The Manufacturing Institute’s “State Responses to the Skills Gap”: The Manufacturing Institute has collected promising state-level best practices that encourage and promote a skilled manufacturing workforce in its newest report.

These areas, including state examples, are:

• Industry Credentials
• Industry Partnerships
• Credit Articulation
• Dual Enrollment
• Comprehensive State Strategies

ACT Policy Platforms: Testing giant ACT recently rolled out a series of policy recommendations for K-12, postsecondary and workforce development.

“With more than 50 years of data to draw upon, ACT research suggests that for far too many individuals—often those from low-income, first-generation, or minority backgrounds—success along the K-career continuum is out of reach,” according to ACT.

In short the three platforms are:

• K-12 policy platform: Focus on readiness for all students, support the implementation of a high school core curriculum and rigorous coursework and promote the use of high-quality student assessment systems.
• Postsecondary: Support postsecondary readiness, advance efforts that reduce information barriers and adopt holistic approaches increasing postsecondary completion.
• Workforce development: Improve foundational workplace skills, ensure that training is valuable to employers and employees and help individuals attain credentials.

Linked Learning 5^th Year Evaluation: SRI International released its fifth annual report on California’s Linked Learning Initiative, which blends rigorous academics with career preparation including work-based learning.

This year’s report focused on the students themselves – Who participates? What are their experiences? How does their participation in a Linked Learning pathway affect their high school outcomes?

As such the report found:

• Student Equity and Access: There is a pattern of disproportionately low female enrollment in engineering pathways and disproportionately high enrollment in health sciences. Also nearly 80 percent of all students who started out in a pathway in the lower grades remained in the same pathway in 11^th
• Student Outcomes: Students outperformed their non-Linked Learning peers in credit accumulation and to remain in the school district; there was no evidence of higher scores on standardized achievement tests, but minority student subgroup perform at least as well if not better on credit accumulation and test score outcomes than their peers at traditional high schools.

For another California-centric study, be sure to check out the new report from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, “Recognizing College and Career Readiness in the California School Accountability System.”

Andrea Zimmermann, State Policy Associate