President Obama pledged $900 million to stem 'dropout crisis'

“In this kind of knowledge economy, giving up on your education and dropping out of school means not only giving up on your future, but it's also giving up on your family's future and giving up on your country's future. And yet, that's what too many of America's children are doing today,”

President Obama said at an event organized by the America’s Promise Alliance (March 1, 2010)

STEM Crisis in US K-12 Education

“STEM education in the United States is woefully inadequate for the future of our nation. It is insufficient to produce a robust field of opportunity for our children."

Chuck Vest - President of National Academy of Engineering

The PROBLEM

There is a high school dropout epidemic in America.

In today's era of No Child Left Behind, here is the most astonishing statistic in the whole field of education: an increasing number of researchers are saying that nearly 1 out of 3 public high school students won't graduate.

'Wake-up call': U.S. students trail global leaders
Out of 34 countries assessed, U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, 25th in math.

"This is an absolute wake-up call for America," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press. "The results are extraordinarily challenging to us and we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education."

"We live in a globally competitive knowledge based economy, and our children today are at a competitive disadvantage with children from other countries," Duncan said. "That is absolutely unfair to our children and that puts our country's long term economic prosperity absolutely at risk." (December 7, 2010)

The numbers have remained unchecked at approximately 30% through two decades of intense educational reform, and the magnitude of the problem has been consistently, and often willfully, ignored.

For Latinos and African Americans, the rate approaches an alarming 50%. Virtually no community, small or large, rural or urban, has escaped the problem.

Many of these students abandon school with less than two years to complete their high school education.

This tragic cycle has not substantially improved during the past few decades when education reform has been high on the public agenda.

Dropouts are much more likely than their peers who graduate to be unemployed, living in poverty, receiving public assistance, in prison, on death row, unhealthy, divorced, and single parents with children who drop out from high school themselves.

Our communities and nation also suffer from the dropout epidemic due to the loss of productive workers and the higher costs associated with increased incarceration, health care and social services.

Given the clear detrimental economic and personal costs to them, why do young people drop out of high school in such large numbers?

Underlying that conviction is perhaps the most surprising finding of the Gates survey: just how few dropouts report being overwhelmed academically. Fully 88% said they had passing grades in high school. Asked to name the reasons they had left school, more respondents named boredom than struggles with course work.

American public education may be a victim of its own ambition. Rallying around the notion that every child should be prepared for higher education, schools follow a general-education model that marches students through an increasingly uniform curriculum, with admission to college as the goal. But what happens when a 17-year-old decides, rightly or wrongly, that her road in life doesn't pass through college? Then the college-prep exercise becomes a charade. The general-education model became an all-or-nothing game that left far too many students with nothing.

(Sources: The Silent Epidemic- Bridgeland et al- March 2006)

LINKS

The Solution

The Advanced Vehicle Technology Academy

The Curriculum

The Funding using QZAB Bond Financing

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