Aspen Institute Publications
Aspen Institute publications are listed below. Many are available for purchase through Google Checkout, a secure system for handling credit card transaction online. For assistance with ordering publications, please contact our Publications office by email or by phone at (410) 820.5433. Please note: Orders are shipped two times a week from our warehouse in Queenstown, MD, on the Eastern Shore.
Courses to Employment: Partnering to Create Paths to Education and Careers
This publication summarizes research from AspenWSI’s Courses to Employment project, which studied how six community college-nonprofit partnerships work together to help low-income adults succeed in the classroom and the labor market. The report provides an overview of the approach and strategies these partnerships use, how these partnerships are structured in terms of institutional roles and responsibilities, what factors influence how these partnerships are structured, and describes the education and employment outcomes participating students achieved during the Courses to Employment project. This publication is geared towards policymakers and investors who are interested in supporting models that increase the success rates of adults in community college and to workforce development leaders who are interested in building or sustaining collaborative efforts to support workers in their labor markets as well as learning about innovative approaches to curricula, training and instruction, employer engagement strategies, and support services. This in-depth look at Courses to Employment (C2E) strategies will be useful to those already engaged in this work as well as to newcomers to this field of practice. Courses to Employment was funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Toward a Single, Global Digital Economy: The First Report of the Aspen Institute IDEA Project
Toward a Single, Global Digital Economy: The First Report of the Aspen Institute IDEA Project discusses critical steps forward for establishing a fair, effective, and empowering multi-stakeholder system for governing the flow and use of data in a single global digital economy.
The two-year long Aspen Institute IDEA Project is an internationally inclusive project designed to explore the free flow of communications across borders on a unified Internet. Learn more or comment at http://www.aspeninstitute.org/idea.
A Strong Foundation: Key Capacities of Construction Pre-Apprenticeship Programs
This publication shares research from site visits conducted to construction pre-apprenticeship programs in Baltimore, Hartford, Milwaukee and Portland (OR). Findings from the site visits, which included interviews and focus groups with pre-apprenticeship program staff, public officials, philanthropic leaders, construction industry leaders and employers, and pre-apprenticeship participants, showed programs in these cities to be of high value to workers, employers and other stakeholders in the their regional construction labor market. The publication reviews how programs target a variety of education and employment outcomes for workers and use industry networks and staff expertise in order to meet a wide range of worker and employer needs in the construction industry. WSI also makes several recommendations about how pre-apprenticeship programs could be better supported to help their participants achieve outcomes that are aligned with participants’ interests and needs as well as the realities of the labor market. This research was supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as part of a project investigating how pre-apprenticeship programs are used to train low-income and disadvantaged adults for careers in construction.
Networks and Citizenship: Using Technology for Civic Innovation
Networks and Citizenship: Using Technology for Civic Innovation, the Report of the 2011 Forum on Communications and Society (FOCAS), addresses two questions: (1) What does citizenship look like in an era of digital networks? and, (2) What are the emerging roles of individual citizens and institutions in this changing environment? Written by Rapporteur Jeffrey Abramson, Networks and Citizenship details the use of information and communication technologies to enhance the public sphere, provide access to information (open-source and open-data networks), connect citizens and government, create global networks, globalize and localize citizenship and use crowd sourcing as a self-governing process.
Building It Together: The Design and Implementation of Hillsborough County Public Schools' Teacher Evaluation System
Hillsborough County Public Schools has launched a teacher evaluation system that has attracted attention from educators and policy makers across the country. Centralized, collaborative, communications-driven and adaptable are key characteristics of Hillsborough's approach. The system consists of two main components: observation of instruction and teachers' value-added scores, based on student test results.
Putting the Pieces in Place: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools' Teacher Evaluation System
The two top priorities in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools' Strategic Plan 2014 Teaching Our Way to the Top are: focusing on equitable instruction district-wide, and creating a performance-oriented culture based on continuous improvement and accountability for results.
Key Takeaways:
- Target use of teacher performance data
- Engage a broad group of stakeholders in the schools – especially teachers, in the system, and in the community
- track implementation with monitoring, feedback surveys and other oversight
- build and adapt the system based on data collected
- shift the district’s focus from managing the amount of money and services provided to schools to focusing on student achievement and graduation rate
A Northern Tiger? Canada's Economic and Fiscal Renaissance and its Implications for the United States
Little known to an American public weary of the seemingly intractable fiscal problems facing the United States is an example of a mature democracy successfully addressing a similar set of problems. In the 1990s Canada faced chronic fiscal deficits, saw one-third of its Federal expenditures go to debt relief, and suffered unemployment averaging over 9.5% for the entire decade. Yet by the end of that decade it had eliminated the annual deficit, was able to cut its debt burden, and at the same time strengthen its economic performance so that its growth surpassed that of the United States in the decade of the 2000s. This paper chronicles the systematic steps undertaken by Canada to turn a chronic budget deficit into a surplus and slash the overall debt burden. It also outlines many of the policies—free trade agreements, instituting a value added tax while cutting corporate and individual taxes, improving supply chain integration within North America, and bolstering scientific research—to promote competitiveness in a global economy. Not all of the measures were fully successful, and not all of the changes in federal programs can be translated into comparable initiatives in the United States, but both the total package of fiscal reform and the individual components are well worth better understanding south of the 49th parallel.
Updating Rules of the Digital Road: Privacy, Security, Intellectual Property
Given the current growth and importance of the Internet, the report of the 2011 Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy titled Updating Rules of the Digital Road: Privacy, Security, Intellectual Property, highlights the elements that will allow for greater use of broadband as the common medium: security, privacy and intellectual property regulation. Written by rapporteur Richard Adler, the report explores a range of threats that plague the use of today’s communications media and provides a series of recommendations which aim to ensure that users’ communications are secure, private and protected.
The report reflects the issues and ideas raised by business leaders, academics, and policy experts at the Twenty-Sixth Annual Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy.
Policy Brief: Family Planning is the Missing Investment
Investments in family planning yield demonstrated social and economic returns in all sectors—food, water, health, economic development—yet are one of the least well-funded areas in global health.
Reinventing Health Care
"The U.S. continues to make remarkable advances in medical science and technology. However, financial incentives within the health care delivery system can hinder consistent, affordable patient access to these advances,” said Sam Nussbaum, M.D., WellPoint's Chief Medical Officer. “WellPoint is pleased to collaborate with the Aspen Health Innovation Project to address critical barriers to innovation in care delivery. We believe the report issued today will serve as an important roadmap to advance novel approaches such as incenting providers for innovative payment models based on quality and outcomes and for health IT implementation.”
