On March 1, 2010, General Colin Powell, America’s Promise Alliance Chair Alma Powell and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the formation of Grad Nation. Grad Nation is a 10-year campaign to mobilize the nation as never before to reverse the dropout crisis and enable our children to be prepared for success in college, work and life
The goals:
- Ensure that 90 percent of today’s fourth-graders graduate high school on time.
- Help fulfill the President’s pledge to be the world’s leader in the proportion of college graduates by 2020.
Just 12 percent of the nation’s high schools generate half of the nation’s dropouts. By focusing our community work on these 2,000 lowest-performing schools, their feeder schools and neighborhoods, we can have tremendous impact.
Why Grad Nation?
- Every 26 seconds, another student drops out of school in America ““ more than 1.3 million students per year.
- Today, more than one in three students fails to graduate from high school. As a result, we lose an entire graduating class every three years.
- Among minority students, less than 50 percent of Native American and a little more than half of African American and Hispanic students completing high school on time.
- Young people who drop out are twice as likely as likely as graduates to be unemployed; three times as likely to live in poverty; eight times more likely to wind up in prison; and twice as likely to become the parent of a child who drops out.
- Of those who do graduate, only about one-third have the skills they need to succeed in college and the 21st century workforce.
The funding for the project will come through America’s Promise Alliance. Go to America’s Promise Alliance’s website for more information.