In some California schools, one counselor serves as many as 1,000 students. In response, TechFutures developed Counseling Wizard, an online system providing high school students with information on graduation and college admission requirements. (Photo: Noah Berger)

A crisis is brewing in California schools, revealed not by poor grades or declining test scores but a far more ordinary symptom: empty seats. Only 69 percent of the state's students are graduating high school on time, according to recent research by Harvard University and the Urban Institute.

For minority students, the news is worse. Only 55 percent of African American students, and 57 percent of Latino students, graduate with regular diplomas. The figures are even lower for male students in these groups.

The research, based on new methods for calculating dropout data, has issued a wake-up call for California schools.

"The number of youth who aren't getting a high school diploma is staggering," says Anne Stanton, director of Irvine's Youth program. "The failure to educate, connect, and help young people complete a significant milestone like high school has huge ramifications, both for the individual lives of these young people and for the economy of California. When you think of the cumulative effect of these statistics over a decade or more, the implications are tragic."

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Can California's high school classrooms propel students into careers as well as colleges? A growing wave of education reformers believe the answer is yes. Boosted by the September passage of a bill putting $20 million into vocational education, new initiatives to elevate career and technical education (CTE) in the state's high schools are gaining steam.

Career and technical education (CTE) helps engage young people by linking challenging academic curricula with the working world through work-based learning, internships, job training, and mentoring programs.

Supporters see improved CTE as a timely response to some significant challenges facing California schools. Maybe the most pressing of these: a rising dropout rate among the state's high school students. "People recognize that the dropout rate is alarming and that we've got to provide students with additional incentives and support to stay in school," says Anne Stanton, Irvine's Program Director for Youth. "California has some of the highest standards in the country, yet if we drill only academic skills, we could lose the kids who are most at risk. Connecting formal education to the broader world will help young people see the role academics can play in their life choices and careers."

Reformers say the dropout trend highlights the need for a "multiple pathways" approach to high school education. Rather than a one-size-fits-all direction, a diverse student population requires a diversity of possible paths to educational success. This notion is at the heart of Irvine's Youth program strategy. "There's no silver bullet," says Irvine's Stanton. "We need a broader menu to engage the young people whom we're not now engaging and provide focused support to help them succeed academically."

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Do California's high school students suffer from motivation deficiency? Many experts see lack of student engagement at the root of the state's growing struggles with student dropouts and achievement. Walk through the typical high school today, says UC Berkeley professor David Stern, "and occasionally you'll see actively engaged students who are on-task, but it's rare. Instead, for the most part you see polite attention or inattention, and in a lot of cases disruption, acting out, or opting out. Motivation is a big problem in high schools."

Rather than the one-size-fits-all approach, a movement of education reformers is seeking to provide students a wider range of possible paths to educational success. This multiple pathways approach is at the heart of the new strategy of the Irvines Youth program.

Studies show that, even as most students say they plan to attend college, a large slice of them will not end up doing so. "If you look at the numbers, the proportion of young people who attain either a four-year or a two-year college degree is still, for all our efforts, a little over one in three," says Harvard professor Bob Schwartz. "If you look at the flip side, we've designed a system that is essentially not serving at least two kids out of three very well."

Support for rigorous curricular standards remains high. The new push is for more relevance.

"The core business of high schools ought to be to equip kids with a solid foundation of academic skills so they can move on to whatever they're going to do next," says Schwartz. "But there's this increasing tendency to say 'Let's run everybody through a standard college-prep curriculum.' This is where I jump off the train. For a lot of kids, the argument that they need this for college simply isn't very motivating. It doesn't connect to who they are or their interests or experiences. Historically, one single pathway - leading kids to a four-year, higher education institution - hasn't worked for the majority of kids."

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They might be the best-kept secret in higher education. With 109 campuses, they make up the largest system of higher education in the world. They serve twice as many students as the University of California and California State University systems combined. Yet California's community colleges receive far less funding or attention than their high-profile counterparts.

In fact, the state ranks 45th in the nation in its funding of community colleges. And they receive a fraction of the dollars that go to the state's four-year colleges. This sobering data could be cause for concern, but for Mark Drummond, the new chancellor of California Community Colleges, they can be seen another way—as cause for celebration.

"The miracle of community colleges in California is that they are as strong and good as they are," says Drummond, whose zeal in building support for the two-year institutions has led him to be labeled the "evangelist" of the state's community colleges. "We rank 45th in funding compared to other states, and look what we accomplish. Nowhere in the state do you have to drive more than an hour to be in a community college classroom. No state rivals what we have in California."

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Why are so many high school graduates in America not going to college? And what can be done about it? In a new report, "A Shared Agenda," an alliance of education organizations and funders seeking to improve college attendance among the nation's students issues both an eye-opening reality check and a detailed call-to-action.

The alliance, called the Pathways to College Network, begins the report starkly. "In a nation where equal opportunity for all is a bedrock democratic value," it reads, "getting a college degree still depends far too much on one's economic circumstances or ethnic heritage."

Sobering data underscores what the report calls "an educational divide in this country that in some respects has not narrowed in decades." The divide has racial dimensions. For instance, only about half of African American and Latino ninth graders graduate from high school within four years, compared to 79 percent of Asian Americans and 72 percent of Whites.

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Too many youth between the ages of 14 and 24 are falling through the cracks, says Anne Stanton. In an Irvine Quarterly Q&A, the foundation's Program Director for Youth discusses the challenge of finding new ways to engage adolescents, the role of expectations, and what she learned running a community-based organization.

IQ: What did you do before coming to the Irvine Foundation?

Stanton: I've spent my career working in the community, both here in San Francisco and in New York City, with the most disenfranchised youth—youth with minimal support and skills trying to make transitions in their lives. I came to California to run Larkin Youth Street Services in San Francisco, where we focused on addressing the needs of runaway youth on the street. A lot of very disconnected runaway youth end up in San Francisco and are preyed upon in the street economy. It poses big challenges. How do you build a system that provides these young people with what they should have had in a family?

IQ: What interests you about youth development?

Stanton: The phrase "youth development" tends to have softer connotations and is perceived by some to be about self-esteem and leadership. I might instead call it "basic rights" because we're focusing on the development of academic and job skills. But whatever we call it, what excites me most about this work is the generation of young people between the ages of 14 and 24. Some people say that it's too late to work on these populations, that programs have to start with younger youth. However, my experience suggests the opposite. If you help them build skills, they will always surprise you and usually inspire you, too.

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California high schools operate in much the same way today as they did 50 years ago, leaving most of today's young people without the academic preparation they need to be successful in college, work and their communities. A new charter school program that blends internships with rigorous academic coursework promises to create a stir—and results—too loud for the state's education system to ignore.

With support from the Irvine Foundation, Aspire Public Schools is developing and piloting in two sites the "Hire and Higher" Program, a work experience program that offers internships to high school sophomores and juniors with local employers while providing a real world context for a rigorous academic program. Students will meet the requirements for admission to California public universities, conduct career explorations during the regular academic year, and utilize structured summers for a combination of work experience, college-based academics, and life skills preparation. During the summer, students will be simultaneously employed in part-time internships, enrolled in a community college class in a related subject, and meet regularly with Aspire staff to develop the skills and habits required in the workplace and higher education.

"When retention rates in the California are so bleak, support needs to be focused on programs like these that might capture kids' interest and help them not only decide to stay in school, but to also do well in school."

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A college degree has never been more critical to career success and to promoting a democratic society than it is today. At the same time, there are stark socioeconomic and racial gaps in college enrollment and achievement, gaps that threaten to widen as California undergoes dramatic demographic change.

Amidst this change, at 28 independent colleges and universities across California, administrators and faculties have been participating in the Irvine Foundation's Campus Diversity Initiative (CDI), a five-year, $29 million effort designed to improve college access and retention rates of underrepresented students and to identify ways to better serve the needs of a rapidly changing student body.

The CDI was designed with the recognition that many campuses were already supporting a wide range of diversity-related projects—but that these efforts often did not achieve their full potential because the programs lacked integration with broader institutional goals and planning. As a result, the CDI has largely focused on institutional development as the key to long-term success.

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Over the last several years, youth advocates, and policy makers have increasingly recognized the positive impact of after-school programs on children and youth. The James Irvine Foundation has played a leading role in this movement by developing the Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) Initiative to support a few California communities in providing high-quality education enrichment programs during out-of-school hours. Across California, 10 museums are also using Irvine support to provide educational programs to young people during after-school hours. They're participants in the Foundation's Museum Youth Initiative (MYI), a broad grantmaking strategy to mobilize out-of-school resources to help young Californians succeed in the classroom.

Museum Management Consultants, Inc. (MMC), a San Francisco-based firm, is conducting a four-year evaluation of the implementation and outcomes of the Initiative. In 1999, MMC began work with Irvine to evaluate the Museum Youth Initiative at the 10 museums involved. The museums broadly range in discipline, scope and size and are located throughout the state. Designed as a multi-year program, the Initiative intends to catalyze institution-wide change. MMC has conducted extensive interviews with staff and participants in order to carry out an evaluation with participating museums.

Participants in an MYI after-school program.

"By integrating evaluation into the Inititative, it has strengthened the programs," says Diane Frankel, Irvine's program director for Children, Youth and Families who served as director of the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services before coming to Irvine. "The role of evaluation in this Initiative is what really makes the project unique. MMC is working closely with the museums to evaluate goals of the project to help strengthen their efforts and inform the ability of all California museums to educate young people by working collaboratively with schools to provide students with after-school experiences."

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Today in California and across the United States, low-income students go to college at less than half the rate of high-income students. Why? Differences in academic preparation certainly account in large part for the disparity in college enrollment between low-income and high-income students. But its not the complete story. Low-income students who get As enroll in college at the same rate as high-income students who get Ds, and an organization called College Summit is trying to change that. Since most low-income students are first-generation college-goers, someone else has to fill the role for them that college-experienced parents fulfill for their children.

Our mission is to ensure that every student who can make it in college, makes it to college.—J.B. Schramm, founder & CEO

In an effort to help change this in California, The James Irvine Foundation has provided funding to College Summit, a national nonprofit organization that seeks to increase the college enrollment rate of low-income students. J.B. Schramm, College Summits founder and CEO, worked as a Freshman Adviser at Harvard University while in graduate school, and he knew that admissions officers were eager to identify talent for admission from low-income families. Yet every year, through his work at a local nonprofit organization, he observed first-hand how dozens of such youth were prepared for college but were not going. Schramm became determined to find a way to help admissions officers look at these students and see their untapped potential. So he enlisted the best writing instructor had met at Harvard and the finest youth worker he knew. Together they designed a system to help bright, low-income students, who, with the right support during the critical transition from high school to college, could propel their lives (and their communities) in positive directions and College Summit was propelled into action.

The College Summit Workshop is the organizations primary tool to catalyze change in the college-going culture of low- income communities. This intensive, four-day experience, repeated dozens of times each summer, brings students, schools, colleges, and community partners together toward the common goal of ensuring that low-income youth have the opportunity to attend college. Usually mid-performing students, these incoming seniors complete their college applications well ahead of deadlines and are trained to serve as peer leaders during their senior year. High school teachers are instructed in college application management, which they take back to their schools in the fall. Colleges get involved by hosting the workshops and showcasing their campuses to a new pool of talent. And community leaders serve as writing coaches, employing College Summits proven method to help students, who don't believe they can write well, to prepare well-crafted application essays.

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