Recently, I traveled to Seattle, Washington, to meet with representatives from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s eight Making Connections sites.  For several days, we shared insights and strategies focused on helping children in the early grades learn how to read.

Why is this so important?  (1) Half of the children in this country do not read on grade level, even though we know that 95% of them can, given proper instruction and support. (2)  73% of children who enter fourth grade with first- or second-grade reading skills never catch up. (3) Children who read on grade level by third grade are more likely to graduate from high school – high school graduates, in turn, are more likely to pursue further education and be employed, with higher incomes and better health, than their peers who drop out.

Given these facts, there should be no question in anyone’s mind that to thrive in school and in life, our children need to read early and they need to read well.  But that doesn’t mean that we should stop investing in reading and writing programs after third grade; adolescent literacy is also a growing national concern.  Time to Act, a recent report by the Carnegie Corporation, notes that without sustained emphasis on literacy and ongoing supports, early reading gains can rapidly deteriorate as students move into higher grades.

We must continue to provide the support and instruction necessary to promote grade level reading in the early grades through initiatives like Making Connections. But we cannot stop there; we must also help adolescents learn to read through collective endeavors such as Foundations’ new Philadelphia Center for Arts and Technology (PCAT), which not only prepares youth and young adults for jobs in high-growth industries, but also offers quality instruction for participants lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills.  And we need to support President Obama as he seeks to expand the small federally funded program Striving Readers, created in 2004 to help schools develop literacy supports for adolescents reading below grade level.

When it comes to reading – a skill so vital for lifetime success – we must not choose between investing in adolescents or young children, teenagers or first graders.  By pooling our resources and energy, we must work together to help them all.

We know that one-third of high school students in Philadelphia drop-out of high school. We also know that across the country 9^th grade is the critical year for students to either drop-out or stay in school. Navigating the turbulent middle school years and managing the often difficult transition to high school contributes to the staggering 9^th grade drop-out rate. To address the drop-out crisis in Philadelphia and to contribute to the national conversation about what it takes to keep kids in school, Foundations, with support from The Lenfest Foundation, launched the Northwest University Scholars Project, a program that provides both academic support and adult mentors to 250 youth in grades 7-9 in Northwest Philadelphia.

 Our three year pilot program began in summer 2008 with 7^th, 8^th and 9^th graders and will follow the same cohort of students as they progress over the next three years. For our younger scholars we concentrate on academic achievement and career exploration with a particular focus on ensuring that students take pre-algebra in 8^th grade and are given an opportunity to be exposed to the “hot jobs” in the Philadelphia area. For our 9^th graders we relentlessly focus on attendance and GPA. Studies have shown that attendance in 9^th grade and a student’s 9^th grade GPA are the two most significant predictors of high school graduation.

 While receiving academic support and encouragement in afterschool “Learning Zones,” our scholars also benefit from summer programming focused on self-expression through the literary and visual arts and STEM at two area universities.  Along with academic support, one of the most critical components of the Northwest University Scholars Project is the mentorship initiative. Our mentors come from all walks of life and participate in activities with our scholars as varied as drumming workshops, attending the theater, and visiting museums. Many of us can remember mentors that we had throughout our lives that opened up new spaces in our minds and challenged us to be the best that we can be. Our scholars are challenged to become the best version of themselves while receiving academic and personal support to allow them to achieve their goals.  We anticipate that the unique combination of academic support and mentoring will ensure a successful transition from middle school to 9^th grade and beyond.

Tomorrow is here and we are still training our youth for the jobs of today. Education and community development organizations that hope to stay relevant and survive tough economic times must recognize that we have to prepare kids for jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. The green economy is here and along with it comes limitless opportunity to create new career pathways. While President Obama and Van Jones have brought the concept of a green economy into the mainstream, education and community organizations on the ground are tasked with turning a buzz word like “green economy” into a reality and ensuring that children, youth, and families in disadvantaged communities are part of this new economy through education, training, and access.

Foundations began our urban farm and entrepreneurship program last year and this spring are piloting Teens-Go-Green, a landscaping business that trains youth in landscaping and landscape architecture while providing an important service to the Northwest Philadelphia community. I’ll be honest — as we developed the concepts for these programs over the last two years they were not encompassed within a larger “green” strategy. Now however, we see both the possibility – and the urgency – in developing a broader strategy rooted in the programs we have already begun. Foundations, along with our partners, is developing an ambitious agenda in Northwest Philadelphia that we hope will become a national model for green education, community development, and environmental sustainability. Our initiatives will focus on intergenerational small business development and community food production, green building and stormwater management efforts. Each of these initiatives will build on work we already have in place. We recognize a sea change is occurring throughout the country; the green economy is a wave that is gaining momentum. As this dramatic economic shift occurs we plan to work tirelessly to ensure that the rising tide truly raises all boats.

As the spring rains begin and the flowers are in full bloom, students are hard at work preparing for a new growing season on the Seeds for Learning farm at Martin Luther King High School. When we started our farm last year we had no way of knowing the food movement would quietly move into the national dialogue. The first family’s embrace of healthy, local eating and the establishment of a garden at the White House has opened new spaces for conversation about food and its role in our lives. Celebrity chef Alice Waters, frequently in the press of late, authored an op-ed about the quality of school lunches provided by the National School Lunch Program, and was featured in an AP story about Americans embracing the backyard garden as a way to save money. Waters is quoted as saying, “Food has come into our conversation in America for the first time, and it’s pretty awe inspiring.” I could not agree more.

Here in Philadelphia, we have expanded our Seeds for Learning program at Martin Luther King High School to include a greenhouse where students not only grow food but science teachers plan hands-on lessons using the greenhouse for biology and environmental science classes. This summer we plan to begin our Community Lunch initiative. Two of my staff members got the idea from The Food Project in Massachusetts, that hosts a lunch on their farm for community members every Friday in the summer, and Common Threads, an organization in Chicago dedicated to improving nutrition through the joy of sharing a delicious meal (the organization was featured on Top Chef!)  

Students in our Community Lunch initiative will participate in a summer program where they learn about good nutrition by preparing healthy meals for the community, using produce grown on our farm.  In addition to learning how to improve their own health and eating habits, students will provide nutrition awareness to the community and promote our farm as a resource for fresh, locally grown produce.  At the end of the summer, a cookbook will be produced incorporating recipes used in the project and will be sold at our Seeds for Learning farm stands. Projects like these that encourage students to try new foods in a fun and comfortable atmosphere are essential to changing the way healthy eating is perceived. Healthy eating will never take root in our young people unless it is a social activity instead of a chore. We have to teach our young people about the joy in growing, cooking, eating, and sharing a meal of nutritious food. Send us your favorite healthy summer recipes and they might just make it into our Seeds for Learning cookbook!

In my last entry, I blogged about the enormous opportunities that exist for literacy development in afterschool time. A similar opportunity exists in afterschool time to develop language skills in English Language Learners (ELL). Here in Philadelphia, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, has unveiled a draft of her reform plan dubbed “Imagine 2014” that is intended to dramatically improve the quality of education for all students in Philadelphia. In her proposal she calls for providing assistance to ELL pre-schoolers and their families, opening three new regional centers to ease the transition to school for new immigrant students, and creating a number of in-school supports for ELLs. It is my hope that her plan will outline specific activities and programs focused on afterschool time.

Afterschool is the perfect time for ELLs to stretch their language development in a safe and supportive environment. As with afterschool literacy programs, enormous challenges exist to creating high-quality, high-impact programs for ELLs. These challenges include untrained staff and a lack of adequate time. Despite these challenges, we must figure out a way to ensure that afterschool is not a missed opportunity for ELL students. As Claudia Weisburd, former Executive Director of our Center for Afterschool Education and now senior advisor to Foundations, Inc. points out, “almost one in five school-age children now live in homes where English is not the primary language.” As Claudia acknowledges in her article, “Gaining a Voice After School” many children and youth struggling with language development need more opportunities to practice their language skills in a supportive environment such as afterschool programs rather than during the fast-paced, high- stakes school day.

The Colorado based organization Colorín Colorado echoes this sentiment and describes the diversity of English Language Learners and their radically different needs. The consistent theme however, is that all ELLs can benefit from after school programs designed to support English language development. In Philadelphia, and as I continue to travel to cities like Denver, San Antonio, and Providence with large ELL populations, I witness the struggle that families, and particularly children, whose primary language is not English go through each day. Afterschool programs can mitigate some of these struggles by providing ELL students with meaningful opportunities to acquire new language skills. As our nation becomes an ever-larger melting pot, we must figure out how to build on the talents of and provide the right supports for ELL students across the country.

Our kids can’t read. Across the country teachers, parents, employers, and policy makers agree that our kids are drastically unequipped with the literacy skills they need to succeed in higher education and the workplace. The school day is not long enough to develop many key literacy skills – including forging a deep connection to and love of the written word – our kids need. Nor is the day long enough to help struggling readers catch-up to their peers. Extending the traditional school day is not the answer. By the time the bell rings at 3:30, kids need something that looks very different from the school day. Afterschool programs that unlock children’s passion and creativity and then channel that passion and creativity in reading, writing, and making meaning from text is a powerful antidote to the typical afterschool program, which research tells us is not greatly impacting literacy levels.

Afterschool programs provide an enormous opportunity to build literacy, particularly for struggling readers who, studies show, benefit the most from high- quality, literacy- infused afterschool programming. Unfortunately, this opportunity is often missed. A 2002 study, The Role of After- School Programs in Children’s Literacy Development from the Chapin Hall Center for Children describes both the incredible opportunities for and formidable challenges to developing literacy-infused programming that gets real results in after school time. Through my work with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, helping schools develop strategies to dramatically improve reading levels, I have become familiar with the on-the ground challenges to developing robust literacy activities in afterschool time.

As I reflect on the work of our Center for Afterschool Education at Foundations, I am reminded of the incredibly important work of professionalizing and building the field of afterschool education as a distinct profession that requires a specialized skill-set. I firmly believe that afterschool literacy development can be an important lever for improving the reading levels of our most struggling readers. Research tells us it is possible; however it will take a paradigm shift in order for afterschool programs to have a dramatic impact on the literacy levels of our most vulnerable children. We owe it to our kids to make sure we are providing them every avenue and opportunity to succeed, starting with afterschool programs that get results — real, measureable improvements in reading levels.

In Harlem it’s asthma. In Philadelphia it’s taking care of younger siblings. In Texas it’s visiting relatives in Mexico. The root of chronic absence is different across different cities and regions. In September, I wrote about what children miss in school when they are absent. Lately, in addition to thinking about what students miss, I have begun to think deeply about the causes of chronic absence and about how to support families, schools, and communities that are struggling with chronic absence. The report on chronic absenteeism by Hedy Chang I referenced in September indicates that chronic absence has been largely overlooked because high attendance rates “mask significant numbers of chronically absent students.” If we are to close the achievement gap in this country we must address chronic absenteeism, particularly in the crucial developmental years.

The report puts forth a universal course of action to address chronic absence but recognizes that absenteeism does not have a one-size fits all solution. I am convinced that within a broad framework schools, school districts, and communities must customize solutions not only for their city, town, or region but for specific families. Schools, in partnership with their District, and with the community, must sit down with families to figure out why a child is missing school and how to ensure that child gets to school. For children with health issues, we must figure out a way to connect them to a medical home; for children who must take care of younger siblings, we must help families figure out another way to obtain childcare; and for students who miss school to visit family members in other states or countries, we must figure out a way to ensure that a child’s academics are not interrupted. The time has come to address this issue – we can no longer afford to ignore the empty seats in our classrooms across the country.

In September, as I travelled around the country visiting elementary schools, I blogged about the correlation between third grade reading levels and attendance. Now, back in the thick of our work in Philadelphia, particularly at the high school level, I am confronted with the disconnect between what our students learn in school and what employers need. I see clearly the correlation between third grade reading levels and high school achievement, but what about after high school?

Foundations, Inc. runs a program at Martin Luther King High School in Philadelphia, the Job Resource and Development Center, whose mission is to prepare students for the world of work and encourage them to pursue higher education to achieve the career of their choice. Yesterday we convened our first Business Advisory Board, a regional “mind trust” comprised of business and industry leaders. As we set priorities for the coming year, the same comments kept coming up again and again: “Our kids don’t know how to think,” and “They can’t pass a basic skills test.” Many of the observations reflected the need for a workforce that is creative, flexible, and dynamic and the inability of employers to fill that need. We owe it to students who want to become nurses to prepare them with high level biology and chemistry classes, train students to read at the high levels nursing programs will demand, and provide opportunities to participate in internships that allow for real world experience in the field. We also need to teach students to work hard, have strong communication skills, be on time, and do more than is often expected at school and the workplace.

Employers, even in this economy, are hungry for the workforce of the future. The Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, an advocacy organization focused on integrating 21^st century skills into academics, has issued a call to action for schools, local, state, and the federal government to address 21^st century skills in K-12 and higher education. As the job market becomes increasingly competitive, we have a responsibility to our young people to prepare them for the world they will enter, not the world as we know it, and certainly not the one most educators and policy-makers grew up in.

On any chilly Friday afternoon in the fall, you can find students standing behind a table piled high with carrots, radishes, squash, and flowers in front of Martin Luther King High School in Northwest Philadelphia debating the best methods of cooking okra with folks waiting for the bus. When customers ask, “Where did all this food come from?” the students proudly respond, “From our farm.” I wrote about the farm earlier this summer in the height of the season but, as the weather cools, I am beginning to consider the bigger issues we engage with on the farm. We encounter and take on many of the challenges facing urban youth today, including the rise of obesity in teens coupled with a lack of access to healthy food, the absence of project based learning opportunities that are relevant to students’ lives, few opportunities for young people to take on substantial responsibility, and inadequate preparation for the world of the twenty-first century.

At Foundations we work in three areas: school, afterschool, and the community. We are constantly searching for ways to integrate our work across the three areas; this has been an exciting challenge for our organization. I believe our farm can become a model to demonstrate the possibilities of connecting schools, afterschool, and the community to improve life outcomes for children and youth.

Our farm builds bridges among the school day, afterschool, and the community. Science teachers can’t wait to get inside our soon-to-be built greenhouse and develop project-based learning units. Afterschool, we integrate academic skills into our work as students develop a love of the natural world, and experience the value of hard work and responsibility firsthand. At our farm stand, students apply what they have learned in their math classes and gain valuable twenty first century skills including problem solving and communication as they run a small business. Community support is vital to the success of our program; without our dedicated volunteers – many of whom are master gardeners from a local church – our farm would not succeed.

Beyond these activities, there is a sense of community developing around the farm. For those of you who are familiar with Philadelphia, before Foundations assumed the management of Martin Luther King High School it was viewed as “an out-of-control, unsafe, even violent school.”  Locally, King was known as a “school of last resort.” We have worked hard to change this perception, and our farm stand has been an amazing place for community members to meet King students. Without exception, our customers at the farm stand are surprised and delighted by our students. In turn, their compliments create a sense of pride in the students who work on the farm and staff the farm stand. As our first growing season draws to a close, and we prepare to build a greenhouse, I am thrilled that we are part of a larger dialogue about what it takes to truly educate students for the twenty-first century.

This week I have been given the opportunity to visit classrooms across the nation. As I look out at the faces of children in these classrooms, I wonder about the children that are missing. A timely report by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), “Present Engaged and Accounted For, The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades” was issued this month. This report seeks to draw attention to the often invisible issue of school absence in the early grades. The authors write, “Common sense and research suggests that attending school regularly is important to ensuring children develop a strong foundation for subsequent learning.” Children who are absent are missing the instruction that, for many, will make the difference between reading at grade level and falling behind. We are all familiar with the statistics; many of the nation’s children are not reading on grade level by third grade, and beyond third grade the numbers continue to fall. Earlier this year I authored an article for Education Week about how to improve reading levels for elementary school children. However, despite two decades of efforts to improve reading levels, literacy is still the issue in many schools across the nation. The NCCP report suggests that chronic early absence is a substantial factor contributing to the nation’s literacy problem. “During the early elementary years, children are gaining basic…academic skills critical to ongoing academic success.” Moreover, “the educational experiences of children who attend school regularly can be diminished when teachers must divert their attention to meet…the needs of children who miss substantial amounts of school.”

 But what do children, particularly children learning to read, really miss when they are absent? As I pondered this question, I stumbled across a letter to parents written by a teacher, Rebecca Hathaway. She lets parents know just what their students miss when they are absent. Ms. Hathaway writes, “It’s Monday morning, and students are writing about their weekends. While writing a weekend story is a part of our regular Monday routine, this assignment is not just an opportunity to practice a learned skill. Today I introduce multiple paragraphing. Moving from one paragraph to several paragraphs within a story is a complicated skill for third graders, and one that requires careful instruction.” She goes on to explain everything students will miss by not coming to school for just one day.

 As I travel the country, I often observe students struggling to learn to read. Each day I wonder how the students who are absent are ever going to catch up. We know what happens when they don’t – drop-out rates can be closely correlated to reading levels, and in some states future prison populations are predicted using third grade reading scores. While attendance is not a guarantee that children will learn to read, our children are guaranteed to fail if they do not show up each day ready to learn.