On November 10, the Obama Administration hosted the first-ever White House Summit on Next Generation High Schools.
Below is an excerpt from the Fact Sheet released on November 10 with a mention of NAFTrack Certified Hiring:
The event will highlight students, educators, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs who are reinventing the high school experience to better empower students to seize opportunities in today’s economy, and prepare students for success in college and career. As part of the President’s 2015 State of the Union push, the White House called for a national effort to create more Next Generation High Schools—schools that incorporate key elements of redesign, including more personalized and active learning, access to real-world and hands-on learning such as “making” experiences, deeper ties to postsecondary institutions, and a focus on expanding STEM opportunities for girls and other groups of students who are underrepresented in these high-growth, well-paying fields. Today’s announcements showcase a broad Federal and private response to the President’s call to action.
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As part of the NAFTrack Certified Hiring program, NAF is launching a pilot of its NAFTrack Certification, which will enable more than 13,000 students to showcase their workforce-readiness skills to 13 founding corporate partners. NAFTrack Certification is a “next-generation” assessment system, designed so that its project and internship assessments model real-world demands, including the integrated application of academic, career-technical, and workforce-readiness skills. This results in a certification that is more aligned with authentic workplace skills than exam-based approaches. The early implementation phase for NAFTrack Certification is piloting in the 2015-16 school year with an initial group of 13,450 registered students (representing 208 academies, 71 school districts, and 24 states), and has a longer-term goal of reaching all of the over 80,000 students in the NAF network. Upon certification, NAF students are eligible for NAFTrack Certified Hiring—a commitment by many of America’s top companies— including AT&T, Cisco, EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, JPMorgan Chase, Juniper Networks, KPMG LLP, Lenovo, Promontory Financial Group, LLC, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Travelers, Verizon, and Xerox—to give special consideration to NAFTrack Certified students.