Marguerite Kondracke, President and CEO, America’s Promise Alliance—Addresses Kentucky Great Kids Summit
July, 2006
I am proud to be with you tonight for the Great Kids Summit. It’s exciting to celebrate with you the many ways that youth and adults are making a difference together on behalf of young people in communities all across the Commonwealth.
I bring you greetings from General Colin Powell, the Founding Chairman of America’s Promise, and from our current board chair, Alma Powell. I want to add my own thanks to theirs for your work here.
I want to offer a special thanks to Carol Blethen of Kentucky Child Now for hosting this event and for how you all have helped bring the needs of young people front and center here in Kentucky.
I’d also like to recognize a couple of special guests.
Senator Katie Stine is with us. I hope you’ll all show your appreciation for Senator Stine’s support for the proposed Kentucky Youth Coordination Act.
And I’d like to welcome Dr. Peter Benson. Besides serving as a board member for America’s Promise, Dr. Benson is the founder of Search Institute.
Finally, thank you to all the volunteers from the Ford Volunteer Corps, who have been engaged in service projects during this summit. Ford is one of our nation’s strongest supporters of our effort to ensure that young people have the fundamental resources they need in order to thrive, and we are all benefiting from their commitment.
In a more general way, I want to thank all of you… because here in Kentucky, y’all get it. You’re in the vanguard when it comes to pulling together for young people.
In the first annual competition that America’s Promise organized last year, no fewer than five Kentucky communities were among the 100 Best Communities for Young People:
- Ohio County…
- Murray/Calloway County…
- Mount Sterling…
Lexington…
- and Louisville.
I anticipate you will all make another strong showing in this year’s competition. I can tell you that if every state were as well represented as Kentucky, we’d be well on our way to making sure that every child in America has a real opportunity to live out the American Dream.
The winners of the Destiny Awards who will be honored here this evening also are a reflection of the way you approach the needs of young people here in Kentucky — and a model for what’s needed in so much of the rest of America. The honorees represent the business community, the nonprofit community, government and concerned individuals, young people and adults. In other words, they represent every sector of society. And as experience shows, it takes the whole community working together to equip our young people for the future.
So I want to congratulate ALL of you here in Kentucky who are doing so much to keep the promise of America for your young people. But I also want to issue you a challenge.
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the Aspen Festival of Ideas in Colorado, with General and Mrs. Powell, and participating in a panel about the educational needs of young people. Several people at Aspen mentioned Mrs. Powell’s address at the festival last year. And that made me think of an analogy she drew in her speech, involving a famous old TV commercial for Xerox that is set in a monastery. As the ad begins, one of the monks shows the abbot a beautiful page of illuminated manuscript. He has spent untold hours on this page, and he is so proud of his work. The abbot studies the page approvingly, and says, “Very nice, Brother Dominic. Now — can you make me 500 more sets?”
As Mrs. Powell explained, that’s where we are right now with America’s young people. Your presence here tonight is a testimony to the life-changing work in your communities and across this state. But for every outstanding effort, we need 500 more just like it.
An Urgent Need
We’re in a faster, more competitive world. But too many of our young people have not received the skills they will need to be successful in that world. Today, only 1 in 7 jobs in America are unskilled. By 2010, less than four years from now, two-thirds of all new jobs will require post-secondary education or training.
So how are we measuring up to this challenge as a nation? Unfortunately, we’ve brought home a disappointing report card.
Each year, 1 million young Americans fail to obtain high school diplomas and will never get one. Thirty percent of our students who enter 9th grade this fall will not earn a diploma in four years.
That means we scored a 70% as a nation. That’s a D, or maybe, just barely, a C-minus. No nation that aspires to compete successfully in the 21st century can get by on D’s and C-minuses year after year.
In some key areas, we score far worse than that. For example, only 30% of our eighth graders are proficient in math — and that’s actually an improvement in the past 15 years. Wyoming, by the way, had the highest overall score — a woeful 47%. In reading, only 31% of U.S. eighth graders were proficient.
I don’t know about you, but when I brought home a bad report card from school, there were consequences. And there are consequences here, too.
Workers who don’t have a high school diploma earn less than half of those with a college degree. And the income gap is getting wider. If you come from a poor household, you’re twice as likely to drop out of school as a student from a family with higher income. And so the cycle continues.
The consequences are not just to individuals. The students who dropped out last year will cost our nation $325 billion over their lifetimes in the form of lost wages, taxes and productivity.
Someone has called our dropout rate “the silent epidemic.” You can read almost every day about the bird flu or threats to our national security. But when 1 million of our young people each year give up hope and quit without the skills they will need, that’s a threat to our security, too.
General Powell, who knows a thing or two about national security, put it this way: “Our future as a nation truly hinges on how well we prepare our children and youth to succeed in today’s global economy. It’s time that we join forces to empower our children and allow them to reach their potential.”
Or to borrow from the words of a great Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln, we need a fuller “measure of devotion” to make sure we keep the promise of America for our young people, just as others worked so hard to keep it for you and me. For our country to flourish, we must prepare our children to thrive.
There is reason for hope and even confidence. Much great work is being done. But we need to do so much more. We need a national wake-up call. We need to awaken everyone that the responsibility for preparing our young people belongs to ALL Americans. If we pull together, as we have at other times of national testing, I am persuaded we will meet this challenge.
The Alliance: Achieving More Together Than Alone
This need to pull together was the impetus behind America’s Promise – The Alliance for Youth, which I am proud to serve, and behind Kentucky’s Promise. Our founding partners recognized that our nation’s best hope for preparing our youth to succeed lay in building strong national partnerships that reach every level. Now, as the nation’s largest cross-sector alliance for young people, we bring together mayors, governors, community leaders, business, nonprofit groups, faith groups, foundations, parents, teachers, young people themselves, and media. We create partnerships with them and between them.
Together, we can create greater impact for America’s youth than any of us could achieve alone.
The mission is too big for any one sector. Government alone can’t do it. Nonprofits can’t do it all. Schools can’t do it. But all of us can do it together. In fact, it is the only way we can succeed.
The Five Promises
Our work focuses on ensuring that ALL of our young people receive the five essential resources that both research and experience show they need to thrive.
- Caring adults
- Safe places
- A healthy start
- An effective education that builds marketable skills.
- Opportunities to help others
We call them the Five Promises because, for Americans, that is what they have always been.
Here’s what we know from research: The more of the Five Promises that are fulfilled in children’s lives, the more likely they are to become successful, productive adults.
We can actually quantify the difference our investments of time, energy and money make. We know that putting just one at-risk young person on the right path saves $2 million for taxpayers.
Give a child these five fundamental resources, and he or she is 5 to 10 times more likely to stay in school, avoid drugs and alcohol, stay free from trouble with the law, and contribute to the community. Empirical research shows that, as more children receive the Five Promises, we see higher
- college or post-secondary enrollment…
- improvements in school readiness…
- better proficiency in math and English…
- lower juvenile crime rates…
- fewer children as victims of crime…
- fewer teen pregnancies…
- fewer childhood suicides…
- and more civic engagement by young people.
In other words, the investment we make together in young people comes back to us in the form of stronger communities, a stronger economy, and a stronger America.
Our Five-Year Goal
Over the next five years, our Alliance has set an ambitious goal. We are committed to changing the lives of 15 million under-served young people through the power of the Five Promises. And we are starting with a concerted effort to make sure our young people are prepared to enter the workforce of the 21st century.
The Role of Business
A number of our Alliance partners have already made sustained commitments to help us reach our 15 million goal. And here’s one of the most encouraging things: Just as you are seeing here in Kentucky, the business community is playing a key part because businesses recognize that all of us — ESPECIALLY business — benefits when we keep America’s Promise.
How can more businesses in your state partner with Kentucky’s Promise? Well let me tell you what others are doing.
The US Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable are working with the education community to improve graduation rates and double the number of technology, engineering and math graduates by 2015.
CVS Pharmacy and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores started the Pharmacies of Promise program. In the summer, they offer paid internships to students that teaches them about pharmacy and offers work-readiness training and college prep. During the school year, health professionals continue to work with these students as mentors. In this way, they’re preparing a whole new generation of pharmacists.
In Detroit, Ford Motor Company Fund and local high schools are giving student volunteers the chance to help others while learning a marketable skill. The students rebuild and install software and computers donated for underprivileged youth. They help with fundraising. And then they provide technical assistance to the kids for one year, maintaining relationships with these youth.
In Mount Sterling here in Kentucky, the Nestlé Company gives employees paid time off to be Big Brothers or Big Sisters. They understand the power of mentors not only as caring adult role models as teachers who help make sure young people have the skills they will need. Mount Sterling has also shown us you don’t have to be a big employer to make a big difference. There, under the guidance of a local financial institution, young people actually operate their own full-service bank that serves fellow students.
In case after case and place after place, we see that what’s good for young people is good for business. What’s good for young people is good for communities. Equipping young people for success is equipping America for success.
Because we all have a stake in the future of our young people, we all have an obligation to keep America’s Promise to them. It’s not only our shared responsibility to be involved, it’s the only way we will succeed. We cannot delegate the whole job to our schools and wish them good luck. We cannot get where we need to be by thinking that government alone, or programs alone, will cure our problems or prepare our young people.
Instead, the history of preparing our young people for the 21st century will be written in the thousands of individual acts by communities, by businesses, by nonprofits and individuals, like you here tonight. Every act on behalf of a young person is a ripple. Acting in partnership with others turns ripples into currents. Currents become powerful forces of change.
Together, all of us will do much, much more than any of us will achieve alone. Our common mission must be to ensure that every child receives every promise, every essential resource. As a nation, we cannot afford anything less. And every child deserves nothing less.
As you go from here, I encourage you to redouble your efforts to enlist your colleagues and your community leaders in building the stronger partnerships that will accomplish more for young people — partnerships that are their best hope for the future. Thank you again for all you do for our young people. Together, let’s keep the promise of America for every American child.