Need Portfolio Judges in Media/Comm, STEM, Entrepreneurship and the Arts
So, it’s that time of year again. We’ve been working with teachers and students across the city in preparation for the Show Your Reel Portfolio Contest. This year, in addition to Media and Communications, we’re accepting portfolios in STEM (Sceince, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics), Entrepreneurship and Music/Performing/Visual Arts. All judging is done on-line and it is typically a 2 – 4 hour commitment during the month of April. If you’re interested, please email mentor@mediacommunicationscouncil.org and put “Portfolios” in the subject heading.
The Kids Are Alright Fest
Just arrived here at the Mohawk for the Kids Are Alright Fest going on all day. Skating, music, gaming and lots of young people. Our Media Proteges are filming the event. It’s another milestone for them. Looking forward to seeing what they come up with…
Youth, Education & Social Entrepreneurship Presentation Wed. Feb 16th @ Link Coworking for Lunch
Link @ Lunch with MCC Founder Carl Settles Jr. Wed. Feb. 16th 12 – 1pm
Hello,
I wanted to send a special invite for you to join me for lunch this Wednesday at Link Coworking from noon to 1pm as I speak on Youth, Education & Social Entrepreneurship. I hope to provide some practical examples for entrepreneurs on how they can have a direct impact on the educational engagement of youth while adding to their own bottom lines.
I’ll be recounting last summer’s Media Communications service learning project with local restaurant Hoover’s Cooking. For four weeks, our students worked with University of Texas Ph.D candidate Amber Chenevert, local entrepreneur Hoover Alexander, senior creatives and executives from GSD&M Idea City and Sanders Wingo Advertising as we developed a media strategy, web site and on-line cooking show.
Don’t forget to bring your lunch and feed your brain! You’re Welcome to stay and check out Link for the rest of the day.
More Info
Almost 40% of the students that graduated from high school and attended college in Texas last year needed remedial reading, math and/or science (Dallas Morning News). In fact, students throughout the United States have fallen behind their counterparts in other developed nations around the world. Even with college educated students in the US, businesses often find them lacking the soft skills needed to be effective and have to invest extra time and resources into making them truly ready for work.
Carl Settles, Founder/Executive Director of the Media Communications Council, will outline ways that business leaders can have a direct impact on student achievement while also improving their own bottom lines. Carl will present a case study of a project completed by students in the youth outreach program Media Xperiments for the local restaurant chain Hoover’s Cooking. Students worked with University of Texas PhD candidates and senior creatives from GSD&M Idea City and Sanders Wingo Advertising as they developed a media strategy, web site and on-line cooking show produced by the students themselves.
Help us employ 50 at risk youth in Austin by “Liking” our new Facebook Page!
Help us employ 50 at risk youth in Austin by “Liking” our new Facebook Page!
It Could Be U: Intensive Mentoring & College Readiness Program is participating in the Rock A Charity contest being put on by Austin Involved. Over the next 48 hours we are competing with eleven other non-profits to get the most “Likes” on our new Facebook Page. If we finish in the top three, we’ll participate in a fast pitch session for local philanthropists being held at Link Co-Working on February 18th. Also, check out new blog site Building The U and Twitter Page as we continue to tell the story of youth and their mentors.
Update on It Could Be U
It’s been a while since we’ve updated the group. We’ve been busy launching It Could Be U. Our peer mentors are working with middle school residents of the Austin Housing Authority as they go through the Discovery Phase of our curriculum. We are also paying high school teachers stipends of up to $1000 to work with their students as they go through the Discovery Phase as well. These students will serve as the talent pool for our four summer service learning projects in the respective fields of Media Communications, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics), Entrepreneurship and Music/Visual/Performing Arts.
Each service learning project is being led by University of Texas graduate students from the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Consortium and will culminate with the E4 Youth Summit we are planning in July. Our students, their mentors and other students at large will showcase their work and participate in panel discussion along with local non-profits and business leaders making a difference in students lives.
Local High School Students Look to Make Film History
How Much Cultural Capital Do You Have?
Cultural Capital acts as a social relation within a system of exchange that includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers power and status.(Pierre Bourdieu)
Cultural Capital is one of the terms that students in the Media Xperiments program must demonstrate mastery of as they tour local businesses, build portfolios and participate in educational planning sessions. Students complete these activities in order to participate in 30 – 60 hour summer service learning projects led by University of Texas graduate students. Students work directly with professionals to provide real goods and services to local businesses and non-profits.
In a sense, every activity that we have students do is about accruing cultural capital. Experiences, knowledge and relationships all focused on empowering students to educate themselves and create a culture of achievement. Our students meet and work with entrepreneurs, executives and experts from a broad range of fields. Some of our proteges have toured and shadowed 12 or more top ad agencies such as GSD&M Idea City and production companies such as AMS Pictures. They have established lasting relationships with professionals that are within their fields of interest and able to call on them for advice, guidance and eventually employment. They are motivated because they know that they have value and that opportunities await them if they are prepared to meet them.
This video was written, shot and produced by alumni (now peer mentors) in the Media Xperiments program on the very subject of Cultural Capital.
Joblessness among young workers could have lasting impact – May. 26, 2010
Youth jobless crisis could have lasting impact
By Chavon Sutton, staff reporterMay 26, 2010: 2:26 PM ETNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The recession has fueled a record level of unemployment among young workers and is likely to have a lasting impact on their job prospects, according to a congressional report released Wednesday.
The Joint Economic Committee’s (JEC) report found that one in five workers between the ages of 16 and 24 was unemployed in April, even as the economy showed signs of recovery, adding more than 570,000 jobs during the first four months of the year.
The youth unemployment rate of 19.6% is the highest for the age group since the government began tracking the data in 1947, the JEC said.
“This new JEC report makes clear that young workers have been hit hard and are still being hit hard by the Great Recession,” said committee chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., in a prepared statement.
Young workers have been disproportionately impacted by the recession. Although 16-24 year-olds make up 13% of the labor force, they represent 26% of the unemployed, according to the report. And 16 to 17 year olds fared worse, with a 29% unemployment rate.
“Unemployment spells early in a young person’s work life can have lasting negative effects on future earnings, productivity and employment opportunities,” the report said.
One way to combat joblessness is greater education, the committee found. College graduates experienced the lowest unemployment rate at 8%, compared to high school drop outs who have the highest level of unemployment at 33%.
But the benefits of college education were not uniform across different groups. Minorities still faced higher unemployment rates than other college graduates, the committee found. For example, black college graduates had a 15.8% unemployment rate in April, nearly double the rate of all college graduates.
At a hearing Wednesday with a panel of experts, the bolstering of summer employment programs was seen as one way of dealing with the problem.
“Summer employment is a rare opportunity to connect young people to the world of work,” said David Jones, president and chief executive officer of Community Service Society in New York. Historically it has been a “wasted opportunity with limited money.”
He added that employers should aim for more rigor during the summer experience, requiring young workers to be on time and giving them performance reviews, as is done in the real world.
A bill now before the House is aimed at combatting youth unemployment. If passed, the legislation would provide resources to support over 350,000 jobs for 16 to 21 year-olds through summer jobs programs.
The price tag of the bill is about $1 billion over the next 10 years and would allow local so-called Workforce Investment Boards to expand successful summer jobs programs that were funded in the nearly $800 billion stimulus that was passed last year.
But even if new programs and educational reform are implemented now, young workers are likely to feel the repercussions of this recession, through reduced earnings, 10 to 15 years from now, the committee said.
“It’s going to be a slow, long climb to creating jobs in the economy,” said Maloney.
First Published: May 26, 2010: 1:54 PM ET
Photographer Dwayne Hills Gives Proteges Tips
I love seeing my proteges learning from pros. Photographer Dwayne Hills breaks down lighting a shoot.
An Educational Crisis: Students Enter College Unable to Read, Write or Do Math
Students playing catch-up as they hit college
12:14 AM CDT on Sunday, March 21, 2010
By HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
hhacker@dallasnews.com
Nelda Contreras stood at the whiteboard and wrote: I like bananas and apples.
“Does this sentence need a comma?” she asked her students.
No, they said.
Next, she wrote: I like bananas apples and grapes.
“What about this sentence?”
Students learn that punctuation rule in grade school. But this is college. A few months earlier, most of these freshmen graduated from high schools in Dallas , Lewisville , Carrollton and elsewhere. They passed their TAKS exams.
Yet here they were at Brookhaven Community College in Farmers Branch taking remedial writing. Over the semester, they’d review “your” vs. “you’re,” how to craft a two-page essay, and other fundamentals they should have already mastered.
Each year, tens of thousands of Texas students land in this academic purgatory – no longer in high school but not ready for college. About 40 percent of recent high school graduates in the state’s public universities and colleges need at least one remedial class.
Statistics show those students take longer to earn a college degree, if they do at all.
The job of remediation falls mainly to community colleges, which open their doors to all students. Texas taxpayers will spend more than $80 million this year to subsidize remedial classes that don’t carry college credit.
State figures show some improvement in recent years, with more students graduating ready for college. But the problem persists.
Comparable national statistics are not available, partly because states define the need for remediation differently. But churning out high school graduates unprepared for college is a national issue.
In Washington, the Obama administration is pushing for kids to be college-ready so they don’t need remediation. Nonprofit organizations that support education, such as the Gates Foundation , are pouring money into the problem. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is funding projects to find the best ways of teaching developmental education and helping students succeed.
The problem reveals a glaring disconnect between what high schools and colleges expect of students. People also point fingers at high schools for graduating under-prepared students, at colleges for not moving more remedial students into college-level classes, and at state policies that put students in semester-long remedial courses instead of shorter, tailored instruction.
“It’s really a combination of all of this together,” said Diane Troyer, a former Houston-area community college president who’s a senior program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “It adds up to a situation that now is getting really strong national attention. I think for the first time we really have the light shone upon this in a way that’s going to make a difference.”
In the Dallas County Community College District, which includes Brookhaven, about 70 percent of recent high school graduates need remedial help in at least one subject – reading, writing or math. In more affluent Collin County, about 40 percent of graduates enrolled in the local community college need remediation.
The school districts that send the area’s highest proportions of graduates who need extra help include Dallas, Irving , Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Cedar Hill and Lancaster .
Yet those high school graduates have passed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. And most must take a college-prep curriculum.
“I couldn’t believe it. I just thought I’d be more prepared for [college work] and obviously I wasn’t,” said Brookhaven student Justin Rudder, who graduated last year from Creekview High School in Carrollton and needed one semester of developmental writing.
Rudder said he wrote lots of papers his freshman and sophomore years of high school, but not many after that. Senior year was pretty much a blow off, he said.
Like most community colleges in Texas, Brookhaven offers three levels of developmental classes, 090, 091 and 093. Students must pass a test at the end of the series to move on toward earning a degree.
Instructors can find themselves with a roomful of knocked-down egos. They’re not just teaching skills, they’re restoring confidence levels.
“One of the reasons I teach developmental writing is to give everybody in the classroom hope that they can go on and do this, that they can succeed in college and fulfill their career goals,” Contreras said.
Not all remedial college students make it to college-level work. In Texas, only 38 percent of community college students who need remediation either graduate or are still in school after three years, vs. 57 percent of college-ready students.
At Brookhaven, Nelda Contreras’ developmental writing 091 class started with about 20 students. She lost two after one week and a few more mid-semester.
One of those students turned in his first essay without a single punctuation mark. Maybe he didn’t take the assignment seriously, Contreras thought. “We really need to work on your sentence structure and punctuation,” she told him.
His earnest response: “I’ll try. I’m not really sure where that punctuation goes.”
At Collin College, Math 0300 begins with grade-school math – the addition of whole numbers in columns – and concludes with the most basic algebra. “Something along the lines of 4 + x = 5,” said instructor Barbara Wilson.
On a recent Wednesday, Wilson reviewed division of fractions – “Don’t be shy! Flip the second fraction, then multiply!” – and moved on to percentages and decimals.
Wilson’s classes include older students who haven’t been in school in years. But many are recent high school graduates who struggle so much with multiplication that she encourages them to use flash cards.
Jeff Strickland, 19, didn’t take math his senior year at Wylie High and “bombed” the Collin College placement test. He’s OK with being in Wilson’s Math 0300 class.
“It’s helped me,” he said. “I needed to be refreshed.”
The first day of class frustrated Contreras. She felt like she was teaching high schoolers. When she called roll, they bellowed “Heeere!” and laughed. They interrupted.
She made it clear she wasn’t going to waste her time if they weren’t serious. After a few classes, they settled down. But sometimes she struggled to get them to take on even easy writing assignments.
“Every time I ask you to write, it’s like I ask you for blood,” she told one student, with a laugh. “I just want a page.”
Those who make it to English 1301, the first college-level English course, will have to write four- and five-page essays. In English 1302, they’ll be expected to produce even longer papers.
“Some students say they just didn’t have the educational foundation with writing,” Contreras said. “They’ll tell me, ‘I’ve never seen any of this. I don’t understand any of this.’ “
The college works to hang on to students. Brookhaven’s developmental writing instructors keep strict attendance. They know who’s in class, they call when students don’t show up, and they have case managers help track them down.
Still, colleges in Dallas County and elsewhere lose students along the way.
In 2008, 1,000 recent high school graduates enrolled in Dallas County community colleges were found to need remedial writing at the 091 level. Only 540 took it (a marked improvement from past years). And of those, only 308 successfully completed the course (a slight improvement).
But there has been improvement overall. Consider DCCCD, where 69 percent of recent high school graduates needed remediation in 2008, down from 82 percent in 2004.
Among the theories: With the recession and rising tuition, more students are starting at community college instead of four-year universities, and those students tend to be better prepared. The state requires students to take more rigorous classes in high school.
Solutions
Colleges, school systems, nonprofit groups and others across the country are seeking solutions. Many efforts target black, Hispanic and poor students because they’re more likely to need extra help.
High school and college leaders say they need to keep talking to each other about what they expect of their students.
In El Paso, the colleges and schools have worked more closely. For instance, students take college placement exams while they’re still in high school, so teachers can try to bring them up to speed. Officials report that while most students still need remediation, they need less of it.
Another popular idea is doing away with semester-long, comprehensive remedial classes and replacing them with a few hours of tailored instruction. If one student needs help with punctuation and another needs help organizing essays, why make both sit through the same class?
It could just keep students in college longer, DCCCD Chancellor Wright Lassiter said. “When they don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, they leave,” he said.
But that approach costs a lot. Last year, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board asked lawmakers for $30 million to offer that kind of tailored instruction but received only $5 million.
Educators are also optimistic about college-readiness standards that Texas adopted in 2008. The standards spell out what students should know in math, English, social studies and science to succeed in entry-level college classes or the workforce.
The 15 students who stuck with Contreras’ 091 class passed. Next up: developmental writing 093. Instead of writing basic essays to describe and explain something, they’ll have to write persuasive essays, which take a position and argue it convincingly.
Contreras met with each student to review the final essay and grade. She told Aida Kolenovic, a Coppell High graduate, that she passed. Kolenovic let out a whoop.
Contreras said: You’ve got your organization down. You’ve got good supporting information in your paragraphs. Just proofread more carefully and catch those stray commas and run-on sentences.
Kolenovic said she plans to take the next and final level of developmental writing next semester.
“It’s going to be a tough class,” Contreras said. “But what’s the positive of that?”
“I can do it,” Kolenovic said.
Staff writer Sam Hodges contributed to this report.