This project arose from a simple premise. Despite what many -- including, at times, the states themselves -- have argued, state governments have the strongest impact on the work of America's more than three and a half million public school teachers. With that as our framework, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) began in 2007 what has become an annual 360-degree analysis and encyclopedic presentation of every policy states have on their books that affects the quality of teachers, specifically state efforts to shape teacher preparation, licensing, evaluation and compensation. Our goal has been to provide research-based, practical, cost-neutral recommendations to states on the best ways to improve the teaching profession in their states.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Education and Literacy;Race and Ethnicity;Women
This study examines the existing knowledge base about promoting Latina educational success, defined as completing high school and then going on to secure a college degree. It also adds to existing research by examining two large data sets - one national, and one California-based for predictors of successful educational outcomes for representative samples of Latina youth who have recently been in high school and college. Finally, after identifying important predictors of success from the existing literature, and the examination of current data, the study incorporates case studies of seven young Latinas who illustrate pathways of women who are finding their way to educational success through high school, community college, and four year universities. Their stories provide a deeper understanding of the challenges that young Latinas encounter in our culture, as well as the promise they represent.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor;Immigration
In February of 2011, President Barack Obama attended a small dinner with several Silicon Valley executives. Seated between Apple founder Steve Jobs and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the conversation quickly turned to the large shortage of trained engineers in the United States, according to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. Jobs reportedly put the case bluntly to the President, stating that he employs 700,000 factory workers in China because he cannot recruit 30,000 engineers in the United States.
Similar stories of skills gaps are found at companies large and small all over the US economy.
As a near term solution to fill the perceived STEM shortage, University Presidents, STEM employers, STEM workers, and others have called on Congress to reform US immigration laws to recruit and retain high-skilled foreign-born STEM workers, and members of Congress have taken up the call for reform. Both Democrats and Republicans from the US Senate and the US House of Representatives have introduced bills to provide green cards to foreign advanced degree graduates in STEM from US universities. Polls have shown broad bipartisan support for these bills across political, ideological, racial, and ethnic lines.
As these bills are considered, it is important to ask and address the following questions: (1) Does a STEM shortage exist?; (2) What is the extent of the STEM shortage, and in what fields is it most prominent?; and (3) Would hiring foreign STEM professionals displace their American counterparts?
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor;Immigration
The future of the American economy rests on our ability to innovate and invent the new products that will define the global economy in the decades ahead. This report seeks to highlight one key aspect of this challenge that is often overlooked: the crucial role that foreign scientists, engineers, and other researchers play in inventing the products and dreaming up the ideas that will power the American economy in the future.
As the magnet for the world's brightest minds, America has prospered greatly from the global innovators who have come here to do research and invent products. However, many of these innovators face daunting or insurmountable immigration hurdles that force them to leave the country and take their talents elsewhere. The problem is particularly acute at our research universities, where we train the top minds, only to send them abroad to compete against us.
This report aims to quantify both the role that foreign-born inventors play in the innovation coming out of US universities, and the costs we incur by training the world's top minds and sending them away. University research is responsible for 53% of all basic research in America. Much of this research leads to patented inventions, new companies, and jobs for American workers.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Men;Race and Ethnicity
The first of a four-volume series on the role of school counseling in the education of young men of color, this report includes short essays, student-produced artwork, and an interview on the topic.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Science;Women
Science, technology, engineering and math: for many students, especially young women, achievement in the "STEM" subjects will be the key to high growth rates, higher paying jobs and career advancement in the knowledge economy.
Yet for years girls have under-performed at these subjects: dropping out early, expressing low interest, opting out of STEM degrees in college and out of STEM careers as college grads. There's even a name for this: the "leaky pipeline."
It's not that girls can't achieve. In fact, girls not only score as well as boys in elementary school, but in societies abroad where math and science achievement is valued equally in both sexes, they continue to do well throughout their educational careers.
Nor is it just the result of patriarchal school systems. Millions have been invested in improving a host of external education variables of this nature that may be holding girls back: hostility in the computer room, lack of female role models, masculine pedagogical models, etc. In some cases, high schools have even refused to let girls drop STEM classes, which has only succeeded in delaying the problem until they matriculate.
What could be causing elementary school girls who excel at math and who love science, to suddenly lose all interest or develop low grades in these subjects in late adolescence and early teens?
One important and under-explored answers is feminine gender norms. As girls age, they internalize gender norms that force them to make a choice between excelling at STEM or being feminine. And STEM loses.
This report documents the existing literature and surveys the problem in depth, including new results of new focus group studies with young women of color.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Nonprofits and Philanthropy;Race and Ethnicity
Outlines Lumina's work with minority-serving institutions to boost completion rates, especially among men of color, by building capacity for data collection and analysis, collective advocacy, developmental education policy and practice, and transparency.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Children and Youth, Education and Literacy
Examines state data on participation in non-parental care prior to kindergarten by age and type of care setting - center-based, relative, or non-relative care - including subsidized early childhood education by publicly funded program.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-California
