Remarks by America’s Promise Founding Chair General Colin L. Powell at launch of the Alliance’s Dropout Prevention Campaign
April 1, 2008
It was some 25 years ago or so that a study was put out that was titled, “A Nation at Risk.” And it talked about our educational deficiencies. It talked about the fact that we weren’t investing enough in not only our school systems but in the whole community structure that supports the school system
Today we’re releasing a new report that takes it a step further.
It’s called “Cities in Crisis,” and it talks about the particular problems within our cities and the suburban areas around our cities where the dropout rates are excessive. They are unacceptable. It is not just a crisis. It is a catastrophe.
And it’s a catastrophe for several very direct and distinct reasons. One, America, a nation of 300 million people, is now on a playing field, an economic playing field, with billions of people who have come out from behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtain who are free from totalitarian regimes who are trying to create a better life for their people.
And they are educating those populations, whether it’s in Eastern Europe or Russia or China. And us 300 million Americans have to make sure that we’re doing the same thing, now that we are on this playing field with billions of people. We cannot afford to lose our youngsters to the problems that exist in our cities that keep them from getting their high school education.
We have got to make sure that every one of these youngsters is kept in school. I was born in New York City. I went to public schools, immigrant family, the whole Horatio Alger story. But early in my life, one option was removed from any possibility of me adopting it and that is dropping out.
It was unthinkable. In my family, the community, the church, the schools, everybody came together and said, don’t you ever think about coming home and talking about not finishing high school. We will terminate you with extreme prejudice, as we sometimes say. We will go find a kid who wants to finish high school.
The simple proposition here is that it is not just a problem for our schools and for our teachers, it is a problem for all of us. We have to have communities where adults are reading to children as soon as children are old enough to understand words, where adults are teaching children their colors and their numbers and how to tell time.
And something that I was taught in my home, and I think most of you were, how to mind somebody, how to go to school and mind and listen and learn. And all of these things have to come together then, connected to a superior school system, and we’ll solve this problem.
But right now, 30 percent of all of our youngsters are not finishing high school. Fifty percent of our minority youngsters are not finishing high school. America is about to become a minority-majority nation in the next 20 or 30 years.
We cannot afford this loss of talent. We cannot waste this human capacity that is what’s going to keep America up and ahead of the rest of the world. And so this is not just a matter of doing good things for kids, it’s a matter of national security.
It’s a matter of our economic security. It’s a matter of the future of our society in this new, complex world that we are living in. So I ask all of you here from the media to study this information carefully, to see the disparities that exist between inner city neighborhoods and the surrounding suburbs.
You’ll be frightened by the numbers that you see. But at the same time, keep in mind that numbers can say different things to different people. Secretary Spelling in a few minutes will tell us about an effort she is undertaking to make sure that we have a more consistent way of measuring these numbers across the country.
You have to have standards against which you can measure. But the point to remember is, whether you agree with a particular number or not is not relevant. The trend is real. The trend is real and it’s a trend that has to be reversed.
And I’m so pleased that the America’s Promise Alliance, under my wife’s chairmanship and Marguerite Kondracke’s leadership as president, has committed itself to this effort to get all of our major cities and all of our states involved in summit activities, not just to have a nice chat about it, but to come up with action plans and start to address this problem in a comprehensive way, from the home all the way through college.
It’s one connected system and we’ve got to make sure that there’s no break in that system as kids go through their high school experience.