EDUCATION - Youth Learning by Doing

"Helping High School Youth Learn by Doing" PBS Newshour 5/21/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Since 1994, YouthBuild has trained 110,000 high school dropouts around the country to put up houses for their community and think critically in the classroom while earning their GEDs or diplomas. As part of the American Graduate series, Paul Solman reports on a program designed to keep kids learning inside and outside of class.

More significant excerpts

PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): The results are tangible -- 120 YouthBuild homes stud the streets of Bloomington and its twin city, Normal, a former crack house where syringes littered the floor, an erstwhile empty lot now affordable housing for 10 families.

Drive 15 minutes outside town, through Illinois' windswept fields and one its newest industries, power generation, and you will find an entire low-income subdivision built by former dropouts.


PAUL SOLMAN: YouthBuild McLean County is a charter school that's part of the local system, bankrolled in part by the Department of Labor, of Housing and Urban Development, and by AmeriCorps.


PAUL SOLMAN: Hands-on is one YouthBuild edge, says Suzanne Fitzgerald, who runs the program here.

SUZANNE FITZGERALD, YouthBuild McLean County: If you're someone who's more mechanically inclined, if you're someone who needs a project, touch it, feel it, take it apart, put it back together, you don't see a lot of that available in the school systems or in the colleges. We would reach many more of our failing young people if we were able to teach in the way that they learned.


MIKE SEEBORG, Illinois Wesleyan University: They move back and forth from skill training in construction to literacy training, working towards their diploma or their GED.

And as they do that, many of them see the relevancy more of literacy and math skills. And so, as they're learning to build homes, they're really building their lives and a future perhaps outside of construction.


PAUL SOLMAN: So, bottom line, what's not to like? It may seem like bad timing to train kids for today's dormant construction industry, but it's more job training than most kids get in school, and certainly most dropouts. So YouthBuild's benefits seem obvious.

But it costs more than $16,000 per year per student.

Economist Robert Lerman.

ROBERT LERMAN, American University: Up until this point, we have not had really serious research that proves that it's highly effective -- it could be -- or modest, or maybe even on just balance may not even capture its costs.

PAUL SOLMAN: YouthBuild director Fitzgerald's response?

SUZANNE FITZGERALD: YouthBuild is a relatively expensive program. It's a longer-term program than many of the other programs out there.

But when you look at any program, I think you have to look at what the return on investment is. And so, if you have young people coming out of YouthBuild and going back into the system, obviously that's a poor return on investment. But that's not what we see with YouthBuild.

PAUL SOLMAN: When you say, go back into the system, I'm not sure I understood what you meant.

SUZANNE FITZGERALD: I'm talking about going into the Department of Corrections.

PAUL SOLMAN: Exactly, says economist Mike Seeborg: Pay now so you don't have to pay later for prison, welfare, food stamps, housing assistance.

MIKE SEEBORG: So the benefits basically from programs like this come from costs not incurred from dropping out and not finishing high school.


PAUL SOLMAN: So one way to get kids through school and into the job market is learning by doing, as they practice it here.

But the other answer is even simpler. Spend what YouthBuild spends to prepare young people for the work force.

Michael Donnelly, himself a former dropout and YouthBuild grad, is a guidance counselor at the high school in Normal.

So if you here at Normal had the kind of money per pupil as YouthBuild has, you could have the same level of success?

MICHAEL DONNELLY, guidance counselor, Normal West Community High School: Oh, yes, easily. I believe that wholeheartedly.

If you could go through and say, you know what, each one of these students, we're going to give them a personal experience, we're going to put all these resources around them to make sure that they succeed, to make sure that they do the things that they need to do, oh, yes, 100 percent, and schools would be a lot better.

PAUL SOLMAN: We wouldn't have a dropout problem?

MICHAEL DONNELLY: I think we would still have a dropout, but I don't know if it would be a problem.