Don't Eat the Seed Corn

By Anne C. Lewis

Illustration © 1999 by Mario Noche

MY FARMING skills extend only as far as the backyard vegetable garden, but I know what it means to eat the seed corn. For whatever reasons people -- or societies -- are driven to such an extreme, they will be consuming their own future. Unfortunately, that is what the Bush Administration's budget is proposing for the several million young people who have already left school or are edging out before graduation.

At the U.S. Department of Education, a frantic effort is under way to develop regulations for the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which emphasizes children in grades K-8. Its reading initiative and Title I provisions, for example, focus on the early grades.

Meanwhile, over at the U.S. Department of Labor, federal officials aren't sweating over what to do about young people who haven't benefited from current reforms (high schools, after all, have changed very little). They just want to phase out or severely reduce the few programs designed to hold on to vulnerable young people. Officials explain that the programs have not proved themselves successful. This is a somewhat disingenuous excuse, considering that the funds, at least for the Youth Opportunity Grants, became available only 18 months ago.

The Administration's proposed budget would cut youth programs in the Department of Labor by 11%, most of it taken from the Youth Opportunities Grants. In the new budget, that program would be down to just $45 million from $225 million this fiscal year. The budget would also reduce funding for the youth activities under the Workforce Investment Act, namely the Youth Advisory Councils.

In sum, the Bush Administration doesn't seem to care much about young people who are about to enter the work force -- or the streets. So why should anyone except a young person ill prepared for work be concerned?

Because these young people are our seed corn. On average, 800,000 young people in this country drop out of high school every year. Over a decade, that's eight million potential workers, students, active citizens, and parents. Moreover, within two years, kindergarten enrollments will begin to decline, and, as the changes in demographics roll through the schools, we can anticipate considerably fewer high school students (except in a few states on the eastern seaboard and a few others in the far West). In a demographic study for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Harold Hodgkinson comments, "If you built schools for the 1.6 million more high school children from 1995 to 2005, many of them will be empty in 10 years."

Because of these demographic changes, the growth of the labor force will be down to just 1% annually by 2015 and down to 0.2% by 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, we need to make sure that every young person in this country can be productive. The practical reason is that they will be needed by the economy. And if you anticipate retiring before all this comes to pass, think of who (and how many) will be contributing to your Social Security.

Ideally, schools ought to make sure that all students earn at least a high school diploma. But only a handful of schools do, and many urban high schools lose half of their students before graduation day. It will be a long time before such schools have the capacity to keep young people engaged.

Yet out in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools there are places and programs that offer hope to young people who are "looking for a way back to the main road," according to Dorothy Stoneman, president of YouthBuild USA. Started in East Harlem in the 1970s, this organization provides education, training, and youth development opportunities for young people as they work to refurbish housing in their low-income communities. It now has 120 sites around the country.

There are dozens of examples of programs that find young people who are stuck in the rut of their own low expectations and that get them started down the right road. And this is why the Administration's budget proposals are so devastating. The two programs slated for deep reductions have shown themselves to be successful with vulnerable youths in a myriad of initiatives and have worked to build frameworks for them in their communities. The emphasis is not just on dropouts; it is on helping young people in poor neighborhoods who need extra support to get started on the road to success.

By last November, only a year after they started, the 36 Youth Opportunity sites around the country had already enrolled 30,000 youths, and 17,000 of them were still in school. The sites often provide one-stop service centers, mentoring, career counseling, and leadership development. The assessment center of Covenant House in Washington, D.C., for example, "tells kids what they do well," according to Vincent Gray, director of Covenant House. "They already know what they can't do." Youth Opportunity sites, which are focused on the neediest of communities, follow young people for two years after they graduate or obtain a GED, and so far they have had enough resources to be powerful players in those communities.

The second program slated for deep cuts, Youth Advisory Councils, was established by the 1998 Workforce Investment Act. These councils are just now beginning to show what they can do. Like Youth Opportunity Grants, they serve mostly young people who are still in school. In Portland, Oregon, for example, the Youth Advisory Councils have focused on "recapturing" 3,000 young people who dropped out of the education system and encouraging them to enroll in either regular school programs or those run by community-based organizations.

The history of federal involvement in training programs for young people dates back to the 1970s, when demonstration programs were expected to point the way. These programs were subsumed, however, by various training initiatives that considered youth programs only in terms of summer jobs. School-to-work initiatives and the work of the National Youth Employment Coalition to identify successful youth training and development programs laid a foundation for the newer programs. Communities were learning to collaborate and to change their focus from "training" to "development." According to a paper prepared by the Youth Transition Funders Group, young people don't fully mature until their mid-twenties, and this is certainly true for those who lack family or neighborhood support. One of the strengths of the newer programs is that they give young people time to grow.

Youth Opportunities Grants and Youth Advisory Councils represent a realistic opportunity to "go to scale" with practices that work with vulnerable youths, according to Marion Pines, director of the Sar Levitan Center for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University. But, she admits, "we have a history in this country of starting up programs, and, just when they begin to build capacity, they lose their funding." We might add that, when efforts such as these die out, there will be no seed left for future plantings.

PDK Home | Site Map
Kappan Professional Journal

Last updated 11 April 2002
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0204lew.htm
Copyright 2001 Phi Delta Kappa International