In Part 2 of Career-Education Linkages, I discussed the need for high schools and colleges to teach performance skills in addition to academic core subjects. Across all the growth sectors in our regional economy, the jobs will require more than technical or academic knowledge.  This jobs will require performance skills such as communication and critical thinking and, finally soft skills such as customer service and work ethic. An Intel executive asks one of his managers how his new intern is working out.  Well, the guy says,

Sorry, it has taken me so long to get Part 2 up on the blog.  Running a non-profit program is not easy these days. With a constant hunt for money, planning for growth, assuring quality of programs, recruiting students, staff and volunteers, I don’t seem to have as much time to keep the blog up to date but I promise to try harder. In Part I of  Career-Education linkages, I talked about the forgotten fifty – the 50% of our kids that do not go on

I am starting a 3-part blog on linking education with a clear career path. Why?  A large percentage of our students are disengaged from learning.  Nationwide 50% of our kids do not go on to any post-secondary education (38% here in Essex County, MA), there is a growing gender gap showing boys significantly lagging in education, and an alarming percentage of remediation in community colleges and high public college drop out rates. Teen employment is at its all time low.  While the current recession has definitely

I just cannot get into the madness that envelops the NCAA basketball championships or for that matter any major or minor sporting event. Sportsmania, sports worshipping, couch potato-spectator sports, fantasy sports – you name it, I just don’t get it.   Pickup games, intramural, youth-run leagues without parents or adults – those I do get because those are adults and kids who play sports because they love it. They don’t need uniforms or parent adulation – they just want to play because it is fun and it

February 28, 2011 Today the Massachusetts Board of Education approved the charter for the Salem Community Charter School.  This is a Horace Mann Charter which means it is an in-district charter school.  Unlike a Commonwealth Charter (such as the Salem Academy) which is totally independent of the public school district, the Horace Mann Charter is approved by the local school committee and by the local collective bargaining unit (i.e., the teachers are still part of the teachers’ union).  However, the Horace Mann charter is governed by

  In today’s (January 30, 2011) Sunday Boston Globe,  Lawrence Harmon wrote an Opinion piece entitled “The Transition Coach.”  This article talks about a Boston Foundation-funded program, Boston Success, that places college coaches into the community colleges to help students coming for Boston Public Schools navigate college. The goal of these programs is to improve college retention, particularly for students who are first in their family to go on to post-secondary education. The article correctly pointed out that the real solution lies in fixing the high

Have you ever tried to read a book in a language other than your native language?  In college, after 6 years of middle and high school French and having spent a summer in France, I decided I would take a 20th century French Literature course — in French, of course. We read such easy page-turners as Madame Bovary (Flaubert), Man’s Fate (Camus), No Exit (Sartre) – you get the picture. It was painful.  Armed with a French-English dictionary, it took me forever to navigate one page

I have proudly called myself a feminist, coming of age in the 60’s with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinham as my guides. I remember going around my new neighborhood on the North Shore after we bought our first house, raising money for the nascent HAWC, proud to be able to support a safe haven for abused women.  I stood and applauded the new legislation on domestic abuse as it got tougher due to the efforts of our citizens and legislators. And, like so many, I cry

There has been a lot of talk in education circles about the failure of schools to teach 21st century skills.  Driven by the insatiable appetite of our knowledge economy, our schools need to address the needs of employers across all sectors for employees with strong problem solving, critical thinking and communication skills.  In an age of mega-standardized testing from MCAS to SAT to Accuplacer, our emphasis on test prep is reducing the time students have to build these skills. In addition to problem solving, critical thinking

Currently, Salem CyberSpace is following 22 students at various colleges around Massachusetts.  All of these students are low-income, most live with one parent, and with few exceptions they went into college covered under their mother or father’s MassHealth medical plan.  Miguel, our first student to turn 19, currently a sophomore at Montserrat College of Art, found himself unable to register for classes because he no longer had health insurance. This prompted a phone call to me. I could not believe this to be true so I