In the United States, a student drops out of school every 26 seconds and more than 3,000 children leave school every day.
In response to this national crisis, Gen. Colin Powell and his wife, Alma, established the Grad Nation campaign to stem the tide. Their nonprofit, America’s Promise Alliance, has been instrumental in building capacity to reverse the problem.
On Monday, Feb. 25, more than 1,000 educators, corporate executives, researchers, foundations, policymakers, education advocates and others gathered in uptown Washington, D.C., to spend three days focused on the problem, vowing to bump up the nation’s graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020.
In his remarks to open the Building a Grad Nation Summit, Gen. Powell crystallized the job at hand.
“We have no more important task than education of our children,” he said. And in a letter signed jointly by Powell and his wife, the couple said: “Year after year, class after class, America still is needlessly losing too much of the talent and potential of our young people to the high school dropout epidemic.
“In other words, we have not fulfilled our promise to our children.”
According to the Powell Report, which was released early during the summit, the national high school graduation rate is currently 78.2 percent and one of every five students do not graduate high school with their compatriots. In addition, 25 percent of African-American students and 20 percent of Latinos still attend high schools where graduating is not the norm. Among students who do make it to college 20 percent require remedial courses and significant numbers end up not earning a college degree. Meanwhile, it’s clear that well over half of the new jobs that will become available in the next decade will require some postsecondary education.
