Who runs NGLs?
How do NGLs help communities?
How do NGLs prepare students for the workforce?
How do NGLs address a communities’ specific workforce needs?
What effects have NGLs had on educational quality?
How do communities find resources to establish NGLs?
Who runs NGLs?
Next Generation Learning Communities (NGLs) are regional alliances of education, business, and civic leaders united in the cause of improving education and strengthening the local workforce. These coalitions can be organized in various ways but must include a broad partnership of all significant players in the community—K–12 and postsecondary educators, leaders from business and industry, and government officials—to effectively produce change. Participants must share a dedication to educational excellence and a conviction that relevant and rigorous education organized on a career academy model can best prepare students to contribute to the economic success of the community.
How do NGLs help communities?
NGLs organize networks of career academies that focus on preparing students for careers in specific industries that have been identified as critical for the economic success of the community.
Civic, education, and business leaders come together to decide what curricula, equipment, and resources are needed for successful schools and where to find those resources. NGLs improve education and build a workforce that can handle the challenges of the 21st century economy.
How do NGLs prepare students for the workforce?
NGLs set up career academies in schools based on sectors of the economy that have been identified as priorities for local workforce development. Curricula reflecting the context of these prioritized career clusters is integrated into academic instruction and rigorous career and technical instruction in the career academies.
How do NGLs address a community’s specific workforce needs?
The partnership of civic, education, and business leaders establishes a career academy master plan that identifies the specific local industries and businesses where workforce needs are most critical. Career academies are established that prepare students for those prioritized careers.
What effects have NGLs had on educational quality?
NGLs improve academic results across the board. Ninety percent of students in the 34 career academies in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area graduate from high school and 60 percent go on to college. A study of career academies in the San Francisco Bay area in 2000 found that students enrolled in career academies had higher grade point averages than non-career academy students in the same schools, as well as lower drop-out rates, higher test scores, and higher numbers of students continuing on to postsecondary instruction.
The Sacramento, California, NGL, in which all students attend career academies, boosted graduation rates and numbers of students taking the SAT, and lowered drop-outs, expulsions, and suspensions, in the four years since the NGL was established.
How do communities find resources to establish NGLs?
NGLs are guided and supported by the Ford Motor Company Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Ford Motor Company.
Ford’s expertise and support are very important, but NGLs are primarily built by communities themselves. Because education affects everyone in the community, and because a broad mobilization of resources and talent is needed to make schools work, effective change requires full community involvement. Resources from the local business and postsecondary communities, including commitments of time and money, are important for NGL success.
Citizens across the wider community are going to be much more involved in and supportive of what happens in schools when they realize that they’re investing in a skilled workforce and a prosperous future. Good schools draw talented people into a community, and good schools targeting workforce development build resources necessary for sustainable economic growth.
Communities across the country are finding that investment in NGLs offers high returns, in the form of better schools and a healthy, broad-based economy.