For Immediate Release
Saturday, October 17, 2009
America’s Promise Alliance Chair Alma J. Powell Calls on Nation’s Pediatricians to Help Reduce High School Dropout Rate
Urges attendees at American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference to think more about the connection between physical health and school performance
(WASHINGTON, DC)—America’s Promise Alliance (the Alliance) Chair Alma J. Powell gave the keynote address today at the 2009 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition at the Washington Convention Center. In her remarks titled “Delivering America’s Promise,” Mrs. Powell applauded the 7,000+ attendees for their tireless efforts on the frontlines of children’s health and thanked the AAP for its partnership with the Alliance on its work to ensure more children have access to quality healthcare.
“I’m honored that the American Academy of Pediatrics invited me to speak today because I truly believe that pediatricians and their medical support staff are some of the most important advocates for young people,” said Alma J. Powell, chair of America’s Promise Alliance. “We know that young people who drop out of high school are much more likely to live in poor health and go without healthcare. Reducing the dropout rate in this country is as much a part of healthcare reform as education and economic reform. Its impact is far reaching and therefore its solution must involve all of us.
Mrs. Powell spoke about the need for pediatric healthcare professionals to think beyond their obvious contributions to the wellbeing of our young people and to embrace the broader role their work can have in solving one of the biggest challenges facing our nation—the high school dropout crisis. She talked specifically about the healthcare and other financial costs of the dropout crisis and the opportunity that the pediatric healthcare community has to leverage the access they have to help parents understand that a child’s healthy start and development is more than just medicine. She also asked the audience to support the Alliance’s goal to reduce the nation’s dropout rate in half in the next ten years.
A full copy of Mrs. Powell’s speech is located below or can be viewed at www.americaspromise.org.
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About America’s Promise Alliance
America’s Promise Alliance is the nation’s largest partnership organization dedicated to improving the lives of children and youth. Through the collective power of our partner network, we raise awareness, support communities and engage in nonpartisan advocacy to ensure that young people receive more of the fundamental resources they need to graduate high school prepared for college, work and life. Building on the legacy of our Founding Chairman General Colin Powell, the Alliance believes the success of our young people is grounded in the Five Promises—caring adults; safe places; a healthy start; an effective education; and opportunities to help others. For more information about America’s Promise Alliance, visit www.americaspromise.org.
Mrs. Alma Powell, Chair, America’s Promise Alliance—“Delivering America’s Promise”—2009 American Academy of Pediatrics National Convention and Exhibition
October 17, 2009
It is an honor to be with you today.
I want to thank all of your personally for the Academy’s partnership with America’s Promise Alliance. It is a very important partnership for the well-being of our young people. Your voice and perspective are critical to our work.
Two years ago, as our Alliance marked its 10th anniversary, some of us were at a retreat together. We evaluated what we had accomplished and talked about our strategies and plans.
One of the strategies our Alliance partners agreed on together was called All Kids Covered — to make sure that six million uninsured children who were eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP got enrolled and received the regular care that they need.
The American Academy of Pediatrics joined with another of our partners, Catholic Charities, on a task force that focused on getting children covered. Our bipartisan policy affiliate, First Focus, was heavily involved in working for the renewal of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
PEDIATRICIANS AS NATIONAL SECURITY EXPERTS
As partners, we are joined in common purpose — the well-being of our children. Now, as we celebrate this partnership, I also want to invite you to broaden and deepen it. I want to invite you to think of yourselves as more than the keepers of our children’s physical health.
Looking out at you, I see 7,000 experts on our national security and economic development.
Perhaps you have never thought of yourselves in quite that way. And yet it is not an exaggeration. It is not hyperbole or flattery. It is true.
I suspect some of you may be thinking: “Thanks a lot! It’s not enough that we’re already on call all hours of the day. It’s not enough that, along with treating our patients, we have to deal with worried and sometimes hysterical parents. Now she’s trying to put national security and the economy on our plates, too?”
Well, yes and no.
Our nation’s well-being is a responsibility that ALL Americans must share. And ensuring the well-being of our children is a moral obligation and an economic imperative that ALL of us must share. We’re all in this together, because it is all connected.
At the same time, you play a pivotal role in your daily work — even more important than you perhaps realize. As pediatric healthcare professionals, you are a critical line of defense when it comes to the well-being of America’s children.
The well-being of our children has a direct bearing on their success in school and beyond.
It shapes their futures. And the kind of future children enjoy determines the future of nations.
If our children are not prepared to meet the challenges of a new century, then our nation’s future is at risk. Our security is at risk. Our ability to compete in a global economy is at risk.
Today for the first time in our nation’s history, a majority of Americans say they believe their children will have a lower standard of living than they did. That is sobering.
We all have a stake. And therefore we all have a responsibility and an obligation. And that really is the organizing idea behind America’s Promise.
AMERICA’S PROMISE AND THE FIVE PROMISES
America’s Promise Alliance brings Americans from all sectors together to ensure the well-being of our young people — that is, to work for our common future… our common prosperity… and our common security.
We’re not the only organization working on behalf of young people. But what makes America’s Promise Alliance distinctive is the power of partnerships.
With 350 national partners and their network of local affiliates representing nonprofits, policymakers and community leaders, the business community, educators — and, yes, the medical community — our Alliance has a presence in all 50 states, every major city and thousands of communities.
We draw on this network to create awareness of the pressing issues that children and families face… to mobilize Americans to action… and to build an even stronger Alliance that achieves more together than any of our partners can accomplish alone.
Our work centers around the resources that all children need — the building blocks of success.
We call them the Five Promises: caring adults; safe places; a healthy start; an effective education; and opportunities to help others and learn the value of service.
For you as pediatric health professionals, the most obvious contribution you make is in helping fulfill the Promise of a healthy start. But I hope you won’t pigeon-hole your work in that way.
Children are not people who develop in isolated silos. Their needs are connected, as the Five Promises are connected. So I believe that all of us must think of our roles in promoting children’s well-being in more connected, holistic ways.
I want to come back to that point in a moment. But first I want to give you a sense of why our work is so urgent… why it must be a national priority no less pressing than healthcare reform or the economy.
THE PROMISES CONNECT TO THE DROPOUT CRISIS
Less than one-third of our young people have enough of the Five Promises in their lives to be confident of success.
One of the most obvious symptoms of our failure to fulfill the Promises is a dropout crisis that threatens our future.
Today, one in three of America’s students fail to graduate high school. In other words, we lose the equivalent of an entire graduating class every three years. In medical terms, that’s an epidemic.
For the 500,000 children in foster care, whose lives are complicated with changing schools and changing families, the odds against graduation are even higher. For students of color and those in our 50 largest cities, the chances that they’ll graduate on time are just 50-50.
Meanwhile, only about one-third of those who DO graduate have enough of the skills they will need for success in college and the 21st-century workforce.
IMPACT AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE CRISIS
If you drop out, you’re twice as likely to be unemployed as a high school graduate.
You’ll be three times as likely to live in poverty. You’re eight times more likely to wind up in prison. There’s a four in 10 chance you’ll depend on public assistance.
You’re more likely to have health problems, and your life expectancy will be shorter.
And you’re twice as likely to become the parent of a dropout and perpetuate the cycle.
Like a chronic, debilitating disease, dropping out limits your possibilities in life. And maybe we need to think about it like a disease… because if some disease were crippling the futures of 1.3 million young people every year, we would make a national priority of stopping it. That is how we must think of the dropout epidemic.
THE COST TO AMERICA
We all pay a tremendous cost as a nation when children drop out.
If the dropouts who would have been part of the Class of 2009 had stayed in school and graduated, they’d generate an additional $319 billion in wages, taxes, and productivity over their working lives.
319 billion: That’s what we’re paying every single year. And it’s only part of the total price.
If all of the Class of 2009 had graduated, our nation would save $174 billion in healthcare costs.
If the graduation rate of male students increased by just 5 percent, the nation would gain $7.7 billion in crime-related savings and added revenue.
Our nation cannot allow this epidemic to continue.
THE GRAD NATION CAMPAIGN
Our Alliance has set an ambitious but essential goal: to help the United States cut the dropout rate in half during the next 10 years. We hope that you’ll join us in pursuing that goal.
Our campaign is called Grad Nation. And to reach our goal, we are mobilizing our network of 350 national Alliance partners and their affiliates to work together like never before. But even more than that, we are mobilizing all Americans to get involved. That is the kind of effort it will take.
As part of this campaign, we are convening high-level Dropout Prevention Summits in all 50 states and 55 major cities.
We have already convened 67 of these summits. They have brought together more than 20,000 mayors and governors, business and community leaders, school administrators, students and parents.
The participants in each summit have committed to building concrete action plans to improve graduation rates in their states and communities. And some have already begun putting these plans into action.
Let me give you just two quick examples. Our first city to host a summit was Detroit, which has a graduation rate of just 37 percent. Thirty-five public high schools account for the lion’s share of the city’s dropouts.
So Detroit has set a goal to focus on these schools and improve the graduation rate there to 80 percent. To help these schools and improve ACT scores, the local United Way created a $10 million venture fund, and the city is closing some of the lowest performing schools and reopening schools of real promise in their place.
As a result of our summit in Mississippi, every school district in the state was mandated to develop and follow a local action plan.
This kind of commitment is beginning to take shape across the country.
To help states and communities carry through successfully on that commitment, we are providing resources that help them apply best practices to improve graduation rates and readiness for college and work.
Drawing on the strength of our partners and their affiliates, we are following a powerful new model for cross-sector collaboration in 12 cities where the challenge is great — and where we can bring the community together to make the greatest difference.
GALLUP STUDENT POLL
There are a number of other initiatives I could tell you about, and I’m touching only on the highlights, but let me mention one more. In partnership with Gallup, we have created the Gallup Student Poll. There has never been a tool quite like this.
The poll not only gives students a direct voice; it allows school districts to pinpoint problems and connects them to solutions.
The Poll measures the hope, engagement and well-being of students — which are actually the most reliable predictors of whether students will stay in school and succeed.
I mention the Gallup Student Poll because it’s a great illustration of how the holistic needs of young people affect something as highly specific as student achievement. Well-being is a holistic measure.
Hope is affected by factors like stress and emotional health. It’s all connected.
CONNECTING TO THE PROMISES
I said a moment ago that an effective education is only one of the Promises that children need. So why is our focus right now on education?
It’s simple. We know that focusing on the need to lift graduation rates and student achievement — which is an emphasis for the Obama administration — will also draw attention to the shortage of the Five Promises in children’s lives. And that shortage is where we find many of the roots of the dropout crisis.
Here’s just one obvious example. Without enough presence by caring adults in their lives, very young children may not have someone to read to them every day. We know that nothing lays a foundation for literacy quite like being read to from a young age. Without a strong foundation, children are much less likely to read at grade level. And if children aren’t reading at grade level in third grade, odds are that they will become casualties of the dropout epidemic.
A HEALTHY START
As guardians of children’s health, probably no one knows better than you how physical health can affect school performance.
Children who come to school hungry aren’t prepared to learn. Children who are lack access to regular care are more likely to be sick, which means they’re more likely to be absent from school. Absenteeism is one of the telltale warning signs that a child may become a dropout. We also know that children covered by health insurance tend to miss fewer school days and do better in the classroom.
It really is all connected. And as I mentioned earlier, these connections demand that we go beyond old silos, old ways of working, as we work to meet the needs of our children.
YOUR SPECIAL ROLE
The job belongs to all of us. Yet there are roles that you, as pediatric health experts, can fill better than anyone else.
You are in unique positions to guide parents on pathways that lead to healthy development of the whole child.
Parents trust your expertise. They will listen when you remind them that a healthy start is about more than making sure children have their shots.
Because you are in regular contact with families, you can be an invaluable gateway to other resources. You can do that in a variety of ways — from giving away books at your offices to encourage reading to connecting people to assistance in the wide community.
These are just a few of the ways that you can help us move toward the goal of helping our nation cut the dropout rate in half.
They may seem like small contributions. But what you do for children in your care — and for parents who in a real way are also under your care — can have a profound impact.
Not just on the well-being of boys and girls but on the future well-being of this nation and on whether this nation will be a Grad Nation.
IT REALLY DOES TAKE A VILLAGE
The old African proverb has it right: It really does take a village to raise a child. It takes every sector of the community.
The job of preparing them for success in school and in life must involve more than schools alone.
Having an administration that has made a priority of improving education is powerfully important. Yet we also know that the job must involve more than government alone and money alone.
We must draw on “the power of WE.”
Schools and communities and government must work together. We need parents, civic organizations, nonprofits, the business community, and young people themselves… and we need you.
We are called in this campaign to renew the spirit of “community” — a word that does not refer just to a geographical location but whose original meaning involved a sense of “mutual participation.”
And we know what is possible when the community comes together, because we have seen it.
I have seen it in places like PS/IS 50 in New York City — a school that had been failing and on the road to closure until a dynamic new principal began engaging the larger community. And then the power of the community went to work, including a health clinic in the school operated by the Children’s Aid Society. Now this school provides all Five Promises. Instead of an isolated outpost, it’s a hub of integrated resources.
I’ve seen the power of the community at work in the Harlem Children’s Zone, where the free clinic run by the Children’s Health Project is just one of the ways that the Five Promises make all the difference in the lives of at-risk young people.
We’re seeing it in cities like Philadelphia and Tucson, which have improved their graduation rates by more than 20 percentage points in a decade.
I’m seeing it communities across this land, where our Alliance and others have helped raise the alarm that too many of our children are in trouble, and our neighbors are answering the call as they always do in times of need.
WE HAVE THE WAY IF WE HAVE THE WILL
It is not a question of whether we have the power. It is only a question of whether our nation has the will.
Today and next year and the next, let us respond to that question with the answer our children are counting on:
We have the will. And we will make a difference.
Thank you.
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