Business and the new entry-level workforce United Way and Anchorage community partners invest in Anchorage youth.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: EDUCATION

Business is a never-ending cycle of finding and training new employees. Especially, perhaps, for entry-level positions, when often applicants have absolutely no job experience and little to no understanding of workplace expectations. United Way and community partners, including the Anchorage School District, nonprofits, and the business community, are taking a look at the whole education picture to prepare Anchorage's young potential employees for work, all as part of the larger 90% by 2020 partnership, called Destination 2020 by the Anchorage School District.

90% by 2020

"Let's start by clarifying what [90% by 2020] isn't: it's not a program, it's a movement," says June Sobocinski, VP of Education Impact for United Way Anchorage. "Our role [at United Way] is to create a space for the community to come together to get better results, in this particular case, around student outcomes and workforce readiness."

Sobocinski says that more than ten years ago a movement began to improve measurable outcomes in terms of graduation and other benchmarks for students in the Anchorage School District, which extends from Girdwood to Chugiak. Anchorage School District graduation rates in 2013-2014 were 73.54 percent for the four-year cohort and 81.02 percent for the five-year cohort.

Sobocinski says 90% by 2020 is "a diverse partnership in the service of getting the right work happening to impact results for students" with more than one hundred individuals and organizations, including the school district, businesses, nonprofits, churches, early childhood education providers, and others. "It isn't one strategy; it's multiple things from birth to career," she adds.

8th Grade Math Benchmark

United Way's 90% by 2020 partnership specifically refers to one of the six Anchorage School District's Destination 2020 goals "90 percent of students will graduate high school" by the year 2020.

There isn't one data point that can indicate whether or not a young student will graduate from high school, but data has suggested that one indicator is a student's proficiency in 8th grade math. Sobocinski says that students who are not proficient in 8th grade math are 25 percent more likely to drop out before graduation.

"That was a regression analysis that the Anchorage School District and the partnership did ... All this data analysis also surfaced another really interesting thing: kids that stopped consistently attending [school] around the 4th or 5th grade level really fell off in terms of proficiency [in 8th grade math]," she continues. Those two factors, attendance in the late elementary school years and math proficiency in middle school or junior high, have a huge influence on a student's likeliness to graduate from high school in four years. "Attendance is a huge thing that, holistically, systemically, if we can improve that, math would improve," Sobocinski says.

Workforce Readiness Taskforce

Making sure that students graduate from...