FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(BOSTON 5/10/12) – Innovation is the driving force of progress. Nowhere is innovation more vital than in education. In our hypercompetitive global economy, America’s success depends on the skills of its workforce; and that workforce is trained by our education system.

At 10:00 AM on May 30, in the Gardner Auditorium at Massachusetts State House, JFYNetWorks will recognize a group of educational innovators who have helped keep Massachusetts in the forefront of American education during the past year. These JFYNet partners represent the vanguard of innovation in education.

Honorees
North Shore Technical High School
Malden High School
Revere High School
Knox Trail Junior High School
Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School
Essex Agricultural Technical High School
Shawsheen Valley Technical High School
MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, Software Tools for Academics and Researchers
Solution Grove
The College Board
Pearson Education

Each year, JFYNetWorks presents awards to a select group of individuals and schools that have made significant contributions to the cause of improving student achievement. This year, the awards are focused on innovative uses of technology in the classroom—the heart of the JFYNet program.

JFYNet has been helping schools use technology to improve student achievement since 2000. This year, the program is providing technology-enriched instruction to more than 6000 students in 28 middle schools, high schools, community colleges and community agencies in two states. JFYNet has compiled a twelve-year record of success in raising student achievement on the MCAS. In the past year, the new Accuplacer Readiness program has helped students qualify for college-level courses and avoid non-credit “developmental” courses.

Gary Kaplan, JFYNet’s Executive Director is quite passionate about the programs offered through JFYNet and shares this:

“Massachusetts was the first state in the Union to institute universal public education in 1852 thanks to its pioneering secretary of education Horace Mann.” He adds, “The Bay State’s educational leadership has continued through the current era of standards-based education reform. The goal of JFYNet is to continue that leadership into the age of online student-centered instruction.” Mr. Kaplan’s enthusiasm continues through his final thought with us, “Innovation has always been a core competency of the Commonwealth. JFYNet is proud to be part of that long tradition.”

The JFYNet blended learning program helps schools use technology effectively to improve student achievement. In 12 years of operation in schools throughout Massachusetts, JFYNet has helped more than 60,000 students meet high school graduation standards and prepare for college-level work.

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Even one-year certificate programs, such as phlebotomy, require students to show the ability to do college-level work. Yet about 60 percent of incoming students at the state’s 15 community colleges are required to take one or more remedial courses. These courses eat up about one-third of all tuition and fees paid by students.

One solution is to introduce high-school juniors and seniors to the Accuplacer exams they must take prior to registering for courses on state and community college campuses. Doing so would allow testers to identify students’ weaknesses in core subject areas in time to address them during high school. Whatever its other virtues, the state-mandated MCAS now given to 10th graders is not designed to predict college readiness.

A pilot program offered by JFY Networks, a nonprofit career training program, provides an example of how such a system could work. The group has offered Accuplacer Diagnostics – a new series of tests developed by the College Board – to about 40 students in three Massachusetts high schools. Based on the Accuplacer pretest results, these students would have been required to enroll in a total of 75 remedial courses at community colleges. But after instruction, which happened largely online, that number fell to 47 remedial courses. JFY Networks recently expanded the program to about 1,000 students in five high schools.

Community college shouldn’t be just another year of high school. Governor Patrick recently proposed adding $10 million to the state’s budget to beef up the community college system’s workforce development capabilities. That’s not enough to have a profound impact on academic departments in 15 colleges. But it could make a significant difference if used in high schools to reduce the need for remedial courses later on.

After long deliberation, the board decided to transfer our GED and ESOL programs to another agency. This was completed in 2011. We are preparing to do the same in 2012 with our environmental job training program. When the transition is complete, JFYNetWorks will be completely focused on JFYNet, our suite of online learning programs in high schools, middle schools, community agencies and community colleges. Raising the academic skills of our middle-school, high school and community college students is, in our judgment, the highest value-added contribution we can make to the development of a globally-competitive American workforce. Our methodology—bringing digital resources into schools and systematically building the capacity of teachers to use them effectively—has shown that it can produce measurable improvement in student learning by gradually transforming the practice of teaching.

The universal accessibility of online resources makes JFYNet scalable. This means that it can be grown to a size that can move the needle of student achievement statewide, regionally, and nationally. It is the only program we have ever developed that has this potential for truly population-scale outcomes. This is why we decided to concentrate our resources here.

Our decision to focus on digital instruction has both qualitative and quantitative components. Qualitatively, language and math skills are the most potent determinants of employability. The struggles of our public education system, and our steady decline in international student assessments, are well known. JFYNet’s targeted, assessment-driven online instruction has proven its effectiveness in raising student achievement as measured by the MCAS and gaining access to college by helping students pass the Accuplacer. Quantitatively, JFYNet has already reached more than 50,000 students and can easily double that number in the next few years. This impact far exceeds the magnitude attainable in any other program.

Two large-scale trends have shaped our development: globalization and government retrenchment. The globalization of markets has changed everything in the American economy. Whole industries, with their workforces, have disappeared, and the skill requirements for productive employment in the post-industrial economy have risen steadily. At the same time, government disinvestment in job training and other human services has made it impossible to sustain them.

No one can forecast with precision what the labor market will look like in five years, or even 12 months; but the one prediction that can be made is that education will be the basis of employability. We are confident that the re-focusing of our energies and resources on our highest-impact services offers the greatest possible return on investment.

JFY has been in operation since 1976. To say that much has changed in those 35 years is to state the obvious. Through those decades of social and economic change, JFY has gone through many adaptations to maintain relevance. We recalibrated our job training from low-skilled to high-skilled, and shifted our education from basic tutoring to GED and alternative high school and then to our current online blended learning. In making those adaptive changes we sometimes had to leave good programs behind. We have made those decisions on the basis of our assessment of how we could use our finite resources to produce the most valuable outcomes.

Adaptability is a core competency of successful organizations. The ability to shift resources from areas of lower return to areas of higher return is one of the definitions of entrepreneurship. As societies change, organizations that can read the changes and respond quickly survive. Those that can’t, that keep doing what they have been doing even though the market has dried up, don’t survive. JFY has survived for 35 years because its board and staff have understood that entrepreneurship is not just for start-ups. The discipline of continuous renewal is the foundation of long-term survival.

We are excited and honored to win an Empowerment Grant from the Motorola Mobility Foundation,” said Gary Kaplan, Executive Director. “These funds will enable our organization to further engage the students of Lowell with technology in an effort to enhance their lives.”

The Empowerment Grants support programs that leverage technology to build stronger communities and will provide non-profit organizations with funding to close the digital divide. Successful programs may include providing technology, and the skills needed to use it, for teachers, mentors and community leaders.

“The Empowerment Grants program is designed to help non-profits use new technologies, including digital media, to reach their mission and help strengthen communities,” said Eileen Sweeney, director of the Motorola Mobility Foundation. “I’d like to congratulate this group of non-profits who are exploring innovative ways to use emerging technologies to help solve serious social issues.”

JFYNet is a lot like BASF. We don’t make any of the products that have produced the remarkable improvements in student achievement in our partner schools. We make those products work better. And we are challenged to compress the JFYNet brand into a single message that incorporates all of what we do and the value we add to our customers by closing their student achievement gaps and creating student-centered pedagogy*, (* is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching).

Like BASF, JFYNet can be defined by what IT isn’t. “We’re not the hardware people. We’re not the software people.” These products are tools JFYNet uses to provide blended online teaching and learning. JFYNet aggregates many instructional products into a single custom – built Learning Management System (LMS). The LMS platform we use is the open source MOODLE, but we aren’t the “Moodle people” either. Nor are we the MCAS people. We simply believe that as long as there are standards, every child should have the opportunity to meet them, and every teacher should have the tools to teach them. That’s why students in JFYNet classrooms consistently outpace their non-JFYNet peers on standardized performance assessments.

Finally, we are not the “geek squad”. JFYNet’s LMS offers a single login and password to access a comprehensive library of engaging digital material — curricula and lessons, instructional and assessment resources, for teachers to teach and students to learn. There are tasks, such as software installation, class batch enrolling and, password set-up to be done and JFYNet staff assists the schools’ technology staff with those tasks. After initial teacher training days, we are present in classrooms on a regular basis and online to coach teachers in how to integrate the technology resources into effective pedagogy. JFYNet’s year-end surveys indicate increasing acceptance, utilization and satisfaction by teachers every year.

There is a wealth of great products – Sebit’s Adaptive Curriculum, ATI’s Galileo Online, NROC’s Hippo Campus, Pearson’s My Foundations Lab, Houghton Mifflin’s Skills Tutor, Knewton, Promethean Classroom, to name a few. But no one product is comprehensive enough to address the needs of every student in every classroom.

There are several LMS’s – Moodle, Edmondo, Blackboard – and several delivery technologies –desktops, laptops, tablets, Smartboards, Smartphones, JFYNet is adaptable to all of the above, but we don’t make or sell any particular product.

JFYNet’s eclectic approach finds the “best of the best,” aligns it to the prevailing performance standards, and makes it accessible and useable for teachers and students. There are also a number of LMS’ – Moodle, Edmodo, Blackboard, etc.

So what is JFYNet, again? We are a team of implementation professionals dedicated to helping teachers and students use technology as a tool for effective teaching and learning. We implement a proven strategy that produces measureable results. We don’t make technology resources. We make technology resources better by applying them to solving real problems in the real world of the classroom.

It’ not the product; it’s how you use it. That’s the spirit of innovation that defines JFYNet.

~Paula Paris is the Deputy Director of JFYNetWorks

Many educators, politicians etc. are decrying the state of college readiness in our community colleges. The statistics are staggering-with 65% of community college students taking at least one developmental course and only 35% of those students who begin with these courses earning a degree. This is not a new problem. When I was working for a community college, I would see the work my former GED students were doing in college and I was amazed to find out that they were paying to take math courses that were on the same level as the most elementary portions of the GED.

Although many people talk about this problem, few talk about solutions or the success that’s possible in a relatively short period of time. Let me tell you a success story.

The student studied almost all day—at least four to six hours. He worked with JFYNetWorks Accuplacer Readiness software and Community College of Rhode Island tutors to hone his skills and review concepts that he may have forgotten. He worked with computer based instruction and received additional assistance from tutors to reinforce concepts. This example shows what can be accomplished with some hard work in six weeks. What’s the lesson of all this? Students don’t have to be trapped in an endless maze of developmental courses. With some diligence, eliminating or placing out of developmental courses is possible—so let’s stop complaining and get to work.

Read more about JFYNetWork’s Accuplacer Readiness Program – White Paper.

Ideas—what’s your solution to this community college issue?

The Path to Post-Industrial Careers‘The measure we care most about is whether you go to college.’

-Bill Gates | Wall Street Journal | July 23, 2011

Ever since Daniel Bell coined the term “post-industrial” in 1973, college has been recognized as the principal path to a career in the new economy. Enrollment rates nationwide have gone up for all demographic groups, especially in Massachusetts, which has the 3^rd highest college enrollment rate in the nation.  But these positive trends mask some perplexing gaps. Although enrollment is up, college completion rates remain stubbornly low.  While many more people of all demographic groups are realizing the benefits of college and taking the first step of enrolling, the majority of them may never earn a degree. 

The graduation rate for Massachusetts community colleges is only 18%. For the state universities (formerly state colleges), the rate is 51%.  Enrolling in college is the first step, but completing a degree is the goal, and far too many entering students drop out before graduating. Some drop out for financial reasons, some because of illness or simple lack of interest. But the largest number fails to complete college because they cannot do the work. They are victims of the preparation gap. 

The most significant barrier to college completion is inadequate academic preparation.  Nationwide, 65% of all community college students are required to take at least one “developmental” (remedial) course in reading, writing, or math.  Developmental courses cover basic skills students should have learned in elementary and high school such as addition and subtraction, decimals and fractions, reading comprehension and sentence structure. Many thousands of students take developmental courses each year. In Massachusetts, more than 20,000 entering community college students are scheduled for these classes this fall. Fewer than half will complete them.  Of those that do complete, only 35% will ever earn a degree. The discrepancy between the skills required for college work and the skills possessed by these thousands of “developmental” students is the Preparation Gap.  

This post is an excerp from a recent white paper authored by Gary Kaplan, Executive Director of  JFYNetWorks.  More of this white paper in future posts.  It is an EYE OPENER!

Read the entire whitepaper