lose her job because she’d been working there for eight years. But since she didn’t look worried, I didn’t worry either. My mom had savings and the government gave her unemployment—money you get from the government every two weeks after you’ve been laid off. But she still made sure to budget her money.

We didn’t eat out or go to the movies as often. Out of habit, I’d ask my mom to buy me clothes when we were at the store but she said she couldn’t. So I would mostly ask my dad whenever I went over to his house because he had a job. Many times my junior year I’d come home after band practice and see my mom on her laptop looking for jobs, but she wasn’t having much luck. I didn’t think it would take two years for her to find a job and that she’d struggle to pay her bills.

The summer before senior year, I researched colleges. My dream school was the University of La Verne because I thought its small class sizes would be better for me. Tuition cost $31,300 a year but I thought financial aid would cover everything since my mom was unemployed. By the end of the summer I knew that I couldn’t depend on my parents to buy me new clothes and pay for my senior year expenses so I kept my summer job at Little Caesars.

In late September my mom started dating an old classmate from New Orleans. He and his daughter moved here and my mom and them moved into a three-bedroom home. My brother and I stayed in our apartment and my dad moved in with us so we could continue going to school in South Gate. My mom and her boyfriend got married in December.

Last month, the California State Senate approved a bill to develop a Creativity and Innovation Education Index, designed to measure how schools are fostering creativity among their students. California is just one of several states to implement a law like this, Massachusetts being the first, according to Education Week.

It might seem like a shock that California is concerned with measuring creativity opportunities when the budget for arts classes and music programs has been cut in school districts all over the state in recent years. However, employers and business owners are saying that new applicants to the workforce are not equipped with the creativity and critical-thinking skills required to get hired.

The California Alliance for Arts Education describes the index:

A creativity and innovation index would provide a way for schools to rate their progress in teaching, encouraging and fostering creativity in students. Index scores would be voluntarily compiled by school and district staff from a survey of curricula and teacher reports. It would quantify the opportunities in each school as measured by the availability of classes and before and after-school programs offered by and through school districts that nurture creativity and innovation in students. Examples might include visual and performing arts education classes, debate clubs, science fairs, theatre and dance performances, music concerts, film-making, creative writing, and independent research.

We spoke with Mary Wright, Associate Director for The Conference Board, a business membership and research association, who specializes in the intersection of business and education. She was a leader on a report called, “Are They Really Ready To Work?” in 2006, which identified key skill sets that employers thought were important for their employees to have, and creativity / innovation were among the top five.

We spoke with Wright about the concept of a Creativity Index and how she thinks it could affect the workforce readiness of young people today.

Youth Radio: Explain in a nutshell, the findings of your workforce readiness research with regards to the need for non-academic skills.

Wright: We wanted to understand what business really meant by--new entrants are not workforce ready. We looked at both basic skills, which we took from No Child Left Behind-- the reading, writing, and arithmetic skills, and also asked about the applied skills, like 21st century skills. The applied skills are things around critical thinking, information technology application, teamwork and collaboration, and creativity and innovation. There are about 13 or 14 skill sets we looked at.

It was clear to us that the applied skills were the ones that were considered most important. Certainly, people would argue that math and science develop significantly critical thinking skills. They give you tools to figure out problems. But if you can’t communicate what you just learned or what you just did, you’re not as valuable in the workplace.

It was interesting given the emphasis that people have on STEM [science, mathematics, technology and engineering] skills, and yet, what employers were saying, it wasn’t the math skill that was important, it was the critical thinking skill. That would be true regardless of whether someone was in a STEM career or a retail career.

The video below shows journalist Roland Martin interviewing Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, about new data showing that black students are being suspended at higher rates than others. The data comes from a study done by the Yale University Child Study Center.

The study shows that black students, no matter their income receive less attention, harsher punishments, and lower marks in school than white students.

Watching this video made me think about the challenges that I, as well as my siblings, faced in school. There could have been other ways to help us or discipline us, but our schools weren’t aware of them.

Dianis says, “Our schools are not using common sense when it comes to the behavior of children.” I agree 100 percent. There are times when suspension is unnecessary.

My little brother, who is 13 years old, was suspended for five days for play-fighting a block away from his school. He and the other student were having fun after class off-campus, but still got suspended. What happened to calling a child’s parents? Is that method not valuable anymore? I expected someone to call my mama or at least give my brother a warning, but suspension is what they had in mind.

I feel worried for my brother and other black students. They’re becoming part of a static based on skin color. My brother is a bright student so I hope this suspension doesn’t mess up his reputation and cause teachers to look down on him, like Dianis says in the interview.

This story was originally published on L.A. Youth. 

Author's name not given to protect their identity. 

I’ve always worked hard in school because I want to go to college and be successful. But because I’m not a citizen, my hard work could be for nothing. My parents don’t have the money to pay for college and I can’t get federal financial aid because I don’t have a Social Security number. In October, Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Dream Act, which will allow undocumented students like me to get financial help to attend public colleges in California. This made me feel hopeful for my future. However, the state Dream Act doesn’t provide a path to citizenship. Even if I graduate from college, would I have to work in a low-wage job? Will my status prevent me from obtaining my dream job as a journalist?

Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

A new film on the education circuit offers a new assessment of the answer to America's public education woes. Simply put: our current treatment of the teaching profession is killing all prospect of growth. American Teacher -- which is making its debut in select screening locations around the country -- attempts to emphasize that good teachers in a variety of school settings are the linchpin to improving American schools.

The movie is one component of The Teacher Salary Project, which hopes to document the stories of teachers and assert that teachers are undervalued in American society in terms of compensation. The book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of American Teachers, written by Ninive Calegari, Daniel Moulthrop and Dave Eggers, inspired the making of the film, which was produced by  Calegari, Eggers, and Vanessa Roth, and is narrated by Matt Damon.

According to the project’s website, “46 percent of public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years of being in the classroom. Salaries and stress are among the top reasons teachers say they leave.” I became a classroom teacher at age 22, but left the position after two years.  As I watched the movie American Teacher, memories of my own teaching experience flooded back -- arriving at school before sunrise and leaving after dark, just to go home and work some more.

Calegari was a classroom teacher in Massachusetts and California. After three years in a Marin school, she left to teach at a charter school in San Francisco.  She started working with Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work Of A Staggering Genius, to start a literacy center in San Francisco.

The film looks at five stellar teachers from across the country who are revered by their school communities, and what challenges they confront every day to continue teaching. One teacher has two secondary jobs to supplement his teacher salary. Another returns to teaching just six weeks after giving birth, and frantically looks for places to use a breast pump during passing periods. The movie also interviews experts who speak to the lack of support for new teachers, and the disparity between how teachers are treated in America versus other countries. Turnstyle spoke with Calegari about producing the film.

Turnstyle: What was your strategy for tackling the huge issue of teaching?

Calegari: Our strategy is to elevate the teaching profession and shine a light on good and excellent teachers. I think when you are focused on attacking the bottom, bad teachers, even good teachers get offended and feel that it dishonors and denigrates the excellent work that they do on a day-to-day basis, so I think it’s a really important strategy to be positive and think about the excellent work that is happening and try to amplify that, and make a profession that is attractive to college kids. My goal has always been that the teaching profession is so exciting and so attractive that college students would stay up at night and worry about whether they could become a teacher just like they would worry about whether they could get into medical school.

The following originally aired on KCBS

By: Lanaya Lewis 

 I applied for early admissions to six colleges and was accepted to all of them. But not many of my classmates are in the same situation.

“Do you know what a Historically Black College is,” my tutor asked. I had never heard that phrase before, but from that day on, I knew exactly what type of school I wanted to go to. I’ll be the first person in my family to go to college, and advice like this from the college prep program Upward Bound has really helped me.

Even my mom has been a great support. Every day when I come home from school she asks: “Did you do your homework, because I don’t want to hear any excuses when report cards come?” But not everyone has parents who push like this.

Many of my friends have been struggling on their path to college. I was lucky that I qualified for Upward Bound, but luck shouldn’t matter in trying to further your education. There should be more programs that reach out to students who want to be helped regardless of grades, GPA, and family background.

College is intimidating enough, and programs with a lot of qualification requirements are an unnecessary hurdle.

Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

Russell Rumberger is an expert on high school dropouts. He recently published a book called, Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can be Done About It, and he currently serves as provost in the Office of the President at the University of California. Rumberger is also director of the California Dropout Research Project. According to Rumberger, roughly 25 percent of U.S. high school students do not graduate.  And he says that our country is only making the problem worse by trying to prepare everyone for college.

Turnstyle spoke with Rumberger about how to re-define success in high school by creating multiple pathways for students to find success inside and outside of school.

Turnstyle: In a nutshell, tell us about your argument that when academia focuses solely on getting kids to college, it can lead to more high school dropouts?

Rumberger: I do believe everybody who wants to go to college, has the inclination to go to college, should be able to. Even if they may not have the initial ability, they should still be encouraged and supported to go. It may be harder for them, it may take them longer to finish, but that’s okay. But for students who don’t want to [go to college], they should have an option as well; the opportunity to develop skills that are valued in the job market and take that pathway. What would serve students better in the long run is if we had a broader definition of success in high school to include more things that people can master that we know are important.  Some of those things can be best acquired in the classroom, but many can be acquired outside the classroom.

Underlying my assertion is that we want to try to make every kid successful in something. If we define success narrowly by saying how well can you do on an AP test, or a math test, or some other kind of academic test, and that’s the only way we judge success, then the students that have the ability to work with others, the ones that can design things, the ones that know how to cook or fix cars, none of those skills are valued. But if we say, everyone should have something that they can master, and demonstrate mastery of, then there’s this notion that students will develop a sense of competence.

Who are the “Opportunity Youth” of America? A new report classifies Opportunity Youth as those between the ages of 16 - 24 who are not pursuing education or employment. They have previously been classified as “disconnected” youth.

The report called, “The Economic Value of Opportunity Youth” attempts to quantify the fiscal and social burden of Opportunity Youth on society. According to the report, “Each year the average opportunity youth imposes a total fiscal burden of $13,890 and a total social burden of $37,440.”

This group of young people is divided between “chronic opportunity youth,” who have terminated their education and are unemployed, and the “under-attached opportunity youth,” who could be working or going to school part-time, but are spending some portion of their time doing neither. The report states, “We identify approximately 9% of youth (3.4 million) who have almost no formal schooling or employment between the ages of 16 and 24 – chronic opportunity youth. … 17% of youth are opportunity youth, but 8% are not in the chronic category; we refer to these 3.3 million youth as ‘under-attached.’”

One of the interesting sections of the report breaks down the immediate economic burden of opportunity youth on society, in areas such as earnings and taxes, crime, health, welfare and social supports, and education. In terms of health, opportunity youth are more likely to have received drug and alcohol treatment in the last year, as well as spent time in a mental hospital. They are also more likely to be uninsured.

The report estimates, “The average opportunity youth imposes a public health care burden of $3,490; by comparison, the average youth imposes a burden of $1,110. Therefore, each opportunity youth imposes a net burden of $2,380 for an aggregate burden of $16.0 billion."

Where does the U.S. stand in terms of education compared to the rest of the world? What should the U.S. be doing to measure up to countries that outperform us academically?

Education Week just released their annual publication, Quality Counts 2012, that analyzes important issues facing American schools, and this year’s edition is focused on how the U.S. compares to international systems. In general, the U.S. does not shine in comparison to other nations. 15-year-olds in the U.S. scored around the international average in science and reading, but below the international average in math. Countries like China are surging ahead in terms of contributing to the number of college-educated people in the world. The focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) achievement is due to the correlation between those fields and economic growth and stability.

Here are some highlights from the report:

How are we measured? Can better scores affect our economy in a positive way?

The PISA, or Program for International Student Assessment, and the TIMSS, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, are the international assessments used to rank nations in order. One of the main debates discussed by Education Week experts is whether improving scores on these exams will visibly affect U.S. economic growth.

Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University, believes that if the U.S. increased its math performance by 40 points on PISA, the nation’s gross domestic product would increase between 7-to-11 percent annually on average over the next 80 years. Critics like Hal Salzman, an economist at Rutgers University, say linking achievement on these tests to the economic status of our country can distort how business and policy leaders go about reforming education.

The following originally aired on KQED-FM.

By: Sayre Quevedo

Around this time last year I was busy applying to college. Clicking that ‘submit’ button on my online applications, I imagined myself in New York City, going to poetry readings and cramming for various exams. I listened to Patti Smith and Lou Reed over and over in anticipation of receiving acceptance letters. But my acceptance letters were followed by even more important pieces of mail, my federal financial aid statements, or FAFSA.

The minute I saw the amount of financial aid I qualified for, I knew that the price tag of my dream was way out of my budget. My mom is still paying off her college loans, and I had already spent more than I could afford paying for official transcripts, applications, and the ACT test. Tuition at my top school was 30,000 dollars a year and I was going to be on the hook for 2/3 of it.