Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. It is no secret that the U.S. struggles with a skills gap. According to a March 2018 report released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Burning Glass Technologies, “surveys of employers routinely find that companies have difficulty finding skilled workers.” This national finding holds true in Indiana, which faces a gap in “middle skill” jobs – i.e., jobs that require more than a high school education but not necessarily a four-year college degree. There are many factors that contribute to our state’s skills gap, perhaps the most fundamental of which is that too many Hoosier […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. It’s well known that good jobs often require a strong understanding of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Yet K-12 performance in STEM lags in Indiana, driven in large part by substantial disparities across race and income. In 2017, only 51 percent of Indiana students passed the math portion of the ISTEP+ in grades 3-8. The pass rate for students with free- and reduced-price lunches was just 36 percent. And the pass rate for black students was 25 percent—less than half the rate for white students. Raising STEM achievement, particularly for low-income and minority […]