The year 2011 was the most transformative in JFY’s history, culminating in our year-end move to 44 School Street from the Tremont Street building we had occupied for a decade and a half. Though only a two-block distance, the move signified a much longer journey in organizational evolution.
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.
